DevNTell - Formo, The Data Platform for Onchain Apps

Transcript

GM, welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of Devantel. So, if you didn't know, Devontel is a 30-minute podcast held every held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm excited to welcome Yos Riyadi, who is the founder of Form. So, if you don't know, Formal is a data platform for onchain applications, making analytics simple by combining the best of web product and onchain products. So, if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Yos, learn about Formulo, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let's get into it.

[Music] >> GM GM, welcome to the show. Yo, pleasure to have you on, man. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. you you were telling me before we came on on air that uh you you've been watching the show for for a little bit. Uh so I'm ecstatic to have one of the audience members uh come on the show. >> It's an honor to be here. Honestly, I'm really excited.

>> Yeah, man. Yeah, man. And and we're ecstatic to have you on. And uh yeah, I guess before we get into all the awesome stuff you have uh lined up for us, I guess uh would you just like to give a brief introduction about yourself? Yeah, absolutely. I'm Yoss, founder and software engineer at Foromo. Uh we're building an analytics tool for onchain teams. Basically, we make analytics and attribution simple uh for anybody who's building onchain. Um before this, I was uh working at chain link labs as a smart contract engineer and tech lead. And the last project I worked on there was chain link staking, which is like uh now almost a billion in TVL on Ethereum. Um so yeah I think I think I had a uh

learned a lot over there and um I really believe in the the mission of building like building blocks for the rest of the ecosystem and uh just continuing that mission with formal with analytics >> beauty and yeah uh chain link's a great place to kind of carve out your uh web 3 uh blockchain uh skill set and just curious like before that um was that kind of like your first foray into tech or or did you have any other experience prior to that? >> Yeah, so before that I was working at normal like software companies. I had worked at PayPal for example, even even PayPal big tech. Um and right before chain link I was also already in crypto.

I was working at a D5 startup uh where we were building like a lending and borrowing protocol on Ethereum and we used chain link. So that's how I came across chain link and sort of switched teams after some point and uh helped um yeah helped them build for more developers. Amazing. Amazing. And yeah, I guess kind of um in your in your tenure from PayPal to the DeFi startup to chain link um was there any point where you kind of came across a point of of frustration or something around uh analytics in particular that kind of inspired you to to start formal?

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think almost in every team that I've worked on in in crypto, you know, we always struggle with building dashboards and getting even basic metrics. Um, answering even simple questions in in crypto is really hard. Like even things like where do my users come from? What did they do on the app for this specific campaign? How many actual users did we get who who did something meaningful? And these are really simple questions that you know you would expect to have an answer to and easily uh if you compare with maybe normal software or nor normal tech startups. Um there are a lot of existing tools that help you answer these questions. Things like traditional product analytics like mix panel for

example business intelligence tools like Tableau and PowerBI for example. It's so it's really established in in the tech industry in general. But when you try to do the same and try to answer the same questions in crypto in web 3, it's really hard. You would have to juggle like three to five different tools. Google Analytics, Dune, Flip Side, maybe other tools. Um, and they all each see a different parts of the user's journey. And so being able to see the whole journey is incredibly difficult and usually takes a lot of in-house engineering.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I I I feel you on that. And and do you kind of attribute it to any single thing or is it just you think people were too concentrated on just um getting infrastructure to work, wallets to work that kind of metrics were an afterthought? >> I think it's probably due to the fact that uh crypto is still new. So a lot of the industry is focused on top of the funnel metrics. So more more around visibility, you know, v views, clicks, followers. Um so a lot of the tools and that are out there are mostly focused on those top of the funnel metrics. Um you know you have things like Kaito for example um and a lot of other social analytics tools. Um but I think you know

over time we'll we'll as as the industry matures more and more as as revenue becomes the new meta right um the these metrics will will only become more important and we'll see better tools overall like over time. >> Yeah. Yeah definitely. And uh I think for uh is a great start to that revolution. Right. So it's good good segue. Um I guess uh yeah if uh like what's what is form? uh what what what's your elevator pitch of it for for the audience here?

>> Absolutely. So, Formula makes analytics and attribution simple for onchain apps. Uh instead of spending months and having an in-house like data engineering team um building custom data pipelines, you can just install formal takes 10 minutes or less to set up and it captures all the data that you need from offchain to onchain. Um, so basically formal helps you understand who your users are, where they come from and what they do on your app from offchain to onchain. >> Well said. Well said. And uh I guess like what are what are some of the features that are baked into um the analytics platform?

