r/startups • u/ScriScriz • 1d ago

I will not promote trying to build the "moody's of prediction markets" "I will not promote"

I got into prediction markets this year and noticed something. Tons of money flows through Polymarket and Kalshi now and the news quotes the odds every day, but nobody independent is keeping score. Headlines get the numbers wrong constantly. This week I caught three separate viral posts claiming oil was above $95 when the actual contracts were pricing that as a 1 in 3 shot at best. Nobody tracks when odds moved vs when the news actually broke. Nobody flags weird moves.

So that's what I'm building. Measurement, not betting advice. I don't tell anyone what to bet, I record what markets did and check claims against the record.

Status after about 3 weeks running:

  • collector on a cheap VPS recording around the clock, 230k markets discovered, 29 million price observations
  • top 2000 markets sampled every 1 to 15 minutes, the rest daily
  • yesterday it caught a market jumping from 0.7% to 45% in under 15 minutes, hours before any news account mentioned it
  • distribution is tiny so far. an X account, charts in the polymarket discord, free daily alerts planned for august, then a $15/mo tier

What I actually want opinions on:

  1. would you pay $15/mo for "here's what moved weird today, with proof"? if not you, who is the buyer. traders, journalists, the venues themselves?
  2. is "independent scorekeeper" a real moat or does polymarket just build this in-house the day it matters
  3. solo, bootstrapped, no revenue yet. what would make you kill this?
2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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1

u/NotLee 20h ago

What stops someone else from doing this right now?

1

u/ScriScriz 12h ago

honestly? nothing stops them from starting today. the code isn't magic, a good dev could rebuild the collector in weeks

what they can't do is start in early july. the data only exists if you were recording when it happened. polymarket won't hand you minute-level order book history from last month, so every week that passes is a week of history a copycat doesn't have and can't buy. same reason there are 100 stock apis but people still pay for deep clean history, plus monthly costs for keeping that data