Formo is building a web3 data analytics platform that helps you understand your users and how they engage with your app so you can build a better product. Spend less time building analytics, and more time building products. Understand and use onchain data to turbocharge your growth.

Onchain is the new online

Onchain summer is here. A new wave of web3 consumer apps is coming. Recently, consumer dapps have driven substantial growth in unique active wallets.

Consumer apps are seeing some success in web3.

Web3 social apps such as Farcaster and Lens are breaking records in user activity. In September 2024, it's getting 50,000 daily active users (DAUs) and 680,000 registered users.

Farcaster DAU is going up and to the right.

Polymarket, an onchain prediction market, saw a massive increase in activity with a volume of $472.87 million and over 50,000 active users. Over the past year, daily page views have increased tenfold, with cumulative views surpassing 32M.

Polymarket hit mainstream success.

Stablecoins are experiencing rapid growth. 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. Stripe allows its merchants to accept Ethereum, Solana, & Polygon without transaction fees. PayPal’s stablecoin is approaching $1B in assets. Stablecoin APIs are laying more and more crypto rails.

Network fees are at an all-time low thanks to the Dencun upgrade and new L2s. Builders can deploy new consumer-friendly rollups with Conduit and Caldera in a few clicks today. The barriers to entry for both users and builders are lower than ever.

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

Embedded wallets and social logins are ubiquitous, enabling seamless UX for new users. Builders can onboard new users with Privy and Dynamic. It's easier than ever for everyday people to start using onchain apps.

Embedded wallets simplify onboarding by removing the need to open another app or external wallet.

These are all promising adoption signals. We are at the cusp of a new consumer wave in web3, but…

Where are the web3 consumers?

Building a successful dapp is hard. According to Binance Research, web3 has yet to break into the mainstream:

• The average retention rate in web3 stands at 5.4%. Web2 retention rates are significantly higher, with a good rate between 25-40%.

• An example of web3's retention struggles is Starknet, where user retention fell sharply from 18.0% post-March to just 4.3%. This decline was likely driven by the conclusion of their airdrop campaign, illustrating the limited impact of speculative incentives on long-term engagement. Many ecosystems struggle with this lack of user stickiness.

User retention remains a significant challenge for web3.

The data indicates that beyond broadening web3's reach to mainstream audiences, crypto’s adoption frontier must expand beyond mere speculation and profit-making purposes. This means creating compelling consumer apps that generate intrinsic demand and keep users engaged.

Wandering the dark forest

According to a 2024 developer survey, product analytics remains one of the biggest challenges in building a consumer dapp. Iterating is hard when you don't know who your users are and how they use your product.

Product analytics infrastructure in web3 is lacking.

In web3, the majority of user activity is pseudonymous. Users interact using digital wallets independent of email or IRL identifiers and create multiple wallets without any known link between them. The vast percentage of onchain activity is invisible or hard to decipher.

Building for users without information about their interests, activities, and what drove them is a shot in the dark. Product teams - web3 teams included - need live data to understand who their customers are, plan roadmaps, and nail their distribution. You need to know:

• Who are my users, and what drove them?

• Which channels are my users coming from?

• Which marketing campaigns and features are working?

• 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?

Teams across web3 are struggling to understand onchain user behaviour. Collecting and aggregating data from multiple onchain and offchain sources demands a nontrivial amount of engineering work to parse, process, and analyze. The absence of effective tools has made measuring the impact of new features and campaigns difficult. Builders have had to build hacky in-house solutions that distract them from building products. Entire teams of data engineers and analysts labour over dashboards instead of user-facing features. Many are left wondering what went wrong.

Web3 teams are drowning in data yet struggle to extract actionable insights.

In the 2010s Hubspot and Mixpanel transformed online services and consumer apps. They made it easier for internet builders to understand and use data about online users. Alongside them came a wave of web2 consumer apps. Product analytics tools are fundamental for the success of consumer apps.

Learning from web2

Product analytics have existed in web2 for a long time. Session replay tools 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. Analytics tools let us deeply understand user behaviour and everything that happens on your app.

Analytics tools help you understand your users' experience from first contact to conversion.

However, web2 analytics tools are ill-suited for web3. 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. The source of truth for conversions onchain - the crypto wallet - is detached from the web2 channels where user engagement occurs. Any technology that aims to capture where web3 users are coming from and how much they spend or engage will have to span two worlds: offchain and onchain.

