We built the wrong product first

We thought the problem was conversation

The internet is where people form opinions, but there's nowhere to put them. You read something, you have a take, and the people who'd care about it are off on some other platform, talking without you.

So we asked a simple question: why do you have to leave the page to talk about what's on it?

So we made the page social

We built an extension that added a feed to any page on the internet. You're reading an article, and right there beside it, you can post, react, and talk with everyone else reading the same thing. No separate app.

And it worked. People showed up, came back, used it on pages we never expected.

The thing we didn't expect

The clearest signal wasn't the conversations. It was what the users kept asking for: a way to engage with the content itself, not just talk next to it.

Reading something and thinking "I think this will happen" isn't a comment. It's a position with nowhere to go. And the cleanest way to act on a view like that already existed: a prediction market.

That's when it clicked. We didn't need to invent anything new. We needed to put the market where the opinion forms, on the page itself.

The gap nobody was filling

On election day 2024, Polymarket did $3.6 billion in volume on the presidential race. That came from about 150k traders. The same day, 35 million people read CNN's election coverage. None of them saw a market on the page.

That's the gap. Not because the readers lacked a view, but because there was no market in front of them when they had it. To trade, they'd have to stop, leave the page, find the right app, fund it, and by then the moment was gone.

35 million form the opinion. Only 150k act on it.

What we built next

So we took what already worked, putting things on the page where people are, and pointed it at that gap. Poppin now shows the relevant prediction market right next to what you're reading. One tap to trade, never leave the page. 4k testers, 45k waitlist, and we spent nothing on ads.

To everyone who showed up early: thank you. You're the ones who showed us people didn't just want to talk.

We didn't pivot. We followed what was already happening.

We set out to make the internet less lonely. We ended up making it something you can act on.