>> Yeah. So we the way we built formal is we did a lot of customer interviews like in the beginning. Um we spoke to a lot of DI teams for example multiple tools. So the marketing would use Google Analytics for example um to see visitors page views um which which domains are referring the most visitors then you have PMS who are using like mix panel or or amplitude to see how users use the product so the middle of the funnel how what's the conversion rate what's the activation rate which

features are users using and then finally you have like maybe business business people who who's trying to figure out okay what how what is my revenue and they usually use onchain analytics like June and other tools so formal is designed to get the best features of each type of analytics to give you as much visibility as possible uh from the beginning of the funnel offchain to the bottom of the funnel uh onchain.

So, our key feature is product analytics. Um, and this feature lets you see how users navigate from your website to your app to onchain. Um, and we couple that with wallet intelligence, which shows you what who are your users, you know, what what segments they're they're in, what other apps they're interested in. Now, we're not interested in like dean anonymizing people or identifying users. uh we we're just interested to understand, you know, what are they into and what what type of profile do they have based on what they do on chain because onchain data is completely public. It's actually a a gold mine of of user and product insights. Uh we just

haven't had, you know, maybe good enough tools or it's not quite as accessible as we wanted to be. Um so product analytics and wallet intelligence are are two cool features. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh certainly uh might want to I I want to uh double click a little bit into the uh wallet intelligence. Um, so if I understand correctly, um, your platform enables people, um, to be able to kind of, uh, discern what types of like smart contracts and and DAPs, um, uh, anonymous, uh, wallets kind of interact with onchain. Correct.

>> That's correct. And also a bit beyond that um some you know some user some wallets have public profiles like ENS profiles who uh reveal more about what type of things they're interested in and also what channels they're active on um as well as we combine that with context that we get from web analytics so that we can for example create very specific segments um that will help you figure out who your ICP is your ideal customer profile is. Um so maybe it's you know desktop users who use Athena from China. So you you can create very specific segments and figure out you know what is the activation rate what is

the conversion rates of these specific groups and um and it all comes out of the box like you don't need to set up any complicated data pipelines. That's yeah that that sounds amazing and uh especially as you mentioned like it's a it's a low lift. I mean um a lot of yeah a lot a lot of like big enterprise companies like that that like you mentioned kind of earlier on in the show like that's kind of a no-brainer thing to have. Um, and I imagine also that customer segment um might be interested in a tool like this because it's just so plugandplay like like you mentioned and they want to know exactly um like what's going on behind the scenes with their

users. And if those companies introduce like loyalty programs with like tokens or or introduce stable coin payments or or whatever, I think it would be very useful for them to continue to build that customer profile with this data. Yeah. >> Yeah. Exactly. And and when you know jumping on to that, you know, um it's really hard to figure out the impact of incentive campaigns for example and long-term impact of incentive campaigns. Um not just on like short-term uh metrics like uh monthly active users or weekly active users, but also long-term retention.

um like are these users actually staying or are they mercenary users who's just there for the incentive right so the these are really important questions but so far it's really hard to to get an answer to them >> yeah yeah for sure uh I'd be really curious to kind of see a demo of this um if you if you don't mind yeah I mean seeing it in action would be would be awesome >> yeah absolutely so let me happy to share happy to share Amazing. And um while Yas is bringing that up, uh folks who are watching us live, if you have any questions, uh please drop them in the comments and we will bring them up as we go along.

>> All right. Uh can you see my screen? >> Yep, you are good to go. >> All right. So this is um going to show you a few screens from Formoon to give you a better idea of what you can do with it. Um as I mentioned earlier, we combine the best features of web product and onchain analytics. Um so here on the screen you can see uh at the top some basic web metrics that you can it's similar to what you can get with Google Analytics. We have visitors, page views and bounce rates. But we also unlike Google Analytics, we have direct support for onchain data and m and metrics uh things like wallets, transactions. We have built-in support for volume and revenue as well. Um, and here we can see where users are coming from. So, which

pages they're visiting and also which uh maybe other partners or websites they're coming from. Um, and not just the number of users but also impact on volume and revenue metrics. So here for example um oops I think yeah you can see exactly you know which refers or which you know referrals uh is giving you the most val volume or revenue. Um so it's not just fanity metrics like user counts but actual impact on chain. Um and you can see other demographics like countries what devices people are using what type of wallets people are using as well as

which uh what what chains uh people are connected to. Um so this gives you a broad overview. Um, which brings me to the next um the next section which is about the wallet intelligence. So you can see a lot of more if you go to a blockchain explorer like ether scan you can sort of tell you know what tokens they own and what uh what's in their balance at a very high level but it's not that useful. I think it's still very raw usually missing a lot of contacts.

