Hello world! This article introduces the problems Formo is solving and our vision of the future.

Onchain is the new online

Onchain summer is here. Web3 social apps such as Farcaster and Lens are breaking records in user activity. Network fees are at an all-time low thanks to Dencun and new L2s. Embedded wallets and social logins are ubiquitous, enabling seamless UX for new users.

Farcaster DAU is going up and to the right.

L2 fees are at an all-time low after the Dencun upgrade.

That's not all:

Today, 56% of Fortune 500 companies are working on on-chain projects. Stablecoins now process more than twice as much transaction value as Visa every month. Bitcoin ETFs counts $63b in assets under management. BlackRock & Fidelity have launched tokenized Treasury products with nearly $1b in assets combined. Stripe now allows its merchants to accept payments in Ethereum, Solana, & Polygon without transaction fees. PayPal’s stablecoin has more than $0.5b in assets.

- The Future of Blockchain Data, Tomasz Tunguz

We are at the cusp of a new wave in web3. However, building a successful product is hard. It gets harder when you don't know how your users use your product.

In the 2010s Hubspot revolutionized online marketing and Mixpanel transformed product analytics. New analytics tools made it easier for internet builders to understand and use data about online users. Alongside them came a wave of web2 consumer apps we still use today. Analytics and growth tools are fundamental for the success of consumer apps.

Read on to learn more.

Challenges with pseudonymity

For people concerned about privacy, pseudonymity is a core selling point of web3. Users interact using digital wallets that are independent of email or IRL identifiers. Onchain users can create multiple wallets without any known link between them. As a result of pseudonymity, web2 tactics for identity resolution are ineffective in web3 for developing customer profiles, a core building block for marketing and user segmentation.

Pseudonymity creates challenges for the identity resolution processes that power web2 user analytics. This makes a substantial percentage of web3 user activity invisible and hard to quantify with existing tooling. Engaging users without information about their interests, activities, and what drove them is a shot in the dark.

Web3 provides unparalleled accessibility and insight into user behaviour because it's public and permissionless. While web3 identities can be kept private, onchain ownership and activity data are public. You can observe any onchain users’ holdings and interactions, even when they don’t interact directly with your platform. In Web2, this is unheard of. User identity and activity data in web2 are first-party data specific to a platform and third-party data is difficult to acquire and require data brokers.

Web3 projects are still businesses that need to understand who their customers are, plan their product roadmap, and refine growth strategies. For consumer products, it’s critical to understand:

• Who are my users, and what drove them to us?

• Which channels are my users coming from?

• Where in the product are users spending most of their time, and where should they spend more?

• At which point in the flow do most users drop off?

• What interests them, and how can we find out?

Answers to these questions reveal to us invaluable insights about users.

Wandering in a dark forest

Teams across web3 are struggling to understand their onchain users and behaviour. The absence of effective tools and infrastructure has made measuring the impact of new features and campaigns difficult. Many have had to resort to building hacky solutions that distract them from innovating and building products. Many are left wondering what went wrong.

Without adequate analytics, builders are left wandering in a dark forest.

There’s a lot we can learn from web2. Tools such as Fullstory provide product teams with granular data about which users do what within their apps. Every click, scroll, and checkout is a timestamped event within a user journey that gives product teams a deep understanding of how users interact with the product. Mixpanel dashboards uncover overall retention across user cohorts and product updates. These powerful tools let us deeply understand user behaviour and inform key decisions.

A customer journey map visualises a customer's steps with a product from first contact to ongoing engagement.

Most Web2 growth tools and strategies start from the assumption that potential customers are known. In web3, the majority of on-chain activity is pseudonymous. Traditional web analytics use session IDs such as cookies, which are largely absent in web3 and are becoming obsolete even in web2 due to GDPR and global privacy laws.

The source of truth for conversions in web3 - the crypto wallet - is detached from the web2 channels where user engagement occurs. A web3 user’s journey involves both offchain and onchain channels making it difficult for teams to identify demographics, user journeys, CAC, and conversion rates. Any technology that aims to capture where web3 users are coming from and how much they spend or engage will have to span two different internets: offchain and onchain.

To get a complete view of a web3 user, we must link multiple touchpoints offchain and onchain. This data fragmentation makes it difficult to reconcile actions done on Web2 UIs (eg. clicks, page visits, etc.) with on-chain ones (eg. transactions, swaps, transfers, etc.). Furthermore, once you aggregate your offchain, onchain, and first-party data, you must find a way to link these different signals together under one single identity (eg. wallet address) to form a unified user profile.

