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Case's Manifold Contributions Umbrella Project

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Update: This project has been converted into an umbrella project to represent all of the projects I have worked on for Manifold thus far.

Work completed so far:

  • Manifold Bounties - Standalone website the aggregates bounties for manifold projects that the community can upvote/work on. Is fully-open source as an example of a standalone Manifold app.

Archive:

Tackling First-Week User Churn at Manifold šŸ£

Creating a compelling onboarding and first-week experience to enhance user longevity

Project summary

I aim to overhaul the Manifold onboarding experience to address the high churn rate experienced within the first week of usage. Analysis reveals a crucial link: users who engage in activities like betting, creating markets, or commenting on their first day show a higher tendency to stay active over the long term.

Currently, there's a concerning trend where 90% of new users don't return after creating an account, a rate significantly higher than the industry average. This inefficiency inflates user acquisition costs drastically ā€” it's effectively 10 times higher for retaining a long-term user. Given that Manifold is a platform driven by user-generated content, every user action amplifies the experience for others, making early engagement not just beneficial but essential for the platform's growth.

Project goals

The primary goal is to increase the number of users who remain active after creating an account by:

  1. Create a simplified onboarding flow to prompt immediate user interaction, particularly betting on markets. Show users popular markets to bet on an give them a simple YES/NO interface that makes it really easy to get started with their first few bets. Design Concept

  2. Identify key user drop-off points and address them with streamlined onboarding.

  3. Create a "First Week" engagement checklist to ensure users discover value in Manifold quickly. Design Concept

Funding Allocation

The $3,000 requested is for 20 hours of development work, priced at $150/hour.

  • Onboarding Implementation (10 hours): Refine onboarding to prompt immediate user interaction, leveraging data that suggests active first-day users exhibit increased long-term activity.

  • Iterative Development Sprints (10 hours): Allocation for two 5-hour increments for targeted mini-projects to address specific retention pain points, like the "First Week" checklist and streamlined user drop-off points.

About Me

I am Case Sandberg, a seasoned developer and designer with 15 year of experience in software engineering across startups, Fortune 500 companies, and various open-source projects. I have a long history of developing both prototypes and fully operational user applications. My prior contributions to the Manifold codebase demonstrate my ability to understand the existing systems and contribute meaningfully as an external developer.

Failure Risks

Potential failure risks include:

  • Inadequate understanding of user needs, leading to ineffective solutions.

  • Insufficient user engagement with the new onboarding process.

  • Resistance from Manifold to make these changes or lack of access to their systems (see below).

Manifold Asks

To ensure the success of this project, I ask Manifold for:

  • Permission to A/B test the onboarding module upon reaching a quality threshold.

  • Access to Amplitude for real-time data analysis, to ensure my interventions are data-driven.

  • Provision of GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS_DEV for application testing in a local development environment.

offering $3,000
FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

10 months ago

Final Evaluation Results

Valuations: 3000, 5000, 2750, 3000, 8000

Median Valuation: 3000.0

Frankie: imo case's simplified onboarding flow + "first week" engagement checklist are both super valuable

Eliza: He's doing work that the Manifold team could/should/would have done but didn't have the bandwidth for. Users are ecstatic. Reward him.

Tod Waddington: This stuff is really cool. I am comfortable with giving Case money knowing that when he sees something he can fix or improve, he does it. Hovercards are great, color picker is fantastic, plus I've seen him credited for some other fixes here and there.

James: Great contributions. I estimated $900 for the 4 major PR's, on top of the $2100 from previous rounds.

The hover card implementation was a little bit annoying because it triggered lots of hydration warnings, and was a little verbose by wrapping more components everywhere instead of making a new component that included the hovercard.

Still, hover cards are a great UI feature that makes users more likely to follow creators.

The other features are pretty strong as well. People liked the color-picking for answers, limit order improvements for answers are cool, etc.

Austin: Case continues to produce beautiful, thoughtful, well-executed features that are broadly popular with the crowd. Custom color picker for answers is my favorite of these; it places control over the look & feel of a market with the market creator, allowing people to do all kinds of neat shenanigans, and is very much keeping with the libertarian spirit of Manifold. The hovercards are a close second, a small touch that helps users new & old alike navigate our site. Contributions like these make me so happy that Manifold is an open source project!

case avatar

Case Sandberg

11 months ago

Manifold pull requests:

  • Added Hovercards everywhere in the UI

  • Added a color picker for changing answer colors

  • Show limit orders on answers, add limit order volumn below answers

  • Added select to positions for answer filtering (vs overflowing chips)

  • ...other small fixes requested by the community

offering $20
šŸ¶

Eliza

12 months ago

@case You should open your project for trading.

case avatar

Case Sandberg

11 months ago

@Eliza I don't believe I can since it never hit the original cap or something?

