Formo, The Data Analytics Platform for Onchain Apps ft. Founder Yos Riady

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast 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 Riady, who is the founder of Formo. So if you didn't know, Formo is a data platform for on-chain applications, making analytics simple by combining the best of web product and on-chain products. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Yos, learn about Formo, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Yos. Pleasure to have you on, man. You were telling me before we came on air that you've been watching the show for a little bit, so I'm ecstatic to have one of the audience members come on the show.

It's an honor to be here. Honestly, I'm really excited.

Yeah, man, yeah, man. And we're excited to have you on. And yeah, I guess before we get into all the awesome stuff you have lined up for us, I guess would you just like to give a brief introduction about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm Yos, founder and software engineer at Formo. We're building an analytics tool for on-chain teams. Basically, we make analytics and attribution simple for anybody who's building on-chain. Before this, I was working at Chainlink Labs as a smart contract engineer and tech lead. The last project I worked on there was Chainlink Staking, which is like now almost a billion in TVL on Ethereum. So yeah, I think I learned a lot over there and I really believe in the mission of building like building blocks for the rest of the ecosystem and just continuing that mission with Formo, with analytics.

Beauty. And yeah, Chainlink's a great place to kind of carve out your Web3 blockchain skill set and just curious like before that, was that kind of like your first foray into tech 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 PayPal, Big Tech. And right before Chainlink, I was also already in crypto. I was working at a DeFi startup where we were building like a lending and borrowing protocol on Ethereum and we used Chainlink. So that's how I came across Chainlink and sort of switched teams after some point and helped them build for more developers.

Amazing, amazing. And yeah, I guess kind of in your tenure from PayPal to the DeFi startup to Chainlink, was there any point where you kind of came across a point of frustration or something around analytics in particular that kind of inspired you to start Formo?

Yeah, absolutely. I think almost in every team that I've worked on in crypto, we always struggle with building dashboards and getting even basic metrics. Answering even simple questions in crypto is really hard. Like even things like: Where do my users come from? What do they do on the app? For this specific campaign, how many actual users did we get who did something meaningful? These are really simple questions that you would expect to have an answer to and easily if you compare with maybe normal software or normal tech startups. There are a lot of existing tools that help you answer these questions, things like traditional product analytics like Mixpanel, for example, business intelligence tools like Tableau and Power BI, for example. So it's really established in the tech industry in general. But when you try to do the same and try to answer the same questions in crypto and Web3, it's really hard. You would have to juggle like three to five different tools: Google Analytics, Dune, Flipside, maybe other tools. And they all each see a different part 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 feel you on that. And do you kind of attribute it to any single thing or is it just you think people were too concentrated on just getting infrastructure to work, wallets to work, that kind of metrics were an afterthought?

I think it's probably due to the fact that crypto is still new, so a lot of the industry is focused on top-of-the-funnel metrics. So more around visibility, views, clicks, followers. So a lot of the tools that are out there are mostly focused on those top-of-the-funnel metrics. You have things like Kaito, for example, and a lot of other social analytics tools. But I think over time, as the industry matures more and more, as revenue becomes the new meta, right, these metrics will only become more important and we'll see better tools overall over time.

Yeah, definitely. And I think Formo is a great start to that revolution, right? So good segue. I guess, yeah, like what's what is Formo? What's your elevator pitch of it for the audience here?

Yeah, absolutely. So Formo makes analytics and attribution simple for on-chain apps. Instead of spending months and having an in-house like data engineering team building custom data pipelines, you can just install Formo. It takes 10 minutes or less to set up and it captures all the data that you need from off-chain to on-chain. Um, so basically Formo helps you understand who your users are, where they come from, and what they do on your app from off-chain to on-chain.

Well said, well said. And I guess like what are some of the features that are baked into the analytics platform?

Yeah, so we the way we built Formo is we did a lot of customer interviews, like in the beginning. We spoke to a lot of DeFi teams, for example, working in DeFi, from product to marketing. And one of the biggest pain points there is you really have to juggle multiple tools. So the marketing would use Google Analytics, for example, to see visitors, page views, which which domains are referring the most visitors. Then you have PMs who are using like Mixpanel or Amplitude to see how users use the product, so the middle of the funnel: 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 are trying to figure out, okay, what how what is my revenue? And they usually use on-chain analytics like Dune and other tools. So Formo is designed to get the best features of each type of analytics to give you as much visibility as possible from the beginning of the funnel off-chain to the bottom of the funnel on-chain. So our key feature is product analytics. And this feature lets you see how users navigate from your website to your app to on-chain. And we couple that with wallet intelligence, which shows you what who are your users, you know, what what segments they're in, what other apps they're interested in. Now we're not interested in like de-anonymizing people or identifying users. 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 on-chain data is completely public, it's actually a goldmine of user and product insights. We just haven't had, you know, maybe good enough tools or it's not quite as accessible as we want it to be. So product analytics and wallet intelligence are are two core features.