uh you see contract addresses but you don't really know what apps they are. For example, um here you can see a lot of detail of about um your visitors and your users um from net worth um if they have any social profiles connected to their address uh what apps what their top apps are in DeFi, their top tokens, which chains they're on. Uh we're also working on ways to label these wallets automatically uh based on their life cycle. For example, if they're new user, uh if they're a returning user, um if they're about to return, you know, they're at risk of leaving your app. Um because and we can do that because we

have full um visibility on what users do uh on the app. So here uh let me just wait for this to load. So here so we can see uh a user's wallet profile. Um this gives you more information about things like their net worth across like all the different chains that they're active on. um how old their wallet is to give you an idea of how active they are on chain and how how long they've been in crypto. Um as well as details around how much are they

spending on your specific app. Um we have revenue volume um as well as demographics from web analytics like which country they're from, what device they're using, and who referred them or what brought them to your app. Um so this gives you a lot of insight into the type of user who are who's you know active on your app where they come from as well as what they do. Uh we capture all the key events automatically things like page views whenever someone connects their wallet uh when someone tries to sign a transaction when they confirm a transaction. So all of that, you know, is captured automatically when you install formal. So you can see

exactly who's doing what and um if there are any issues or drop off points, you can uh very easily see that. Um another way to view this is as a funnel. So a typical final for a DAP could be going from a page view on the website to um connecting your wallet to making a transaction or some other action that uh is specific to your app. Um formula makes it very easy to create these funnels and understand the user behavior uh in web 3. And all of it is done through like a no code interface.

You don't need to write any code at all to create these funnels. Um, and you can uh basically customize it to um based on your use case. Um, it's all done through the UI with no code. So, you don't need to bother your engineers uh or your data team um or anybody else who and because they're probably already busy with other things. Um and because we're a data platform, um, it's extremely flexible. We have an API that you can use to you know query and explore the data. So this is an example of um what it looks like. We use SQL just to give you the most f flexibility

to explore and query the data. Um to make it easier for nontechnical f nontechnical folks we even have um like an alpha task AI feature. Um here before this call I asked it a question about which countries have the highest number of users and what it will do is it will look at the the data all the tables all this the data schema and actually write SQL to get the data and then present it in a human readable format for you. So you don't have to write custom SQL because nobody does that anymore. I think um the the AI can help help you figure it out. And so we we try to make

it as easy as possible for non-technical people to understand what's going on and try to identify like growth opportunities or specific user segments that are you know your your most valuable segments. Um, and once again to get all of this, you don't need to do any fancy data engineering. You don't have to build an in-house data team. Uh, you just install formal. It takes less than 10 minutes and you get all of this. Yep. That's that's all.

>> Well, that that's uh that's quite a bit of uh quite a bit of features packed into uh one platform. And I I really like the this idea of the the ask AI is like a lot of the time if you're um like a product person or or or someone who's in charge of kind of providing reports and and updates to stakeholders. Uh it used to be like you had to go and you had to make little queries and kind of bring up whatever data you needed to make your report. But having this kind of interface is really nice because you can just ask specifically exactly what you want and the AI like basically will spit it out for you in a very nice

summarized format. So I I think this is pretty nifty. >> Yep. Yeah. >> And and to add on to that, um once we have this data, uh we we make it easy to share um share this information into dashboards for reporting. Um, so like one pain point that I've I've heard from many builders is I have data from Google Analytics, I have data from Dune, I have data from Mix Panel and I need to stitch all of these into one dashboard that I can share with my partners or stakeholders or leadership. Um, we uh Formal offers you a way to do that as well. Um, you can add charts. Um we have um several different types of like uh

charts from bar charts to um funnels to pie charts. Um and um yeah looks like this. And so with formal if you use formal you don't have to run a separate vi tool. Um, we offer that functionality and you don't have you you don't need to worry with one other one more tool to run. >> Awesome. I love I love the sounds of that. And um for end businesses and users who want to um start start up with form um do they are they only um afforded the opportunity for a cloud

hosted option or are is it available for them to self-host as well? >> Right now we don't offer self-hosting. Uh but we we're looking into ways to support it. Uh right now we only support cloud. Um so uh there there are pros and cons to that but I think one big pro is that you don't have to maintain your own infrastructure or data pipelines uh because the infrastructure requirements to uh unify and and process all of this data can be quite intense uh especially when you're talking about indexing like smart contract events on really fast chains like base. Um, so I would recommend checking us out um if you don't mind cloud um because it solves a

lot of problems especially around scale. >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And um around that um how can people get started with formal um what what's the process? Do you offer a free tier, paid tier? >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think first step is to you know go check out our website uh to learn more about what we do. Uh we have a free plan that you can use to get started risk-f free. Um and the way you install formal is very similar to a Google Analytics. You install like a pixel on your website or your app and once we do that we will auto capture all the key events automatically um and give you all these information out of the box.

