Nonrival Makes Forecasting More Fun

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Welcome back to FWD Progress, our series highlighting newsletters that push the boundaries of the form. This month, we’re looking at Nonrival, a business and tech email where explainer journalism meets crowdsourced forecasting meets gamified learning. Ready to dig in? (We promise we’ll go easy on the jargon from here out). 

The Origin Story 

Founder Walter Frick is a business journalist and contributing editor at both Harvard Business Review and ProMarket. As a hobby, he dabbles in online prediction markets — websites where participants log their best guess on the outcome of an event. Will crypto take a nosedive, for instance? Or, will a certain political candidate win their election? Markets generally remain open for several months and you can update your answer at any time. A correct prediction is generally considered its own reward, although a few sites dole out cash prizes. 

Frick enjoys the ways such sites operate, but he also saw some room for improvement. For starters, there was the prolonged timeline. “It can be daunting because you have to pay close attention to the news,” he explains. “Like with crypto, a lot can happen in three months. So you have to be constantly updating [your prediction] if you want to do well.” He also saw that questions often required extensive knowledge of the subject. “They can take a lot of research to figure out what you even think,” he says.

Frick started to think of how he could devise a forecasting market experience that was less labor-intensive, more accessible, and fun. He determined a newsletter would be more convenient than a website [ed’s note: no argument there] and a shortened prediction window would provide more immediate gratification. The real aha moment, however, came when Frick realized he could use his reporting skills to enable participants to bypass the hurdle of doing their own research. 

Digging Into ‘Dirt,’ a Digital Entertainment Newsletter

In September 2022, he launched a free forecasting newsletter that poses a weekly question about the future along with supplemental information and data, gives subscribers three days to make their prediction, and then circles back with the results. He named it Nonrival, after the economics term for a product that can be enjoyed simultaneously by many consumers. 

How It Works 

Every Sunday, Frick sends an email with the question of the week. He tends to choose subjects in his wheelhouse, with an economics and/or business tech focus. “Will the US credit rating be lowered?” “Will Disney beat Netflix in the streaming wars?” The email includes everything a reader—even one with no previous knowledge of the issue—might need to know to form an opinion, from background summary to statistics and indicators to varying expert takes and perspectives. It concludes with a forecasting multiple choice question via Typeform. (“How likely is it that Disney will have more subscribers than Netflix at the end of Q2? 10%? 30%?” etc.) There’s also a prompt to share the reasoning behind your choice. On average, 20% of recipients respond to the survey question. 

On Wednesdays, Frick sends a followup email with a breakdown of the poll results and a roundup of the most thoughtful reader prediction explanations. Each email is tailored to its recipient and shows them how their forecast compares with the group. (He uses ConvertKit for its personalization capabilities — they have a feature that applies a tag to a user’s account when they click a specific link, which allows Frick to easily track results.) 

In terms of engagement, Frick found that broader subjects with which readers might already have some familiarity perform best. The top two Nonrival emails concern the future of movie theaters (74% open rate) and social media platforms (70% open rate). “Some of the really wonkier topics, like interest rates, people don’t necessarily have an opinion on,” he says. 

While Nonrival’s format might seem novel, Frick sees a predecessor in the magazine letter-to-the-editor page. “You publish an article and then, in the next issue, you have three follow-up responses,” he says of the author/reader dialogue. “So it’s kind of bringing this old-school journalistic approach to forecasting.” 

What Comes Next

Yet another difference between Nonrival and most prediction markets? There’s less emphasis on being right. (Most of the time, you won’t even know if your prediction was correct until months after the related email hit your inbox.) According to Frick, much of Nonrival’s value lies in the predictions themselves — examined collectively, or in specific categories — and the trends that emerge. “I think I have two audiences,” he says. “The first is a group of people who are motivated to learn new things and find this fun. The second is a business audience that wants to know what other people are saying.” For the latter, Frick envisions an eventual paid subscription model. “I could say, ‘I’ve asked my readers once a quarter about their predictions about working from home, here’s what they said, and if you’re paying me you can segment the data by C-suite readers or people who actually do work remotely or readers.” 

Of course, Frick will continue to cater to the first audience, whom he affectionately calls “the nerds” and whose ranks he counts himself among. “I want this to feel like a gamified experience, but in a healthy way that correlates to being open-minded and considering counter-arguments,” he says. He’s still working out the scoring system but he envisions eventually having a reward for top predictors at the end of the year. “Maybe it’s a magazine or Substack subscription in the spirit of ‘go out and read more and learn more,’” he says. “ I think that would be a very fitting reward for accuracy.” 

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