Building your brand on-chain with Megaphone

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every Friday, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Albert Hu, who's the co-founder and CEO of Megaphone. So if you didn't know, Megaphone empowers brands, protocols, and chains to activate users, run token-based campaigns, and incentivize on-chain liquidity, all on one platform. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Albert tell us his story of how he co-founded the company, a walkthrough of the platform, and how you can use it to grow your brand on-chain today. All right, let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsor.

[Arbitrum Sponsor Break]

GM, GM. Welcome back to the show, Albert. It's been too long, man. I'm happy to have you on. Last time you were on the show, the company was called Deform. DevNTell, we use Deform quite a bit; we've been using it for ever since you've existed, I believe. Long-time partnership indeed. So wonderful to have you back and tell us the story of how the company has evolved over the years. But before we get into all that great stuff, did you just want to give a brief introduction about yourself for folks who aren't familiar?

Yeah, certainly. Hi everybody. I'm Albert. I'm co-founder and CEO of Megaphone. We are building the go-to platform for Web3 marketers to drive real, measurable growth through allowlist campaigns, airdrop infrastructure, and anything related to help teams identify, talk to, and reward their best contributors. I've known Narb for a long time now, especially from like the early Developer DAO days, and I think it's been really incredible that, you know, this show is one of the longest-standing artifacts of that community. So it's really nice to reconnect. Likewise, and thank you so much for the kind words, man. Really appreciate it. Yeah, and like you mentioned, the early... you and I met in the early days of Developer DAO. And back then you were a DevRel at Alchemy. We can get into that in a little bit, but just curious on how you got interested in technology in general and what led you to Web3.

Yeah, I guess my journey with technology starts at the beginning of my college career. I studied electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. And throughout all of college, I was actually kind of expecting myself to go down like more of a pre-med or doctor route. But especially going to Berkeley and kind of seeing the energy of the Bay Area and seeing all these clubs and extracurriculars on campus that allowed people to find other people who were doing hackathons and working on side projects, I worked on a lot of different side projects including building small video games, websites, different applications. And then also like less from a technology perspective, more from maybe an entrepreneurial perspective, I was always thinking about ways to make money. I was doing kind of like trading card arbitrage for a little bit also. So anyway, college was a really formative experience to kind of open my eyes to there are so many different ways and so many creative ways to make really strong impact on the internet. And so it was actually around 2017 when I got involved with Blockchain at Berkeley. So along the way, as I was developing my software engineering skills, I got involved with Blockchain at Berkeley and that was an awesome experience because they're one of the premier crypto student orgs in the world. And it was a really awesome community where I was able to dive into whitepapers and experiment with building smart contracts during the really big first ICO era on Ethereum. And so that was something that really opened my eyes to the power of like crypto technology and blockchain and then also what could be done with tokens. And then fast forward to 2021, my now co-founder Katherine and I, back at that time before we started this company, we worked on an NFT collection actually, called Chibi Shinobis. And we called it Chibi Shinobis because it's a nod to Naruto, the anime series, which Katherine had just finished watching. And so we were like, oh, let's make like a community and have like an NFT profile picture project where, you know, people can mint it, collect it, and be part of this community of people who really like anime and manga. And then we would like watch episodes together on Discord and things like that. So that was a really cool experience where I was able to put all the knowledge I was building from software engineering and smart contract development into a kind of community and growth and marketing-focused use case and see all the ups and downs that are involved with that. And that eventually led me to join Alchemy as a developer relations engineer, actually. And that ended up being a really big turning point for my career because I was able to support builders while also seeing firsthand how valuable, but also how hard it was to run crypto growth.