Unlocking the potential of onchain data

Public blockchains provide unparalleled accessibility and insight into user behaviour because their data is public and permissionless. 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 private by default and third-party data is difficult or costly to acquire.

Existing web2 tools are unfit for 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 don’t account for on-chain activities and events. Product analytics platforms like Mixpanel 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.

Opportunities in web3 data infrastructure and tooling.

To get a complete view of a web3 user, we must link multiple touchpoints offchain and onchain. This means reconciling actions done on Web2 UIs (eg. clicks, page visits, etc.) with on-chain ones (eg. transactions, swaps, transfers, etc.). Once you aggregate your data, you must find a way to link different signals under one identity to form a unified user profile. Pseudonymity creates challenges for the identity resolution processes that power web2 user analytics.

— The web3 growth stack, Multicoin capital

Many teams are struggling to unify on-chain and off-chain data. Onchain user data offers valuable product insights but it's highly fragmented and undecipherable. Collecting and processing all this data is beyond the means of scrappy teams in web3. It distracts them from their core goals: driving user growth and building products users want.

Lighting up the dark forest

Formo's logo is the North Star, a centuries-old symbol of guidance and direction for navigators.

In summary, understanding and using data in web3 is challenging because of the following reasons:

• Data fragmentation: Relevant data is scattered across different off-chain and on-chain interfaces, platforms, and data sources.

• Poor data access: Blockchains have historically been optimized for writes and getting data out efficiently and reliably at scale is hard.

• Raw data: Onchain data is not human-readable and noisy. Parsing and deciphering data onchain requires specialized domain expertise.

• Lack of web3-native tools: Web3 teams cannot fully leverage existing analytics or marketing tools because these tools do not natively integrate with onchain data.
  
  

We need better tools to understand who our users are and what they do onchain.

We believe that analytics and data tools are fundamental for the success of consumer apps.

Formo is a web3 data analytics platform that gives product and marketing teams superpowers. Formo helps you understand your users and how they engage with your app so you can build a better product. Spend less time building analytics, and more time building products.

Formo sifts through fragmented web2 and web3 data to present a unified view of your onchain users and dapp, empowering you to build products users want.

Formo lets you monitor and analyze the end-to-end user journey, from engagement on offchain channels to the final conversion onchain. Spend less time building analytics, and more time building products. Formo's platform removes the need for a dedicated internal data team of SQL engineers to produce dashboards, freeing teams to focus on innovation and product development.

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

Better analytics infrastructure unlocks several growth levers in web3:

• Cross-Platform Attribution: Decentralization fragments customer data across multiple channels and chains, making it challenging to collect accurate data and understand customer behaviour. 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 manual surveys. Builders can create personalized experiences tailored to users’ onchain activity. Marketers can target the right audience with the right message at the right time.

• 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.

  
  

Formo helps you from your first user to when your product is everything it could be.

Our Roadmap

The Formo team is focused on solving challenges at the intersection of blockchain, data, and product analytics. We're here to support the next generation of builders with picks and shovels designed for onchain apps.

Our first product is a Form Builder designed for web3. Easily create signup forms, surveys, and more for your onchain community. Sign up to get started for free.

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

Next on our roadmap are:

• Web3 Analytics: Understand how users engage with your dapp and build better apps. Use powerful end-to-end analytics to follow your users' journey from their initial engagement offchain to their transactions onchain. Identify where your users came from, drop-off points, and retention drivers.

• Wallet Intelligence: Turn anonymous wallets into wallet profiles from unified onchain, offchain, and zero-party data. Understand user segments and behaviour with the wallet data platform designed for web3.

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Join Us

Our mission is to provide web3-native analytics infrastructure for the next wave of onchain apps and empower builders to make sense of onchain user behaviour. We are hiring.

DeFi, dapps, and onchain builders

Want to learn how users use your dapp? Let's explore how data and product analytics can turbocharge your growth.

Chains and communities

We love working with ecosystems and communities. Let’s connect. Formo is on a mission to support the next wave of onchain builders to go from idea to PMF faster, with data.

Partners and investors

Know someone who would find Formo useful? We're keen to support teams in proving concepts, forging connections, and finding new use cases. Here is Formo's pitch deck. Let’s collaborate.

Let's light up the dark forest, together.