What Happened When I Let Futarchy Decide My Startup's Worth at Manifest
An experiment in valuation at the world's biggest prediction market festival
It is time for Okay Bet to raise its first round of funding. With an empty cap table, investors need some context for valuation. An effective way to make decisions and poll public opinion is with prediction markets. This market driven policy is called Futarchy and it involves having a group bet on the what the policy outcome would be in order to decide what to do in the first place. To try this out I went to the world's largest prediction market conference, Manifest 2025, to ask the best forecasters to bet on what Okay Bet is worth.
The Rules
A real money contest was created with the rules below. Players put their dollars at stake with the incentive to profit. The rules as the attendees saw them are written below.
The Process
For 2 hours market participants arrived to the booth and were encouraged to bet on the valuation. To help make an informed decision, I gave them data for both fundamental and technical analysis.
For the value investors there was plenty of information about the project from the one pager you see below to the app running live and even the founder available to answer any hard questions. This gave the bettors data to ground their valuation forecast.
The technical analysis was bit more fun. The amount bet in each jar was recorded in detail during the entire event. New bettors could see the orders of the earlier ones giving them an advantage. The information was available to determine wager sizing and calculate expected value.
Results
While the first few bettors had a large range of small bets, a high conviction forecaster set the market with a 8 million valuation. From there, many of the other players followed his lead.
The winning bettors saw a 37% return on their investment by taking it from the losing valuations.
| Winning Bet | Payout |
|---|---|
| $42.00 | $57.69 |
| $5.00 | $6.87 |
| $5.00 | $6.87 |
| $1.00 | $1.37 |
| $10.00 | $13.73 |
| $10.00 | $13.73 |
| $10.00 | $13.73 |
Is Okay Bet really worth $8M?
I mean, who are we to doubt the invisible hand of the free market?
Okay Bet is looking for $500k to raise a preseed round at an $8 million dollar valuation. Please email ben@okaybet.app for more information and to set up a call.