Yeah, it's very hard to organically grow a crypto community just because the predominant platform is X, and basically it's become somewhat of an echo chamber. But anyhow, I just wanted to touch on the Naruto bit. When Katherine mentioned that Naruto story to me as well, I had not watched Naruto, and then I got on the bandwagon and I started watching the seasons. And yeah, I blazed through that entire season. That's awesome. Did you follow one of the... they have like filler cutout filler guides? Yeah, yeah, I discovered that too late. Oh, that's all good. I mean, I think it's like also nice to like see the entire canon lore, so. Indeed, yeah, I got the full experience. But anyway, wonderful series, if anyone has not seen it yet, definitely you want to check that out. But that NFT collection you mentioned led you to Alchemy, and you've left a pretty big achievement there as one of your last before you founded the company in DevRel University. Did you want to briefly talk on that?

Yeah, yeah. Alchemy was a really awesome experience. I think it was, you know, as I was working on this NFT project Chibi Shinobis and also starting to make some YouTube videos talking about here's how NFTs really work in terms of a smart contract system and how do you code your own and what happens to images when they're not hosted properly, like things like that, really kind of like peeling back a layer and showing maybe developers or other people who are interested like what's actually going on with this technology. Alchemy saw some of my content and I had some friends who were working there. Shout out to Kanal and Stephen in the early days who connected me to Alchemy and they were like, hey, like we are at the early stages of our PMF and we have a lot of really great APIs right now, we have a lot of great things that we're building down the road, and we could really use someone who can understand the technology really well and build with it and then also help us grow and like teach other people how to do it. And they saw some of my rap videos; I was making rap videos at the time as part of this like creator journey that I was going on. And they were like, yeah, it's hilarious, it's awesome, it gets attention, and also you're able to like tell the story on the technology side. So come help us do that. And so at Alchemy, I was making tutorials, writing documentation, writing example guides and ways for people to build out their projects using Alchemy APIs. And I ended up working with the other people on the developer relations team, including Vito and Alan and a bunch of others, to help launch a program we called Road to Web3. And this was a way for developers all over the world to learn how to build their own decentralized applications, their own smart contracts, with support from a lot of really awesome industry giants, including like Chainlink and Optimism and Aave and all these types of players. So we got everybody together to create a series of tutorials and then people who were completing these tutorials could earn proof-of-knowledge NFT badges that would be valuable to them to help build their on-chain reputation, help them land jobs and opportunities and things like that. So Road to Web3 eventually evolved into Alchemy University, is what it's called today, with there was also an acquisition of a company, an amazing company called Chainshot. Great educators and really great content, and we made it turn it into the next level of an experience. But the impact of this project was really awesome because we taught over 100,000 developers around the world how to build decentralized apps and then we reward them with these NFTs.

And the key insight here that then transitioned into, hey, like maybe there's something that's really important to be built here, is that I kept running into the same pain point over and over again as I was like running admin operations on this like tutorial program. The pain point was crypto-native growth is really hard to track, manage, and execute. And the reason is that you have to like collect wallets of the people who are completing these tutorials if you want to reward them and shout them out and acknowledge them. You have to verify that these wallets and social accounts, Twitter accounts, all this kind of stuff are real or like meet some kind of threshold of quality. And then you then also want to segment all the different people coming through the forms that we were sending out to understand okay, these are the people who are here because they really want to develop and they really want to launch projects. And then these other people are here because maybe they're like farming rewards or speculating. And these there are other people here who just like stumbled here by mistake and they didn't actually do anything, etc., etc. And so to do all of that stuff and then also then distribute a reward that is like for example a proof-of-knowledge NFT or maybe a payment for some other people, it's like really actually really really hard. All these solutions are they end up being duct-taped and hard to build on your own, especially if you're sitting on a more traditional part of the marketing or like growth department. So yeah, I started building tooling to solve these problems in-house at Alchemy. I was just like writing all these scripts, creating my own applications to filter people and automate that. And then Katherine at the time was running MintKudos, which was a like an NFT minting platform that focused on like reputation on-chain using soulbound tokens. And MintKudos was actually the system that was powering a lot of the NFT credentials for the proof-of-knowledge NFTs for Alchemy University. And so I was working very closely with her on that. And so the two of us from like both perspectives, we quickly realized that there was something bigger here because I after a hackathon and we created the initial version of Deform, I started tweeting about it and people from everywhere started reaching out wanting to to pay us. They were like, I know this is a hackathon project but like like take my money, when can I get early access to it? I need it for all these use cases. And the use cases were like very similar to what we were seeing with allowlisting, with applications, and so that's when we knew we were onto something real. And that's when we really felt that pull to like to say, hey, how can we offer this to the rest of the world?

Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, we used to use MintKudos as well on the show. So yeah, fully intertwined there. But yeah, that's amazing. So it's you really found you basically founded the company solving a problem that you had, which a lot of people who found companies usually start with solving a problem that they wish they were fixed. But then you quickly discovered that hey, like everyone else has the same problem and everyone's doing the Fry meme 'take my money'. Exactly, exactly. It was really resonating. I think a lot of people were like, wow, like it's such a simple idea to have a form service but have it be better than like a Google form or a Typeform and actually verify wallets, verify, you know, Twitter accounts, Discord accounts, Telegram accounts, and and do some like on-chain analysis of like net worth and the age of a wallet and all this kind of stuff. But they were like, yeah, it's such a simple idea but nobody's done it. Why? And I need this. Exactly, exactly. And I know we're going to get into a feature kind of overview of the platform, but just before that, just want to hear the story of how the company changed from Deform to Megaphone and what the reasoning is there.

Yeah, that's a great question. We did this rebrand earlier this year in 2024 at the beginning of the year. And the reason for that is, you know, Deform as we were called before, it really started as a as the output of a hackathon. And then, you know, as I mentioned earlier, you know, people were reaching out, they wanted to use it, and it was really great. And Deform is basically like Typeform but for wallet addresses and kind of on-chain marketing. And as we built the the entire system out from what people were using these forms for, our vision grew way beyond just forms. And we saw really like two big trends or shifts happening in the industry. Number one, digital assets are becoming really powerful marketing tools. They're not just like currencies, they're not just, you know, a store value, but actually they're a way for for people to identify with the brands that they really really care about. And the second big shift is that on-chain marketing could eventually outpace traditional digital ads like social media ads and things like that in terms of scale and impact. And we're already seeing a lot of that from from our existing customers and how they're using Megaphone. And we're also seeing that in other examples like, you know, Kaito with Info-Fi and things like that. So the problem was that as we started, you know, stumbling upon these these deeper insights by building with our customers, the problem was that people still thought of us as just a form tool because it's like kind of in our name, Deform. And that held us back a little bit. So we decided to rebrand to Megaphone to reflect what we actually do, which is give communities a louder, more effective way to grow and reward their users. And that that was kind of like the motivation why. And so Katherine actually led the rebrand and she wrote a really good blog post about the entire thought process, all of our friends that we looped into the project, and how we came up with the name. We worked with a lot of really awesome people in terms of our customers, various partners in the industry, some of our investors as well. Shout out to Steve from Kindred and Linda from Scalar who's now working on on Farcaster stuff as well. But yeah, it was a whole process. It was very fun. It was a very great opportunity for us to kind of really show the the potential of the entire platform altogether rather than just forms.

Amazing, amazing. Yeah, and it totally makes sense with where you all are heading towards. And I guess that's a great segue to get into all the bells and whistles that Megaphone has in store for people. So I will bring up your screen and yeah, you can give us the quick tour.

