DeForm

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to another great DevNTell. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project, demonstrating best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, and so on. Basically, if you've got a passion, this is your opportunity to share with the Web3 community. Today, I am ecstatic to have Albert, also known as 'thatguyintech' on DevNTell to give us an overview of the latest and greatest from the world of DeForm. Albert, welcome! Perhaps you want to give our audience a bit of background on who you are and how you found yourself in Web3.

Yeah, Narb, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's seriously an honor. I've been watching some of these episodes for a while now, so huge fan of what everybody's been working on at Developer DAO. Quick background on me: I've probably been in the Web3 space full-time for almost two years now. Before working on DeForm, which I'm super excited to tell you guys all about very soon, I was a developer advocate at Alchemy. I was making educational content, building the Alchemy University community, and also just teaching people how to become blockchain developers. Before that, I was a full-stack engineer at a variety of different companies, working on education tech at Magoosh and full-stack IoT at Samsara. It's been a great ride joining Web3 full-time.

100% to that. It's awesome to have you on. How did you find yourself in Developer DAO? What gravitated you to join the community here?

That's a great question. This really takes me back. I remember Nader tweeting about how you can start a DAO by creating a contract with NFTs and having people get membership through them. At the time, it was part of the zeitgeist of the industry to explore how DAOs could be run. It was very interesting to follow along on the code side, but even more exciting was the social side of getting people from all around the world connected and bonded by this on-chain membership. It was something completely new. I saw that and was like, 'Okay cool, I'll mint an NFT and see where this goes.' It was crazy to see the momentum from just a tweet to thousands of people participating and meeting at conferences and parties.

Yeah, 100% to that sentiment. I think it really hit home for folks once they transitioned from hanging out in Discord to hanging out in real life. That's awesome to hear. If you want, we can get right into the thick of it here.

Okay, awesome. What I'll do is talk a little bit about how DeForm came to be and then do a product demo. I have some slides here. DeForm and Developer DAO, March 17th, 2023. How it all started: Kei and Catherine, our co-founders, met at a previous startup as the founding engineer and first product manager. They spent the holidays a year and a half ago churning through ideas in the Web3 industry. I was talking about DAOs, and it spawned this conversation about a new community model. One of the ideas that caught traction early on was MintKudos, which some of you might have seen on a previous DevNTell with Catherine.

They raised capital and were off to the races. Fun fact: Naruto actually helped Catherine secure the first million dollars in funding because she bonded over the anime with an early investor. We built MintKudos, an NFT minting platform, and gave it away for free. It had incredible growth, including with Developer DAO. However, what didn't sit well in hindsight was that the problem it solved was more of a 'vitamin' and not really a 'painkiller.' People liked giving out badges and reputation points, but it wasn't necessary for running their organization. We weren't confident in the path to revenue. We kept building and kept our ears open for market pain points.

In parallel, I was building Alchemy University. This is an example of how we used MintKudos to hand out badges for tutorials. We really appreciated Kudos, but along the way, we discovered a major problem: there's no way for people to collect info about users and verify wallet addresses easily. Our workaround was Google Forms or Typeform, but we would get attacked by bots all the time. Our forms would have tens of thousands of spam responses. Typeform has limits on responses you pay for, so our bills were going up for no good reason. It was a nightmare.

I was at DevCon in Bogota last October with the MintKudos team. I was itching to hack on something new, so we all hacked together on an idea we called DeForm—short for decentralized Google Forms. The idea is simple: Google Forms with wallet connect. You login with email or social, create a form, collect feedback, and analyze responses including NFT, token, and on-chain activity. We launched a tweet, and it blew up because the idea resonated. The team decided to reprioritize. DeForm was born as the Typeform with wallet connect that lets you look up web3 assets.

Things we're doing differently this time: we used money to measure intent and charged from day one. This wasn't to make a ton of money initially, but to see if the problem was painful enough for people to spend time and money on. We brought on incredible partners like ENS and Alchemy. Another thing: we're building the team to be in-person and co-located, not remote, for the beginning. While remote culture is great, the most miraculous product evolutions happened in person. We're also upskilling ourselves to stay lean. Now, let's jump to the demo at app.deform.cc/home.

This is the workspace of all the forms I've created. You login via a magic link. You can see your forms and a preview of the number of responses. You can upload a logo, set a title, and add a description with links. It follows a classic form-creator flow. I'll create a new one for Developer DAO DevNTell. The coolest thing is the 'Wallet Connect' question type. This is the bread and butter. You can ask people to verify their wallet address to check for NFT or token holdings. We also have Twitter, Discord, and Telegram connect options.

We have standard question types like short text, long text, and email with validation. I'll add a rating question: 'How much would you recommend Developer DAO to a friend?' and a link question for examples. Now, for the enrichment: Data Lookups. You can enrich responses with lookups for ERC20 token ownership, NFT ownership, and ENS. I'll add a lookup for the $CODE token. I'll paste the contract address from CoinGecko. This checks if the respondent owns any CODE tokens on Ethereum mainnet. I'll do the same for the Developer DAO NFT.

There are advanced conditions to check for specific token IDs or metadata, but ownership is enough for now. We also have an ENS lookup for primary names and avatars. In settings, we have bot prevention like reCAPTCHA and IP address collection for business plan customers. We're privacy-conscious, so these are default-off. You can also toggle the form open or closed. I'll share the form link. When you open it, you can connect your wallet and sign a message. We make sure users know this won't trigger a transaction or cost fees. It just verifies ownership.

After verifying Twitter and submitting, I can go back to responses. You can download responses as a CSV. When I open it, you'll see the verified wallet, Twitter username, account creation date, follower count, and the on-chain lookup results. It shows 'TRUE' for the NFT ownership and the exact balance for the ERC20 tokens. It's a full end-to-end flow. Here is the team: Catherine, Kei, Tracy, Cody, and myself. We have a promotion code: 'DEVDAO' for two months of the Business Plan for the first three people who sign up.

Beauty. That was awesome. We got some questions from the crowd. Nate asks: 'What tool has helped you a lot recently as a software engineer?'

Great question. Our stack is Next.js, React, TypeScript, and GraphQL. We use a lot of AWS services to get started quickly. To answer directly, I've been exploring GitHub Copilot a lot, and ChatGPT. They are very useful for getting test cases started as soon as I write a function. It doesn't write the whole app, but it really helps speed things up.

100% optimizes your dev life. Who doesn't want that? Next question from Jake.

'Will you one day have an integrated dashboard that shows stats?'

Yes, Jake. We definitely want to add analytics. People want to know open rates, completion rates, or where people are dropping off. We'd love feedback on what types of analytics matter most to you, so tweet at us @DeFormApp.

Beauty. One more question here from Shikhar.

'How did you scale it up?'

We're still getting early users, but we have Web2 infrastructure in place to serve concurrent requests. In the future, we want to explore scaling through decentralizing content and having people encrypt their own form responses stored in a decentralized way.

Looking forward to it. What's the best way for people to get in touch if they have questions or want to give feedback?

We are very open to feedback. Reach out to any of us on Twitter. I'm @thatguyintech on Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, and Discord. You can also email support@deform.cc and the whole company will see it.

Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on, Albert. This was wonderful and inspiring. Before we leave, a quick note about our fundraiser operators, Chuck and Wyke, who are here to help you fundraiser for your projects in the fundraising hub on Discord. With that, happy Friday, happy weekend, and we will see you here next week. Cheers gang!