>> Oh that simple. Eh oh wow amazing. And um you also mentioned I believe a little earlier um that you offer an API. Um do you want to dig into that uh a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So um we currently we offer the query API. So um basically we are a data platform and we have all our tables you know available for querying um information about for example all the events that are happening um all the users um and you can use this to you know create whatever charts or dashboards that you'd like. Um, one other cool use case for this is also um triggering like

a specific flows for specific types of users. So, for example, if you have let's say um a wallet that you know uses one of your competitors apps, uh you could trigger um perhaps a small like a grant or small airdrop um when when they visit the site for example. So, there's all kinds of cool like activation um that you can do based on wallet profiles and data from our API. >> Amazing. Yeah. And um it seems like you have quite a uh quite a featurerich product already. And um before we got on

air, you you were mentioning that um you're only like six 6 months to about a year of working on this uh which is which is quite amazing. >> Yeah, I think um we we're lucky to have a I think a good idea of what we want to build. Um and yeah, I think Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. and and uh where I was kind of leading with this is um like what your northstar vision of the product is and um if you can share anything around maybe new feature sets or or or whatnot on the road map coming up.

>> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think right now so we we already have on boarded a few projects uh mostly DeFi apps and and teams building in in web 3. Um really our goal is to make you know formal as as useful as as it as it can be for our existing users. um whether that is adding improving our existing features, improving our data quality. Uh beyond that we also realized that there's a lot of different types of apps. Um right now we've mostly supported web apps like web- based um DeFi apps. Uh but there are other types of apps coming which is um for example mini apps on either base or fire caster um world or or world. Um we also there's also mobile apps which I

think is going to be increasingly um popular especially for new users who are not yet in DeFi or crypto. So a lot of our roadmap will be about you know improving our existing features and and and making sure it's reliable for existing users and also expanding what um the platforms that form is available on. So that means mini apps uh and mobile. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, man. Uh you have a wonderful uh foundation built here already. So, it's amazing. There there's even more uh even more that you're going to be packing onto this.

And uh yeah, uh I guess um for people who are interested in um taking it for a spin, obviously they can sign up. Um you mentioned there's a free tier. if people are keen to speak to you, perhaps give you uh feature requests or um maybe just book some time to to meet um what what's the best way for them to get in contact with you? >> Yeah, absolutely. You can message us uh message me on on Twitter. Um you can find me at uh x/ you know, yossi or you can check us check out our website uh and you can either sign up. It's actually, you know, fully open to to to signups. Um or book a demo if you have

any questions or if you'd like a more tailored um um uh yeah, demo of uh of the platform. >> Right on. Right on. And uh yeah, folks, I mean uh this is it seems like a one-stop shop uh for all your analytics needs. So definitely hit YAS up, get that uh account going, and uh just take a play around of the platform. And um yeah, as we're kind of approaching time here, um just wanted to get your thoughts um switching gears just a tiny bit, just like uh what your thoughts in general are of the blockchain web 3 space today and kind of how you see it um evolving kind of going forward.

>> Absolutely. I think in the past few years the ecosystem have focused a lot on infrastructure um from anywhere from scalability to usability like uh we have embedded wallets for example like um and lower costs for transactions faster transactions um so I think a lot of that is in place like it's never been I think it's there it is a really good time to start building apps in crypto um the like things are scalable, the chains are cheap, fast, um wallets are um not as complicated as they were before. It's easier to onboard than ever. Um and I think we're entering

an a new apps, I would say, super cycle perhaps. Um so I'm really excited to to to see more builders join in uh join crypto and build new apps. I think um as you know with the news on poly market just a few days ago I think it shows that u the apps are coming I mean the apps are already here and it's entering the mainstream it's crossing the chasm and so I'm just really looking forward to what's what comes next in the next few years I think we'll see a whole new generation of apps that is that we cannot even imagine today um and for those apps um happy to support if they need analytics uh with

formal and um but in general I'm really looking forward to what we see in the next few years. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well said and and so am I. I think uh we're finally going to see that shift from um many many chains kind of getting pushed out to people finally pushing out apps that use them and don't basically announce to the world we're using chain XYZ. Uh but yeah uh uh you als want to thank you so much uh for taking the time out of your out of your day to come on the show with us today. Uh I know I really enjoyed uh enjoyed the chat and formal looks like a very promising product that

uh I'm sure a lot of people are going to be using uh in the near future. So, um, if you're someone that's watching here today and you are in dire need of a one-stop shop for analytics, um, Formo is your go-to or at least something to play around with today. >> Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Yeah. Uh, and with that, uh, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. And we'll catch you back here for another great episode of Till next week. Till then, have a good one, folks. Cheers.