Nice. Yeah, okay. I have this couple of things preloaded. Would love to show all the different parts of our platform. Excuse me. And this first thing that you're looking at here is Deform, actually. And so this is like, you know, Web3 forms. And what you're seeing here is a custom-domained Web3 form where it has a cover page. And so I've created this as an allowlist for everybody tuning into this episode. If you want to obtain a special Megaphone episode commemorative NFT that will be launching through Megaphone, you know, as a fun simple of like hey, you were here and you heard this episode, then you can fill out this form. And so this is form.thatguyintech.com/devntell. And there's some context here, there's an image. We have the logo configured to be the show. And then when you sign up, you can put in your information. It's a waitlist form, so I'll put in my email to get notified. And then I've already connected my wallet, but there's you can disconnect, you can reconnect other wallets. I've verified my username on Twitter. And then I've also done the actions, which include following the Megaphone account and then liking a tweet. So you can configure these things as an administrator to like point to like different things. And then you can have optional questions as well that connect other accounts or ask, you know, about what your favorite quote is. 'Narb watching Naruto' is my favorite quote moment. And then we do have the option to have a reCAPTCHA check. So I'll have to prove that I'm not a bot. Mountains or hills? Oh, I guess that one is also. And then I can submit. And then once I submit, I'm on the waitlist and you can see kind of your ranking or your spot on that waitlist. And you get a referral code, you can refer other people as well. And so that's kind of the experience as a user. And so when you come here and you want to sign up for the allowlist to get this NFT, that's the flow you'll go through. And then as an admin, there's so many different customizable ways to set this up. You can kind of design it and and make it really feel like your brand, change up the questions and everything like that. And so this is a really lightweight and powerful way to get early interest on like a new feature launch, a new platform opportunity, a new community that's being built, a podcast show. And so a lot of people really love this and have been using this, and so we continue to make this better. Now what we ended up building out that really motivated us more to kind of do a bigger rebrand is we expanded our platform to include kind of like questing and campaigns. This is basically a way for a company or a brand to have a long-standing page that people can revisit over and over again to discover new fresh material. And so actually, I'll log out of this. And what types of material that users are discovering here are activities, pieces of information that the brand really cares about getting users to engage with and learn about, so that they can build up their community. And so this might include, you know, off-chain actions like let's go read a blog post or do something on social media. It might include on-chain actions like stake a certain amount of money to like, you know, help with the momentum that we're trying to build in this ecosystem or this project, or mint an NFT, things like that. And so what the experience is like to an end user is they show up here, they'll often discover this link on Twitter or on a Linktree or something like that. And then I can check in. I'll sign with my wallet. And then you'll see that for my user, I've actually already completed a lot of these actions. And these actions are for this Megaphone Soundcheck campaign. It's basically a testing ground for all of our new campaign features. And I've done a bunch of these activities that have gotten me what Megaphone campaign calls points, which is decibels, just to be cheeky. And then I can take other actions as well. I can mint an NFT, and then I can see how much rewards I get for that, how much it costs, things like that. And then I can also refer my friends, get them in on the fun, and then I can see my leaderboard position as well with all the different things I did. And so this is a really really powerful marketing tool that we've used with companies like Onefootball, which is like a 10 million monthly active user streaming app for sports. They're based out of Berlin, and they've been working with us for for a long time setting up campaigns. We also work with marketing agencies like Serotonin that set up these campaigns on behalf of their clients. And so this is a really effective tool to actually collect all this information about what a user who a user is with all of their accounts that they're willing to share and connect and then allow these marketers to then segment and say okay, these are the people that I really want to continue connecting with and building with and ultimately reward. And so this brings me to the third part of our third module of our system is the rewarding module. It's the airdrop claim or token distribution module, depending on your use case, however you want to refer to it. But basically this is an airdrop claim flow that a brand can customize. And so once you have, you know, the people on the allowlist who have signed up for the NFT or once you have all the campaign participants who have been earning points, completing actions, you can then, you know, complete the loop by rewarding them with tokens. And so this is an example demo site where we ran a fun local event in San Francisco with the Pudgy Penguin community. We've been running Pudgy Penguin meetups for almost two years now. And this was a partnership with a local boba store, a tea store, that was accepting USDC for buying boba. And so we did a little promotion just to showcase our project to a bunch of the other crypto builders in the area. And so if you went and you bought a boba, then you would get a cashback reward with USDC through our platform sponsored by Coinbase. So the experience for the users is you get started, you check if you're eligible for the reward through a wallet address. And this is something that on the back office side, the brand or the admin would configure. They would create like a snapshot and say, okay, these wallets deserve this much. And so as a user when I check, I can see okay, cool. I have earned 42 Pengu, and the way that I earned it was I was a Pudgy Penguin NFT holder and then also I bought some boba with crypto. And then there's plenty of opportunities for the brands to really showcase moments that they want users to engage with. So an example here is drop a comment on our X page to get future bonuses and say hi to Megaphone. And so I can do that, and I'll be like cool, yeah, that's an awesome claim experience with Megaphone. And then I can continue. And then this is where I would finish claiming my tokens. So I just need to agree to the terms and then I can kick off my transaction. And so while the transaction is processing, brands can then put in like a video moment to really help solidify 'this is what our community is about, this is what this event was about, and here's why we're rewarding you'. And then finally once the transaction is done, you can view your transaction hash, you can do another call to action, and then users can mint this claim moment on-chain if they want to. So yeah, like with these three modules, we really try hard to combine the power of like wallet verification, social graph analysis, on-chain behavior filtering, and distribution so that you as a brand can turn attention into action, both on-chain and socially, and then also action into ownership of your token.

