#324: DeForm's Path to Product Market Fit
#324: DeForm's Path to Product Market Fit
🐣 From hackathon project to a full-fledged company
October 25, 2022
Around 2 years ago, I wrote about an ETHBogota hackathon project called DeFormed after seeing the viral post on my timeline.
What was DeFormed? Literally Google Forms, but with token-enabled features such as token-gating and response prioritization based on onchain activity and holdings. To my pleasant surprise, Catherine, one of the hackathon team members reached out to me that same day thanking me for the mention.
We’ve been chatting on and off since that day, and finally, after 2 years I’m writing about this hackathon project turned VC-backed company (now called DeForm) helping companies grow effectively through campaigns and forms.
This is a rare instance where my procrastination worked out, because I’ve been able to watch this evolution unfold from the sidelines, use the DeForm in the wild a dozen times, and catch up with Catherine to dive deeper into how the DeForm team operates and their roadmap for the product.
Shoutout to Catherine for taking the time to share these insights!
2022: Mint Kudos + DeFormed at ETHBogota
Before DeFormed was a thing, Catherine (Co-founder and CEO) and Kei (Co-founder and CTO) were founders of Mint Kudos, a NFT minting platform that helped communities and DAOs recognize achievements, participation, and contributions in the form of SBTs (soulbound tokens, a non-transferrable version of NFTs).
As Mint Kudos worked with various teams and communities, one of the insights they uncovered was that these communities sent out forms to collect wallet addresses and the responses they received were a mess. They were spammed by bots, filled with typos, lacked consistency (ENS, full wallet address, etc.) and had bad actors impersonating community members.
Catherine and Kei asked a simple question: “What if Google Forms had a WalletConnect feature to help address these headaches?” And surprisingly that feature didn’t exist, leading to the birth of DeFormed at the hackathon.
Although the DeFormed team didn’t win the hackathon, there were several signs that indicated that the team was onto something:
Albert’s DeFormed post went viral with over 1k likes
The hackathon judges shared their contact info to keep in touch with the team’s progress
Other teams reached out to DeFormed offering up to 0.5 ETH (~$650 at the time) to use the product 👀
In meme format, early signs of this were happening:
2023-Today: DeForm is born, Fundraise, 📈
As DeFormed the project turned into DeForm the product and company, several milestones were hit:
DeForm raised a $4.6M seed round
Collected 4M+ responses from DeForm’s Forms product
Received 2M+ participants from DeForm’s Campaign product which has only been out in Beta for a few months
Used by companies and projects across the ecosystem, including Coinbase, Forbes, Animoca, Metamask, Optimism, and more. TBH, the list is too long lol
🚨 PS: If you want to check out DeForm, Catherine has graciously provided a promo code for 3 months of complimentary access to the All Access tier of their Form product ($237 in value!). Use the code “TPAN” at checkout for unlimited forms, unlimited users, and up to 1000 responses per form.
How DeForm approaches growth
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to growth especially in these parts, DeForm’s approach combines elements of the do things that don’t scale, build in public, and create a strong culture philosophies that has helped them get to the point where they are today.
Doing things that don’t scale
Despite DeForm’s ultimate goal of being a self-serve platform, the team doesn’t shy away from being in the trenches with their clients and users.
They focus on being as accessible as possible across all channels (and time zones heh). DeForm also serves as GTM partners for strategic clients, sharing insights around best practices for successful launches.
Building in public
There’s building in public and then there’s DeForm’s version of building in public, which is more unique for B2B. Some examples:
Welcoming news hires on social channels and publishing a blog post featuring them
Sharing product and engineering updates from personal accounts, which are then reposted by the brand account
Sharing fun updates that are related but not obviously beneficial to the company. Building in public doesn’t always have to be serious.
Having a public feature roadmap with user input
Catherine’s POV on building in public provides more insight into why they take this approach:
DeForm came out of Eth Global (our hackathon tweet thread went viral — I think we got ~1k likes in 24H or something crazy like that), and early on this taught us the beauty of building in public. We almost feel an obligation to keep people posted because it was the community that gave us the confidence to pursue this opportunity.
This approach naturally leads to…
Creating a strong company culture
When chatting with Catherine, one of the responses that stuck out to me when I asked about DeForm’s content strategy and building in public approach was:
During our one-on-one’s, we ask ‘Are you having fun?’
This approach sounds so simple, but mentally and emotionally contrasts with a lot of what we see in this industry.
