
Show HN: TinyCast – crowdsource with your team the likelihood of meeting metrics - adam
https://tinycast.cultivatelabs.com
======
adam
I'm the co-founder of Cultivate Labs
([https://cultivatelabs.com](https://cultivatelabs.com)), which is based on a
lot of the work I did at Inkling Markets (YC06). We’ve been working on
prediction markets and other crowdsourced prediction mechanisms for awhile
now, but have always just sold a platform to large companies to run
internally.

TinyCast is a "lite" / free version of the stuff we run with big co's and
government agencies where we’ve tried to make it a lot easier to get
predictions from your team or even your customers to ascertain not what people
WANT to happen or what they think you want to be told, but what they think
will ACTUALLY happen.

We also track/measure everyone’s predictions (using Brier scores) so you can
see who was the most accurate and give people feedback about where they're
strong/weak, how they might be biased about certain topics, etc.

We’ve been using TinyCast ourselves on our team to predict some of our
internal metrics which I blogged about here:
[https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/have-your-team-
predict-y...](https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/have-your-team-predict-your-
kpi-s-so-you-can-actually-meet-your-kpi-s)

Industry trends, competitive intelligence, KPI’s are all fair game and great
uses of TinyCast. Would love to get any feedback anyone has, especially areas
where you might have gotten tripped up or any questions about how this could
be used in your company.

------
brilliantcode
My question to every prediction market startup:

"What statistical edge in predicting future events is there simply by asking
for consensus?" or

"Is prediction market good enough to predict stock ticker prices?" The answer
should be an obvious no.

If prediction market did outperform simple random guesses, hedge funds would
be all over it. Hedge funds are great at claiming to hold the golden chalice
but prediction market isn't even on their radar.

Tinycast seems to suggest that your employees know the best but what evidence
is there to suggest their consensus is an accurate indicator of future events?

The only difference with Tinycast seems to be that it's not running on
Ethereum. Inside joke there, prediction markets on Ethereum seems dime a dozen
with no real adopters but stories of scam and fraud.

Best Buy is the only one I know of that were using prediction markets
internally...in 2008. I'm not hearing any fanfares about it now. They couldn't
predict the fall and merger of Futureshop.

~~~
bcroesch
Another Cultivate Labs person here. You're absolutely right re: predicting
stock prices. A prediction market isn't going to beat the market consistently.
People looking for that use case end up disappointed.

Prediction markets are more valuable to companies for things where there isn't
already a large, liquid source of information flow. E.g. all the on-the-ground
workers know a project is going to be late, but no one speaks up due to
fear/office politics. Management thinks all is well since no one said
otherwise.

A PM is an effective way of taking a bunch of siloed information/knowledge (in
employee's brains), aggregating it, and presenting it to decision makers.