Awesome, awesome. And the points that people accumulate as they perform actions, those points are up to the admin to translate to whatever end reward, right? So for example, the points you earned here for the boba meetup translate to Pengu, but they could theoretically be anything, right? Like they could translate into like a tiered NFT or something or any other brand's tokens.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, we try to take an approach where we want to put your brand first. And so we don't prescribe, you know, what the value of these points are or like that they are part of a Megaphone system or something like that. We really want to give you the brand a lot of flexibility to define the meaning and integrate it into your systems. So we've actually seen a lot of people do all kinds of stuff, just like you're alluding to. There are people who call these points raffle tickets and so they're actually like entries into like a prize pool. Or they are actually integrated into their kind of DeFi reward incentives program, and so they will call it whatever that platform's points are. So yeah, there's all kinds of ways that people have integrated their points.

Sweet, awesome. And I noticed that a lot of the share on socials you guys have is either X, Farcaster, there might have been another one. Just curious to hear your thoughts on like what the brand marketing evolution has kind of gone through on like the Instagrams and the TikToks of the world. Like are you guys seeing a lot of brands start to activate on-chain on those platforms as well or or not quite yet?

Yeah, yeah. We're seeing a big spectrum for sure. I think it really depends on what the brand focuses on. We use the word brand to refer to companies pretty generally. I think traditionally when people hear the word brand, they might think of like a Coca-Cola or like some kind of fashion company maybe or something like that. And those definitely are brands, but I think there are also we also think of even communities like Ethereum or like Developer DAO or DevNTell as brands. And so it really depends on the audience that the brand is trying to target. I think for the more crypto-native brands, DeFi projects, DeFi apps, the way they'll primarily reach their users, where their users are at is crypto Twitter, maybe Farcaster, maybe like Telegram group chats. And for some of our bigger clients, especially on the more Web2 side, like Onefootball, they have been investing more into creating like Instagram Reels or TikTok Shorts, YouTube Shorts, TikToks. And definitely building up more of kind of an IP momentum as well. We see that with Pudgy Penguins as a brand also. So it kind of depends a little bit on the brand. But yeah, we're here to kind of help make sure that we can target users across all the spectrums.

Amazing. And obviously on-chain marketing is the way of the future. Like in your words, like how does the toolset that Megaphone provides kind of add on to the traditional marketer toolkit?