šŸ‰

nikki

11 months ago

@case Click the reactivate button or the make a trade offer button

offering $3,000
FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

12 months ago

January 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 500, 1000, 1600, 1000, 2500, 2100, 5000

Weighted Median Valuation: 2100

@case if you want to be included in the final evaluations, please hit the "reactivate" button at the bottom of your project description. Since your project isn't active, we can't actually make buy offers.

Eliza: The 'random' PRs is a great model for a community member and I really hope it encourages other community members to contribute in the same way. Notice how positive the reception to Case's PRs has been and think how much more good will Manifold can gain with the power users by prioritizing the experience for community members to contribute.

Joke: Negative $1000 for the end of year resolution page, because it almost killed SirCryptomind.

cc6: Pull requests are useful of course. I like that you are doing lots of fun projects relevant to current events (new year markets + manaunfolded), but they also don't have as much potential for growth.

Isaac King: I appreciate the work you put into the onboarding flow, but it looks like Manifold decided they didn't like it. My understanding is that we're supposed to value these projects based on their actual realized impact rather than potential impact if the world had been different, so I'm calling that $0.

The various QOL PRs are difficult to value, I'll put those at $600 collectively. I really appreciate people who do the unglamorous stuff like this.

Manifold bounties looks nice but I don't see how this improves on native Manifold bounties. Making people check multiple websites in order to see all potential bounties seems like negative utility, it's better to have those in a single central location. Unlikely to have wasted more than a few hours of total time though. $-100.

Manifold Tools is interesting. It looks a lot nicer than my dashboard, though it seems to be focused entirely around New Year's? I'm not sure if anyone actually used this, but it seems like it could easily have saved a few hours of moderator time in total, so $100.

Mana Unfolded was very well done, seems good for user retention. $1000.

wasabipesto: > Mana/unfolded is pretty cool! I remember seeing it around Christmas and liked it a lot better than the one Manifold made. It's a nice clean interface with a bunch of neat information in one place, and more importantly it's easily-shareable. I'd love to see you build on this for even more cool information next year!

Manifold Bounties is interesting. I think it's a neat proof of concept to re-skin a manifold product for a specific use-case but I don't see why I would use this site over just searching on Manifold. I think it needs to bring something else to the table in order to be useful and I don't see what that is. The PRs to Manifold (mostly adjustments to the API) seem useful, though I've not encountered any situations where I would use those specific endpoints. Exposing more control to external clients is always nice, and I'm glad someone is keeping the docs up-to-date.

SG: Beautifully executed projects! This submission may have the most effort/polish/execution level of any but may be less impactful given lack of integration into the core platform. The PRs have been helpful too!

James: Very cool. It's great to see Case continuing to make valuable contributions over time!

Valuation:

From previous evaluation - 1300

Manifold Tools - 300 This was heavily used during the resolve-a-thon, although it might not have any further use.

New PR's - 500 Adding the Yes/No outcome to the unique bettor notification for multiple choice answers is very helpful. I already saw one person organically screenshot this to make a point. The PR's were short, easy to review, and none got rejected. That minimizes our attention cost, which is good. The 6 PR's are valued $50-150 each.

Austin: The new Manifold Tools dashboard is great! Very shiny & effective leaderboard encouraging people to work on the end of year resolutions, with all the polish Iā€™ve come to expect from caseā€™s websites. The fact that this dashboard got organic usage and Discord screenshots from Manifoldā€™s mods and power users, makes me value this project particularly highly ā€” itā€™s quite rare to see projects have people who like the idea & execution so much that they end up sharing it with each other.

case avatar

Case Sandberg

about 1 year ago

Work Completed:

  • Manifold Tools - Standalone website built for mods to use to filter/search/resolve markets on for New Years. Used a lot for the days surrounding the Resolvathon/NYE.

