Several years ago, me and a couple of friends built a forecasting website. It is 100% complete, but currently parked in a github repo.
This would be a second attempt to ship the website. The first time around we failed to get users due to inexperience (and the 100$ marketing budget).
The concept of this project is to ship the website, but:
focus on the smaller, Bulgarian market
focus on Bulgarian politics, economics, international relations, and policy
hire actual marketing people to get initial traction
have (small) leaderboard prizes to get initial traction
The website concept is very similar to Reddit/hackernews, with the following differences:
there are no subreddits, just the one main page
some news articles have various forecasting questions attached to them
each user has different upvote strength, based on accumulated prediction scores
reputation decays over time
there is also a leaderboard with scores
Here is what it looks like - https://imgur.com/a/smvl0n3
The idea is to tie status in the community to accurate forecasting, but still leave room for corrections by the crowd (downvotes). The fact that reputation is based on actual predictions of reality means that it will not devolve into an echo chamber.
Distributing prizes based on the leaderboard, as opposed to bets on individual questions, means it's not classified as gambling in the local jurisdiction.
You will know whether this alternative approach is viable and/or better than existing platforms.
You will know whether a smaller linguistic noosphere can support a prediction community.
If we are successful, we will export the model to other European countries. It is valuable to have policymakers *aware* that prediction markets are a thing, before actually using them to guide policy.
Most importantly, it is valuable for more effective policy here! I.e. Bulgaria is looking to adopt the euro, most likely before 2025, and there is a lot of chatter whether this will cause inflation. So a question on the inflation, conditional on Euro adoption, could help.
Well, the website IS built, so you know we can do it.
I am currently a data engineer, so I can handle at least the engineering side.
In terms of community building, and growth, I have no experience, but I have some friends and contacts who might be a good fit for the job.
For the full amount, I will do the following things:
pay for various website hosting, firm registering, domain buying costs
run and maintain the website for 6 months
translate the website
have a (small) marketing campaign
have a (small) SEO campaign
do some (minor) UX tweaks
pay a community manager to moderate the content
have some (small) leaderboard prizes - on the order of 5000$/10k BGN total.
reach out to various political science departments and attempt to recruit their students to be participants
(maybe) send a press releases at the start and end of competition period
(maybe) send a press release comparing predictions of elections to polling agencies
apply for other sources of non-profit financing and/or sponsorships, in order to try to make the project long-term sustainable
For smaller amounts I will only afford to do some of these things.