Final Evaluation Results

Valuations: 1000, 2000, 1500, 3600

Median Valuation: 1750.0

Eliza: I can't remember what I put last time but it seems like a real thing happened....

Tod Waddington: It would be cool if we set them up on a partnership thing, and paid them that way in future? Even if it were at a higher referral rate (e.g. $3)

I think the cost here should mostly cover the recruitment for the show, or other time commitments.

I would 100% sponsor something like this independently and get far worse results. Having skilled event organisers that are also committed manifolders running it makes it great.

Rachel: I’m giving the same valuation as last time, even though another event was run and it sounds like it went really well! This is mostly because of Manifold’s priorities changing: now they’ve put Manifold.love into maintenance mode, so my guess is they value contributions to that less now. There are also of course diminishing returns to more of these types of events, and now there have been two of these + Bet on Love, all around similar times. The event sounds cool and fun and like the people there had a good time—don’t get me wrong—I just think the surplus benefits to Manifold the company are not that large.

Austin: Happy to see that Sasha ran a second version of this show -- and it seems to have gotten wider reach, as well as set up several dates! I think it's quite an accomplishment to produce events that draw in a total of 100+ viewers, and report such a great experience as these did. We're not currently investing more into Manifold Love (as of Mar 15, at least) but I hope that we can reuse some of the skillset for making these go well for future experiments such as Manifold TV.

An additional small update

1. I checked in with participants. For two matches people went on one date, so things are progressing.

2. I didn't mention this explicitly, but we recorded the entire two hours of the show. We will be releasing only a bunch of short snippets, but we have a lot of content to pick from. View counts from our previous show can be used to estimate future view counts — check out my previous update for the numbers.
   

Testimonials

What progress have you made since your last update?

The second show on Feb 10 ended up being a success!

Some stats

1. ≈63 people showed up, roughly 2/3 of all registrations — pretty standard turnout for my events.

2. ≈57 people in the audience, 6 participants (3 men, 3 women)

3. 3 matches between participants (two men matched with the same woman, two women matched together — link to our main market with 39 bettors). Prediction markets were displaying reasonable probabilities during the show with one potential match heavily favoured over others (and these people matched in the end). Also, link to the secondary market for the number of matches — quite uncertain, pretty wide distribution of potential matches — also seems very reasonable.

4. 2 hours total show time, longer than planned (70 minutes) — intentional choice on our parts given that the audience was clearly enjoying the show and getting to know the participoants

What went well
We kept the bulk of the original show format but significantly improved the initial 30 minutes by adding extra structure:

1a. Intros. Started by getting participants to say a few words about themselves
1b. 2 truths 1 lie. We asked participants to prepare 2 truths and 1 lie about themselves in advance. Then the audience and other participants got a chance to do a bit of 'investigative journalism' by asking questions about each of the statements. Finally, someone (usually another participant, sometimes a member of the audience) took a guess which one is the lie.
1c. "Where would you take each of other participants on the first date?" . Then each of participants would answer which idea they would like the most. This added interactivity and participant-participant interaction

2. We then alternated between hosts (Rachel and I), the audience and the participants themselves asking the participants questions. The fact that we did a bunch of interactive stuff already (in particular the 2 truth and 1 lie) seemed to make participants more comfortable with answering questions (comparing with the first show here).

3. As mentioned above, prediction markets were reasonable and tracked something tangible. Also, 39 (out of ≈57) people betted on the main market.

4. This time we recorded the entire show — though we are planning to publish only snippets, this means we'd be able to pick from more material and potentially more clips

5. 3 matches — we weren't optimizing for matches specifically, but it's great to have them

6. 20 more people joined London manifold.love whatsapp group for future events announcements, now we have 56 people in there.

What could be improved
1. More alcoholic drinks! Sadly I ended up not having enough time to do a quick run to a nearby grocery store.
2. Music during the show to signify transitions between different parts, e.g. dramatic music while revealing matches
3. Prediction markets during the "2 truth and 1 lie" round — this would introduce people to betting and let them make a bunch of bets quickly with rapid feedback. This requires some organisational thinking and participants providing 2 truth and 1 lie in advance, so we opted out for not doing this. We'll probably have prediction markets if we run another show.
4. Manifold stability while creating markets. I ended up with a bunch of "fetch errors" and accidental duplicate markets right before the show.


We published several short video snippets from the FIRST show (not the one the update above is about):

1. "How do you feel about being objectified" & naked calendar story, 2500 views + 1100 views + 450 views

2. "Nathan, what's your relationship like with your mother", 2400 views + 500 views

3. Nathan freestyle rapping about Manifold and prediction markets, 1000 views + 480 views

4. "The craziest thing you've done for love", 362 views

5. Nathan manipulating the market, 250 views
   

What are your next steps?

1. Video editing and getting approval from participants for releasing the videos

2. Maybe: writing a post about dating shows as marketing materials for manifold
   

Is there anything others could help you with?

1. I forgot to estimate how many new people signed up to manifold.love — Manifold team, could you please check how many registrations did you get on Feb 10..11 in London (though, it might be hard to separate the effect of the official show from our unofficial London one)

2. Manifold team: how much value would you get from me writing a post about running dating shows?
   

January 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 500, 1600, 800, 500, 1500, 3200, 1000, 500, 1800

Weighted Median Valuation: 1500

Eliza: I heard about this happening and it sounds cool but I don't know the first thing about marketing. It's normal to pay $$$ for new users so if they manage to attract a lot of users it's worth paying for!!!!

cc6: I think this event is a fun way to get people into prediction markets. It has a lot of potential.

