I spent 3 months building a prediction market on Base as solo Dev

Disclosure first: I am on the Machine Arena team. We run an arena where AI models play chess, poker and social deduction against each other and spectators call the outcomes before they resolve, so we live in the same cold start problem even though we are not in your category. Nothing here to click, and I have no product to sell you.

Two things, one on the channel advice above and one on the metric.

On channels. Working through Traction systematically is right advice at a later stage and expensive at yours. In early access you will get a handful of arrivals per channel, and at that volume a dead channel and an untested channel produce the same number, which is roughly zero. We spent weeks reading zero attributed signups as a verdict on channels when it was mostly a statement about sample size. What fixed it was pre committing a threshold before touching a channel: this channel gets N qualified visits, and if the channel cannot deliver N, that is the verdict on the channel and not on the product. Without that you rotate through eight channels, learn nothing from any of them, and conclude the problem is the product.

On the second market metric. Russlan is right that a creator launching a second market without your help is the signal to watch, and there is a confound worth naming before you build on it. A creator usually cannot rationally launch a second market until the first one resolved and paid, so time to second market measures your resolution cycle at least as much as creator satisfaction. If your seeded questions resolve in three months, that metric reports nothing for three months, and by then you will have changed six other things and cannot attribute the answer to any of them.

The fix lives in what you seed, not in what you measure. Seed short horizon questions first, things that settle in days, so the whole loop of create, fill, resolve, pay closes inside the window where the creator is still paying attention. In our arena the thing that brings people back is that a match finishes and the call gets graded while they still remember making it. A question that resolves in April is a one time act. A question that resolves Friday is a habit. Long horizon markets are the reward for a creator who has already been through the loop once, not the thing you open with.

One smaller note on the five second line, since you asked. You currently describe the product by its resolution machinery, which is the part that has to be trustworthy and the part nobody chooses on. Something closer to: any question your community argues about, settled by your community, and you keep one percent of what it moves. Oracle and arbitration belong on the page that answers what stops you from cheating me, which is a question people ask second and never first.

For marketing channels, I recommend reading "Traction" by Weinberg and Mares and systematically (ish) experimenting with every channel.

Since you're already doing founder calls, I'd double down on them while you're still in early access. Twenty users who actively use the product and give detailed feedback are probably more valuable than 200 sign-ups who never connect a wallet. Once you know exactly why those first users stay, marketing becomes much easier because you can communicate the value in their own words.

I think finishing something in a niche market teaches you more than abandoning three better ideas halfway through.

I’d avoid leading with the oracle stack. The five-second promise is probably: ‘Create a yes/no market for your community and earn 1% when people trade it.’ Then explain non-custodial resolution only after someone cares. For the cold start, I’d pick one community with recurring, externally verifiable questions—an esports league, crypto governance forum, or creator audience—and manually seed 10–20 markets around its calendar. The real validation metric isn’t sign-ups; it’s whether a creator launches a second market without your help. If that happens, the creator incentive is working. If it doesn’t, more channels may just scale onboarding friction.

Hey Marcos,

As a fellow solo backend dev building in the Web3/AI space (currently shipping a Solana DeFi API infrastructure for agents at agentshare.dev), your post hits right home. The "great at coding, lost at marketing" phase is an absolute classic for us.

I really love your community-creator incentive model (the 1% pool fee split). It’s a clever growth loop that leverages other people's audiences instead of you doing all the manual heavy lifting. Also, kudos for sticking to a clean, non-token revenue model—it's rare and respectable these days.

Regarding your question about crypto-native users: Have you thought about targeting decentralized autonomous agents or bots instead of just human traders? In my recent launch, I noticed that targeting Web3 AI agents (via frameworks like Fetch.ai or MCP registries) can sometimes trigger automated volume faster than waiting for humans to connect their wallets manually.

Dropped you an upvote. Let's keep shipping!

The hardest part of prediction markets seems less about building the market and more about creating the first meaningful activity loop.

What would convince you that the main bottleneck is user acquisition, rather than needing a narrower initial market/community where participation naturally compounds?