Partnership brief · 2026
The prediction market for people building consumer brands.
A play-money trading floor where operators across CPG, apparel, beauty, wellness, retail, and consumer tech put a price on the outcomes they cover for a living. Closed beta. Calibrated traders. Real signal.
Active markets
214
Across consumer-brand categories
Trades placed
31,662
Since closed-beta open
Resolved markets
56
Resolved against public sources
Closed-beta traders
267
Operators, vetted via invite
Hero Market is a play-money prediction market built and operated by Sugar Capital. Play money is the feature, not a workaround: the regulatory tax on real-money venues compresses the surface to a few macro questions. Hero Market covers the long tail of consumer brands - launches, M&A, retail wins, regulatory calls, category shifts - freely.
What we sell
Calibrated reputation, not gambling.
Polymarket sells exposure to outcomes. Kalshi sells regulated event contracts. Hero Market sells calibration: a public, time-stamped record of who's been right about consumer brands and by how much.
Every trade has a Brier score. Every trader has a track record. Every category has a top-decile insider list. Real money would ruin this: it brings retail gamblers, KYC overhead, and the wrong customer for a data product. Play money keeps the trader base tight to the people whose day job is calling these outcomes.
The asymmetric advantage. A closed-beta cohort of vetted CPG operators outperforms a broad real-money market on consumer-brand questions, because the operators are the ones with the information. Hero Market captures that as data; nobody else does.
Population Brier
0.2473
All users, lower is better
Top-decile insider Brier
0.1287
Best 10% of insider traders
Accuracy, 1 month out
45.7%
Trades priced ≥30d pre-resolution
Reads from public source
100%
SEC, FDA, retailer press, BevNET
Methodology is public at hero.market/accuracy- every metric reproducible from the trade table.
Who's in the room
Operators trading their own beat.
Hero Market is invite-only. The trader base is founders, brand leads, retail buyers, investors, and the press that covers consumer brands. Pseudonymous handles let a Magic Spoon employee take NOon a Magic-Spoon market without putting their job on the line. The result is a venue where the people who know what's actually happening can say so, in calibrated probability terms.
Where they spend their attention
- Beverage. Functional beverage launches, IPO timing on category leaders, energy-drink retail wins.
- Apparel. DTC casualties, brand acquisitions, wholesale-to-DTC pivots.
- Beauty. Acquisition timing on indie brands, new-product line launches, retailer exclusives.
- Wellness. Supplement-category regulatory outcomes, telehealth pricing, prescription-direct launches.
- Retail. Door counts, footprint closures, new concept rollouts, store-format experiments.
- Media / consumer tech. Streaming pricing, creator IPOs, consumer-AI product launches.
Every market resolves from a public source named on the page. Resolution criteria are printed verbatim. Voided markets refund.
What partners get
Three ways to plug in.
1. Press & editorial integrations
Embed live Hero Market markets in any article. The iframe and script-loader snippets sit at hero.market/markets/[slug]/embed and hero.market/events/[slug]/embed. Sandboxed, no-cookie, lazy-loaded. Prices stay live; clicks return readers to the canonical page.
For ongoing relationships: weekly co-branded digest in your newsletter (top-decile insider calls in your beat), syndicated commentary, or a custom "operator panel" surfaced on your property.
2. Brand operator access
Brand operators - founders, growth leads, retail buyers - get free closed-beta access. The hook for your audience: a public, calibrated record of their category calls, signal-rich commentary from peers, and the option to trade their own beat for real reputation. The track record is portable.
3. Data product (in development)
Hero Market Signal: trade-weighted, calibration-weighted YES probabilities on every active market, delivered as CSV, API, or Slack/Notion feed. The output is the consensus of the top-decile insiders per category, updated continuously. Designed for consumer-focused funds, retailer category teams, agency research, and corporate-development desks.
Anchor design partners wanted. Two consumer funds and one retailer category team to shape the first version of Hero Market Signal. Public pricing, three-month design partnership, free for the first year in exchange for product feedback.
What we want from you
If this maps onto something you do.
Hero Market is small on purpose. The closed-beta roster is calibrated against public sources, vetted at the invite boundary, and capped low enough that partnerships meaningfully shape the next twelve months. We're prioritizing three kinds of conversations.
If you publish to consumer-brand operators
Embed slots, syndicated commentary, co-branded weekly digests. We bring a calibrated trader base; you bring distribution. The two get bigger together.
If you invest in consumer brands
Anchor design-partner role on Hero Market Signal. Three-month partnership, three months of free product feedback time from the team, free year one access. The signal goes into your investment process; the product gets sharper.
If you operate inside a consumer brand
Closed-beta invites for your team. Handles preserve job-safety; the calibration is portable and public. Operators get a track record they can put on a profile.
Direct line: hello@heromarket.com. Mention "partnership" in the subject and one sentence on which of the three above fits, and we'll route from there.
Hero Market is operated by Sugar Capital, a San Francisco firm. Play money. No real cash, no withdrawals, no regulator. The currency (Sugar Points) is a unit of measurement for calibration, not a payment instrument.