Isaac King: Difficult to evaluate, but it seems like a good community-building effort. Worth more than 2 blog posts. $800.

wasabipesto: Wow, getting 50 people to attend a show for a betting-slash-dating-website is no small feat! I'm still extremely skeptical of Manifold Love as a product but if it fails it won't be because of a lack of enthusiasm.

Rachel: Sounds like the event went really well, better results than I was expecting! I'm mostly evaluating this as a big and cool meetup, rather than media production, both because videos haven't been released and because I expect the in person part to be most of the benefit.

David Chee: Some great buzz for Manifold. The show probably created more entertainment value than my stingy valuation, but this is based on how much Manifold would pay for the value created for us.

Things that are already in the works that I know will increase the valuation: -Short videos and marketing material for Manifold(love) to use. -Show #2

It's really difficult to evaluate events and their knock-on effects. So this valuation isn't reflective of my experience at the show, just its potential to generate value for Manifold (which isn't even the goal of the show, so feels unfair to evaluate it accordingly).

SG: No comment

James: Amazing. This is a great way to promote Manifold Love. Neat that 50 people came. Builds a lot of buzz and confidence when real people are using and talking about the app.

It's also helpful for getting feedback (e.g. that Manifold Love is not quite there as a product). I hope the feedback is more positive on the Feb 10th showing.

I ballparked the valuation as $10 per attendee.

Austin: I’ve given Sasha lots of feedback already (kudos to Sasha proactively asking about how they could make the project valuable by Manifold’s lights!) A dating show is a super awesome idea, and the fact that they pulled it off is even more awesome.

I think the raw numbers in terms of signups, etc aren’t super meaningful as of yet — but that’s understandable given the scope of the event as an in-person. I’d be interesting in seeing what improvements they make in the second iteration — hopefully it’s an actually good experience in terms of convincing people to match up with each other!

(Note to self: I need to connect Sasha with GoblinOdds, I’m sure they would have great ideas on how to integrate the event & videos into the marketing strategy for Manifold Love!)

One other piece of update: we have a WhatsApp group for future announcements and manifold.love discussions that currently has 37 people. If the Manifold Team is interested, we can use it to reach out to people in some way for announcements, feedback, etc.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We ran the show & it was a blast: 50 people showed. More details in my other comment that I left before I realized there is a "Post Update" button — I don't want to duplicate information here!

What are your next steps?

1. Run another show on the 10th of February.

2. Agree with the Manifold Team which snippets from the show we'll put online

Is there anything others could help you with?

Manifold team could help me by providing me with the information on their social media strategy and how they would like to use the videos. I then will do the basic editing for the videos.

The dating show ended up a blast. The next one is happening on the 10th of February.

— ≈50 people showed up in total: 5 participants on stage, ≈40-45 in the audience. That’s 1.5× more than we expected

— Got 11 people on manifold.love: 3 women while talking about the show, 7 men signed up after the show + I myself signed up before the show

— Lots of positive feedback from participants and attendees: people want more!

— No matches between people on stage, but one of the participants ended up getting a date with someone from the audience.

I had participants permission to take photos and record video and publicly share (with the right to vet what’s getting shared). I recorded ≈30 minutes of the video with some interesting moments, such as:

— Nathan freestyle rapping about prediction markets

— A fun unhinged answer to the question “What’s the craziest thing you did for love”

— Various prediction markets discussions and dynamics, like Nathan intentionally betting up a probability of a match with Mel, a woman participating in the show. 

— People talking about manifold.love as the product and endorsing it while also mentioning “it’s not quite there yet”


Because of the holiday season and waiting Manifold to respond about the recorded video I have yet to post on it anywhere. I'll be doing so in the next couple of weeks.

December 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 0, 200, 0, 800, 500, 1000, 400

Median Valuation: 400

David Chee: Nothing happened yet so it's 0. But I have a feeling this one is going to much higher value once it happens. Looking forward to attending!

SG: Valuation of the publicity so far; we'll need to see how the show goes...

Rachel: Seems like they’ve already done a bunch of planning, though the event hasn't happened yet, so current value is still 0. I'd think a lot of value is lost if it’s not recorded/streamed. That said, they have a decently sized live audience, and just a straight Manifold.love meetup would be valuable. I think the public value of this is higher, because relationships are great and in person events are underutilized relative to apps which kind of suck, but we’re talking about value to Manifold here.

Sinclair: I feel like Steven is the best at evaulating this since he knows how much our manifold love dating show costs and probably has a much better sense of how to counterfactually evaluate advertising.

The current London population of Manifold Love users is like 1/3 of Manifold proper. How much do we want more advertising for that city? Probably not much at this time.

How good is it to promote Manifold prediction markets to people in London? A reasonable amount of good?

Inga Wei: Cool!

Ian Philips: This looks really cool! I'm guessing you get ~20 women (the scarce resource, $10 per capita) signed up per event, ~40 men, ($3 per capita), which gives a $640 valuation. I'll throw in another $360 bc it could get bigger than anticipated, maybe more people sign up afterwards, or due to social media.

Austin: This is super, super cool! Exactly the kind of event I was hoping that Manifold Community Fund would create (note, MCF doesn’t get to claim counterfactual credit as Sasha was already planning this and then I nudged him to apply).

I expect to put increasingly higher valuations for this project as it hits a variety of checkpoints, such as 1) running the first and then second show, 2) producing some kind of writeup about the experience (especially if there are learnings for our own Bet on Love show!), 3) actually matching up people, 4) education people on how to use manifold.love. As is, this current valuation reflects an increase in Manifold.love’s brand value that we’ve already gotten, from having a cool user-driven show in the works. (Congrats on the shoutout from ACX!)