Yeah, so I think the key insight for how we figure out what to build and how we focus is that we're entering an era of the world economy and the internet where tokens aren't just assets; they are marketing primitives. And so I think that's really the main addition to the marketer's toolkit that's different from like the traditional marketing toolstacks with data and analytics and email lists and things like that. What we're really adding into and pioneering is giving marketers access to this new marketing primitive of tokens. Now tokens can onboard users, they can incentivize creators, they can deepen loyalty of all the community members, they can bootstrap entire ecosystems, which is like really really magical. And we saw a perfect example of that with Developer DAO with people minting NFTs and also getting the CODE token. And the thing is that giving people tokens or just giving people access to tokens really only works if you can target the right users who are going to be, you know, a consumer of your brand's product and enjoy it and appreciate it and get value of that product. The tokens kind of are a way to pour fuel on the fire and grow make it grow even more. And so it's important to get that right targeting the users right, finding the right users in order to deliver the right experience. And so that's really where we're focusing at Megaphone. We want to build the infrastructure to make this entire process really scalable, fair, effective, cost-efficient. And so examples of how we're helping is we've helped partners, for example, raise there was one partner we helped raise $6.3 million in a token presale in in just 19 minutes. It was kind of like a record-breaking sale on CoinList and they were able to do this because they were able to get the data that they needed to allowlist the right users to then buy into their token. The users these users were the people who were most likely to have some like on-chain balance, some historical age to their social accounts and their wallets, to really show that these are people who are most likely to be a fan of your actual product. And so that's one way we've helped as an example for how we've built this new marketing primitive. And then there's also a lot of brands, Onefootball included, where we've helped them filter out millions of Sybil users, basically like bot accounts, fake accounts that are there really just to like purely farm for the opportunity for incentive. And that's really really critical if you're a popular brand, you're gaining a lot of momentum, you're going to have a lot of bad actors who are trying to get into your system, and so we help with that a lot and connect those results of filtering to here's really the people who you should be rewarding with tokens. And then overall the the forms and campaigns that we run drive hundreds of thousands of social actions and real on-chain activity every day. And so there the idea is really simple: the new marketing primitive is a token, but the way that you manage all of that can be really complicated and Megaphone's here to make that simple.

Well said, great answer there. Yeah, I see we're running out of time here. I got a couple more questions that I want to run your way. Firstly, is there anything around the roadmap for Megaphone that you'd want to tease out or be willing to tease out?

Yeah, I think what I can say is, you know, our goal is to become the default system of record and growth engine for any team issuing tokens. So what's coming up and what you've seen already from this demo is that, you know, there are these really powerful modules across our entire platform. What we want to do is unify everything into a single powerful experience. So in the next couple of months, we're focusing on a fully modular system that ties together this like allowlist use case or application use case with campaigns with token rewards. We want to have a richer identity and reputation layer that gets smarter over time and helps users express themselves a little bit better and raise their hand and say, hey, I'm like a really good user in your community. And then also for admins to get like better analytics and user experience to make campaign, form, token claim setup super super super easy. I think there's always like ways to improve on those things. So yeah, we're just going to unify it, make it a more powerful experience. That's kind of the high-level roadmap plan.

Let's go. Amazing. Yeah, looking forward to it. You guys have built up quite the product already, so it would be amazing to see how it can grow even further. But for people who want to get started today, what would you say is the best way or how can people get started with Megaphone today?

Super easy. Go to our websitemegaphone.xyz. You'll be able to see all the different kind of entry points depending on your use case. And I'm always down to chat. I'm the same username across all platforms, so 'thatguyintech' on Twitter or Farcaster or Telegram. You can email me thatguyintech@gmail.com or albert@megaphone.xyz. And a quick plug, we're also hiring. So if you want to help build the future of on-chain growth, reach out. We're super lean. We're in-person startup in San Francisco and always happy to chat about that as well.

Awesome. Yeah, if anyone's looking for work, there you go. Hit up Albert. Building something really good here. And with that, we've unfortunately run out of time. I felt like we could probably go on a little bit more, but I know you're a busy guy. So thank you so much, Albert. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today. The product's amazing. We'll continue to use it here on DevNTell. So yeah, just looking forward to you guys continuing to build it out. Amazing. Thanks so much, Narb, for the great opportunity to to catch up and showcase our everything. And we're excited to make the product better for you as well. My pleasure, my pleasure. And yeah, 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 DevNTell next week. All righty. Cheers.