  • More PRs requested by the community like ability to close the resolve mode, market duplication bug, precent double-submitting of bounty, etc..

offering $3,000
FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

about 1 year ago

December 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 300, 1300, 1000, 2000, 3000, 1000, 3000

Median Valuation: 1300

(Because the median valuation is below the minimum valuation and this is a proposal, we can't create a limit order at this valuation)

David Chee: This is a tough one. It's either going to be a bunch or relatively polished, really cool things that just don't get used. Or, something very valuable. I think a little bit of input and guidance from Manifold would greatly empower Case to create a lot of value. I do think though this is a high risk investment and so far I wouldn't pay that much for his current projects. Mana/unfolded is cool though.

James:

  • Open source PR's merged: 500 The sort option for manifold love was helpful to the product because I had wanted it and then changed the default sort to newest profiles rather than recently active. ($300) A few API things were helpful and enabled another projects. ($300) Tracking bets ($100) Some other useful stuff, but also some negative stuff that took time away from us as we reviewed PRs. Several closed PR's probably costing a decent amount of our time.

  • Mana unfolded: 500 Cool project that people will use for a moment and think is cool. The Vercel CEO liked it. Very little ongoing value though.

  • Manifold bounties: 300 Another nice site, but doesn't seem like it's getting much usage. Useful as an example open source contribution for other people.

I have the sense that if we could direct Case to actual high priority tasks he would be orders of magnitude more impactful.

SG: Mana Unfolded is cool and people have already been sharing it on Twitter. The smaller PRs have helped fix a few things. Iā€™m not a fan of the bet-based onboarding or longer onboarding flows in general.

Rachel: Like that manaunfolded isnā€™t a power-user-only feature. With both that and Manifold bounties, seems like the biggest benefit might be inspiring the Manifold team to incorporate elements from the UI into their own features. Hard for me to value the Manifold PRs.

Inga Wei: Great projects, wish we could've collabed on mana unfolded, you have some very cool stats! I think these would be super effective especially if implemented onto the core site.

Ian Philips: The PR's have been helpful, and I love manaunfolded! Integration into the site would make for a great, shareable link on social media. We can reuse it next year, too!

Austin: $1000 for Mana/unfolded

$500 for Manifold Bounties

$500 for A dozen PRs

$1000 Bet-based onboarding for Manifold

Iā€™m so grateful that someone as talented as case is interested in hacking on these cool ways to help out the Manifold community. mana/unfolded and Manifold bounties are both very polished products, surpassing Manifold itself wrt presenting a slick user experience. I generally appreciate caseā€™s API contributions ā€” a clear example of helping out other developers.

And finally I think bet-based onboarding is still quite promising; at least, itā€™s clear that our current onboarding is quite lacking (as shown by our ND1 and ND7 retention metrics) so experimentation generally is a good thing. The fact that case went ahead and implemented this entire feature on his own, makes this stand out above eg the many suggestions for improvement we get, which we appreciate but rarely have time to evalaute.

case avatar

Case Sandberg

about 1 year ago

Update: This project has been converted into an umbrella project to represent all of the projects I have worked on for Manifold thus far.

Work completed so far:

  • Manifold Bounties - Standalone website the aggregates bounties for manifold projects that the community can upvote/work on. Is fully-open source as an example of a standalone Manifold app.

In Progress:

  • Mana/unfolded - 2023 Year in Review for Manifold users.

case avatar

Case Sandberg

about 1 year ago

The bulk of this project was finished but was rejected by Manifold, so I am going to cancel this proposal.

Austin avatar

Austin Chen

about 1 year ago

@case for now, I'd actually suggest changing this project to represent "umbrella for Case's Manifold contributions" and include the first week churn as an example of the work. Off the top of my head, the Bounty hackathon project an various open source contributions could also be eligible if you bundle them into this project

AntonMakiievskyi avatar

Anton Makiievskyi

about 1 year ago

Seems like "Inadequate understanding of user needs, leading to ineffective solutions." could be addressed by user testing. I think it's a necessary step before implementing anything

case avatar

Case Sandberg

about 1 year ago

@AntonMakiievskyi I totally agree! I have since been given access to their analytics provider and have been pushing up more tracking to create a better picture of user behavior in the first week on the platform!

AntonMakiievskyi avatar

Anton Makiievskyi

about 1 year ago

@case I meant more like getting a random person to sign up and watching over their shoulder. Analytics is already something though, definitely has to be studied at as well

Bohaska avatar

Bohaska

about 1 year ago

Seems great!