— The web3 growth stack, Multicoin capital

Existing web2 tools are unfit for products operating within web3 because the data layers for engagement and conversions are disconnected. The best engagement and retention tooling today ignores the rich data on-chain. For example, marketing solutions like Hubspot and Klaviyo don’t account for on-chain activities and events. Product analytics platforms like Mixpanel and Amplitude don't support blockchain data. Web3 also introduces new quantitative metrics such as TVL and volume for DeFi projects, asset prices, and community engagement metrics. Many tools in web2 are either unwilling or unfit to serve web3 products and applications.

According to a survey, product analytics remains one of the biggest challenges in building a consumer crypto product.

Startups should be laser-focused on driving user growth and building products their customers want. Onchain user data offers valuable product insights but it's highly fragmented and anonymized. Many teams are struggling to unify on-chain and off-chain data. Collecting and processing all this data is beyond the means of scrappy teams in web3. It distracts them from what only they can do: build amazing experiences for their users.

We believe web3-native tools are critically needed for the web3 ecosystem to cross the chasm. Our mission is clear: to support the next generation of onchain builders with web3-native analytics and growth infrastructure, to help them make sense of onchain user behaviour.

Lighting up the dark forest, with data

Formo's logo is the North Star, a symbol of guidance and direction for centuries. In ancient times, navigators and travelers used the North Star to determine their location and navigate the seas.

Formo helps teams understand onchain data to acquire and engage active users in web3. Formo helps teams understand onchain data to acquire and engage active users in web3. Our mission is clear: to support the next generation of onchain builders with web3-native analytics and growth infrastructure.

The tools we build help you from your first user to when your product is everything it could be. Harness token-gated forms, wallet data platform, and onchain product analytics to acquire, engage, and retain customers in web3. Turbocharge your growth in web3 with Formo.

Trace your users' journeys end-to-end with powerful offchain-onchain event analytics.

Formo's platform sifts through fragmented web2 and web3 data to present a unified view of your users and product health, empowering you to build products people want. Formo lets you monitor and analyze the end-to-end user journey, from engagement on offchain channels to the final conversion onchain. It removes the need for a dedicated internal data team of SQL engineers to produce dashboards, freeing teams to focus on innovation and product development. Start making data-driven product decisions today with Formo.

Formo addresses several web3-native growth challenges:

• Fair Incentives: Incentives are known to be a powerful flywheel for user acquisition and growth onchain. Formo helps you minimize Sybil or bot activity that breaks incentives. With rich wallet profiles and increased sybil resistance, your community can be empowered through token ownership, governance, and points.

• Cross-Platform Attribution: Decentralization fragments customer data across multiple channels and chains, making it challenging to collect accurate data and understand customer behaviour. Wallet data alone cannot drive growth. With a unified wallet profile based on offchain, onchain, and zero-party data, builders can discover the end-to-end user journey across different channels.

• Wallet-based Personalization: Public wallet activity speaks louder about users' interests and preferences than surveys. These signals can provide an unparalleled level of insight into user behaviour. Builders can create personalized experiences tailored to users’ onchain activity. Marketers can target the right audience with the right message at the right time.

• Privacy-Preserving Analytics: As we enter a cookieless world, growth strategies based on onchain data and novel privacy-centric models will be what marketing looks like everywhere online. Web3 offers us a new, uncharted territory to discover novel analytics techniques in a privacy-first world.

Our Roadmap

Our first product is a Web3 Form Builder designed for onchain use cases. Today, sybil attacks and airdrop hunters are everywhere across the web3 ecosystem. We’re exploring new ways to use offchain, onchain, and proof-of-personhood data to combat this problem.

Sign up to get started for free.

Easily create token-gated forms to help you acquire and engage onchain users.

Next on our roadmap are:

• Wallet Data Platform: Turn anonymous wallets into engaged users with rich wallet profiles from unified onchain, offchain, and first-party data.

• Onchain Product Analytics: Use offchain & onchain event analytics to trace the end-to-end user's journey. Identify where users came from, retention drivers, drop-off points, and which segments convert the most.

Get our latest updates by signing up for Formo's Early Access program. You should follow us on X.

Join Us

Web3 startups and builders

Are you building in web3? Are you keen to learn how users use your product? Let's explore how you can use onchain data to turbocharge growth.

Chains and communities

Are you an L1/L2/dev community? Let’s connect. We’re on a mission to support the next wave of onchain builders. Formo helps teams go from idea to launch faster, with data.

Partners and investors

Do you know a team who may find Formo useful? Formo is keen to support teams in proving concepts, forging connections, and finding new use cases. Let’s collaborate and move the whole industry forward!

Light up the dark forest with Formo.

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