Yeah, certainly. I might want to I want to double-click a little bit into the wallet intelligence. So if I understand correctly, your platform enables people to be able to kind of discern what types of like smart contracts and dapps anonymous wallets kind of interact with on-chain, correct?

That's correct and also a bit beyond that. Some, you know, some user some wallets have a public profiles like ENS profiles, who reveal more about what type of things they're interested in and also what channels they're active on. As well as we combine that with context that we get from web analytics so that we can, for example, create very specific segments that will help you figure out who your ICP is, your ideal customer profile. So maybe it's, you know, desktop users who use Athena from China. So you can create very specific segments and figure out, you know, what is the activation rate, what is the conversion rate of these specific groups. And and it all comes out of the box. Like you don't need to set up any complicated data pipelines.

That's yeah, that sounds amazing. And especially as you mentioned like it's a it's a low lift. I mean, a lot of yeah, a lot of a lot of like big enterprise companies like that like you mentioned kind of earlier on in the show, like that's kind of a no-brainer thing to have. And I imagine also that customer segment might be interested in a tool like this because it's just so plug-and-play like like you mentioned. And they want to know exactly 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 stablecoin payments or or whatever, I think it'll be very useful for them to continue to build that customer profile with this data.

Yeah, exactly. And when you know, jumping onto that, you know, it's really hard to figure out the impact of incentive campaigns, for example, and long-term impact of incentive campaigns, not just on like short-term metrics like monthly active users or weekly active users, but also long-term retention. Like are these users actually staying or are they mercenary users who's just did it there for the incentive, right? So these are really important questions, but so far it's really hard to to get an answer to them.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'd be really curious to kind of see a demo of this if you if you don't mind. Seeing it in action would be would be awesome.

Yeah, absolutely. So let me happy to share, happy to share.

Amazing. And while Yos is bringing that up, folks who are watching us live, if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments and we will bring them up as we go along.

[Demoing Formo] All right, can you see my screen? All right, so this is going to share you a few screens from Formo to give you a better idea of what you can do with it. As I mentioned earlier, we combine the best features of web product and on-chain analytics. So here on this screen you can see 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 on-chain data and metrics, things like wallets, transactions. We have built-in support for volume and revenue as well. And here we can see where users are coming from. So which pages they're visiting and also which maybe other partners or websites they're coming from. And not just the number of users but also impact on volume and revenue metrics. So here, for example, you can see exactly you know which refers or which referrals is giving you the most volume or revenue. So it's not just vanity metrics like user counts, but actual impact on-chain. And you can see other demographics like countries, what devices people are using, what type of wallets people are using, as well as which what what chains people are connected to. So this gives you a broad overview, which brings me to the next next section, which is about the wallet intelligence. So you can see a lot more if you go to a blockchain explorer like Etherscan, you can sort of tell you know what tokens they own and what 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 context. 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 your visitors and your users from net worth, if they have any social profiles connected to their address, what apps what their top apps are in DeFi, their top tokens, which chains they're on. We're also working on ways to label these wallets automatically based on their life cycle. For example, if they're a new user, if they're a returning user, if they're about to churn, you know, they're at risk of leaving your app. Because and we can do that because we have full visibility on what users do on the app. So here, let me just wait for this to load. So here sort of we can see a user's wallet profile. This gives you more information about things like their net worth across like all the different chains that they're active on. 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. As well as details around how much are they spending on your specific app. We have revenue, volume, 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. 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. We capture all the key events automatically, things like page views, whenever someone connects their wallet, when someone tries to sign a transaction, when they confirm a transaction. So all of that, you know, is captured automatically when you install Formo so you can see exactly who's doing what and if there are any issues or drop-off points, you can very easily see that. Another way to view this is as a funnel. So a typical funnel for a dapp could be going from a page view on the website to connecting your wallet to making a transaction or some other action that is specific to your app. Formo makes it very easy to create these funnels and understand the user behavior in Web3. 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. And you can basically customize it to based on your use case. It's all done through the UI with no code so you don't need to bother your engineers or your data team or anybody else who and because they're probably already busy with other things. And because we're a data platform, 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 what it looks like. We use SQL just to give you the most flexibility to explore and query the data. To make it easier for non-technical folks, we even have a like an alpha ask AI feature. 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 data, all the tables, all the database 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 you know write custom SQL because nobody does that anymore I think. 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. And once again to get all of this, you don't need to do any fancy data engineering, don't have to build an in-house data team. You just install Formo, it takes less than 10 minutes and you get all of this. Yep, that's that's all.

Wow, that's quite a bit of features packed into one platform. And I really like the idea of the Ask AI as like a lot of the time if you're like a product person or or someone who's in charge of kind of providing reports and updates to stakeholders, 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 think this is pretty nifty.

Yeah, and to add on to that, once you have this data, we make it easy to share share this information into dashboards for reporting. So like one pain point that I've heard from many builders is: I have data from Google Analytics, I have data from Dune, I have data from Mixpanel, I need to stitch all of these into one dashboard that I can share with my partners or stakeholders or leadership. Um, Formo offers you a way to do that as well. You can add charts. We have several different types of like charts, from bar charts to funnels to pie charts. And so with Formo, if you use Formo, you don't have to run a separate BI tool. We offer that functionality and you don't have you don't need to worry with one other tool one more tool to run.

Awesome. I love the sounds of that. And for end businesses and users who want to start up with Formo, do they are they only afforded the opportunity for a cloud-hosted option or is it available for them to self-host as well?

For right now, we don't offer self-hosting, but we we're looking into ways to support it. Right now, we only support cloud. Um, so 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 because the infrastructure requirements to unify and process all of this data can be quite intense, especially when you are talking about indexing like smart contract events on really fast chains like Base. So I would recommend checking us out if you don't mind cloud, because it solves a lot of problems, especially around scale.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And around that, how can people get started with Formo? What's the process? Do you offer a free tier, paid tier?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first step is to check out our website to learn more about what we do. We have a free plan that you can use to get started risk-free. And the way you install Formo is very similar to 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 and give you all these information out of the box.

Well, that simple, eh? Oh, wow. Amazing. And you also mentioned, I believe a little earlier, that you offer an API. Do you want to dig into that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. So currently we offer the query API. So basically we are a data platform and we have all our tables, you know, available for querying information about, for example, all the events that are happening, all the users, and you can use this to you know create whatever charts or dashboards that you'd like. One other cool use case for this is also triggering like a specific flows for specific types of users. So for example, if you have, let's say, a wallet that you know uses one of your competitors' apps, you could trigger perhaps a small like grant or small airdrop when they visit the site, for example. So there's all kinds of cool like activation that you can do based on wallet profiles and data from our API.

Amazing. Yeah, and it seems like you have quite a feature-rich product already. And before we got on air, you were mentioning that you're only like six months to about a year of working on this, which is quite amazing.

Yeah, I think we're lucky to have a I think a good idea of what we want to build. And yeah, I think, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And where I was kind of leading with this is like what your North Star vision of the product is and if you can share anything around maybe new feature sets or or whatnot on the roadmap coming up.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think right now, so we we already have onboarded a few projects, mostly DeFi apps and teams building in in Web3. Really our goal is to make Formo as as useful as as it can be for our existing users, whether that is adding improving our existing features, improving our data quality. Beyond that, we also realized that there's a lot of different types of apps. Right now we mostly support web apps like web-based DeFi apps. But there are other types of apps coming, which is for example mini apps on either Base or Farcaster or World. We also there's also mobile apps which I think is going to be increasingly popular, especially for new users who are not yet in DeFi or crypto. So a lot of our roadmap will be about improving our existing features and and making sure it's reliable for our existing users and also expanding what platforms that Formo is available on. So that means mini apps and mobile.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, man, you have a wonderful foundation built here already. So it's amazing there is even more even more that you're going to be packing onto this. And I guess for people who are interested in taking it for a spin, obviously they can sign up. You mentioned there's a free tier. If people are keen to speak to you, perhaps give you feature requests or or maybe just book some time to to meet, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you?

Yeah, absolutely. You can message us, message me on on Twitter. You can find me at X/YosRiady. Or you can check out our website and you can either sign up, it's actually fully open to to signups, or book a demo if you have any questions or if you'd like a more tailored demo of of the platform.

Right on, right on. And yeah, folks, I mean this is seems like a one-stop shop for all your analytics needs. So definitely hit Yos up, get that account going and just take a play around with the platform. And yeah, as we're kind of approaching time here, just wanted to get your thoughts, switching gears just a tiny bit, just like what your thoughts in general are of the blockchain Web3 space today and kind of how you see it evolving kind of going forward.

Absolutely. I think in the past few years, a lot of the ecosystem have focused a lot on infrastructure, from anywhere from scalability to usability. Like we have embedded wallets, for example, and lower costs for transactions and faster transactions. So I think a lot of that is in place. It's a really good time to start building apps in crypto. Things are scalable, the chains are cheap and fast, wallets are not as complicated as they were before, it's easier to onboard than ever. And I think we're entering a new apps, I would say, super cycle perhaps. So I'm really excited to to see more builders joining crypto and build new apps. I think as with the news on Polymarket just a few days ago, I think it shows that 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 comes next in the next few years. I think we'll see a whole new generation of apps that we cannot even imagine today. And for those apps, happy to support if they need analytics with Formo. But in general, I'm really looking forward to what we see in the next few years.

Yeah, well said and so am I. I think we're finally going to see that shift from 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 'Oh, we're using chain XYZ.' But yeah, Yos, just want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on the show with us today. I know I really enjoyed enjoyed the chat and Formo looks like a very promising product that I'm sure a lot of people are going to be using in the near future. So if you're someone that's watching here today and you are in dire need of a one-stop shop for analytics, Formo is your go-to, or at least something to play around with today. And with that, 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 DevNTell next week. Till then, have a good one, folks. Cheers.