For many, ‘fun’ in crypto and web3 means you’re making money in some way, shape, or form. And that’s completely valid! However, the inverse of this is where that mindset is more concerning: If you aren’t making money, it’s not fun, or even depressing.
One unique and admirable way that the team facilitates having fun for the industry is by hosting Pudgy Penguin SF meetups. DeForm invites the local Pudgy Pengins community (including non-holders and even those who are crypto-curious). I attended their 6th meetup last month and it was great to meet the team, meet other people working in the industry, and even educate other people who were crypto-curious.
How DeForm approaches growth pt. 2
Alright TPan, thanks but no thanks. Building a strong culture and having authentic content is great, but it’s SOFT. I want the real stuff.
Speaking of TPan, did I mention you can get 3 months of the All Access tier of their Form product for free with code TPAN? Lol sorry I had to give another plug here, it was too easy.
Sheesh! It’s important to share DeForm’s approach to the ‘softer’ pieces of growth because it is a core part of their strategy and should be implemented more at other companies. Being personable and likable as a company and as a team of individuals is an underappreciated strategy and differentiator. Let’s get to the ‘harder’ stuff though.
One of the other notable insights Catherine shared about DeForm’s growth was when I asked her how they closed large brand names such as Coinbase, Animoca, and Metamask. It was all word of mouth, the holy grail of growth.
How is this possible?! As some folks might call it…
Product-led growth (PLG)
For those less familiar PLG is an approach where the product itself is the primary engine for acquisition and retention instead of relying on sales or marketing teams.
Key attributes of PLG:
User-Centric Design: The product is designed to deliver immediate value to users, often through a free tier or trial, which allows potential customers to experience the product before committing to a purchase.
Try it out yourself with the code TPAN for 3 months of complimentary access to the All Access tier of the Form product.
Viral Growth: PLG products often have built-in components for virality, meaning that as users engage with the product, they naturally invite others to join or use the product. I’ll get to this in a bit.
Self-Service: The product is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, allowing users to onboard, learn, and realize value without the need for extensive support or sales intervention. DeForm’s Form creation experience is just as easy as other tools (Google, Typefully, etc.), but with the onchain bells and whistles.
Expansion through Usage: The product often has features or pricing models that encourage users to increase their usage, leading to natural expansion of revenue over time as users upgrade to higher tiers or add more users within their organization.
One of the top examples of PLG outside of crypto is Slack, a communication tool that many of us currently use or have used before. Slack grew to 300k+ DAU before bringing on their first marketing hire, thanks to good ‘ol organic word of mouth, particularly on Twitter.
In its early days Slack adoption spread in a bottoms-up fashion at companies, with specific teams adopting the tool, and eventually the whole company. As employees left to other companies or started their own, Slack became the natural communication tool of choice.
PLG x DeForm
Word of Mouth on social
DeForm’s growth has parallels to Slack’s early traction. Although the addressable market does not have the same size and scale as Slack’s back in the day, DeForm is able to leverage the social world of mouth component more flexibly.
As an example, take Lunchbreak’s v2 announcement and Albert’s (founding engineer) reply. It’s a simple organic shoutout for Deform on the surface, but in reality it’s 5 organic ads for DeForm:
Shoutout from Lunchbreak’s CEO
DeForm URL
Albert replies calling out the features with a screenshot of the form
DeForm brand account repost
If you go to the form, you can see ‘Powered by DeForm’ on the bottom right corner
In words of Albert’s reply, *chefs kiss* indeed 👨🍳
Below is a small sample of other shoutouts for DeForm, making the word-of-mouth approach. Note that these shoutouts are coming from or based off people. The Forbes example is a quote post off of Catherine’s post, and then reposted by the DeForm account, giving the same piece of content 3 chances to reach someone’s timeline.
Responders become clients
The Forms product is inherently a viral product in a non-splashy way, and that’s a good thing because that allows it to be sustainable and scalable.
How so? Because everyone fills out forms!
Whether you’re registering for an event, applying for a program, or signing up for early access to a product, you’re filling out a form of some sort. And depending on the form and context in which it is used, it casts a wide net of respondents, some of which would be future users and potentially customers.
A great example of this was with Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF), which was DeForm’s second client. As a part of the RPGF process, Optimism used DeForm to collect wallet addresses as a part of the voting process.
While participating in RPGF, Vitalik (Ethereum co-founder) and Jesse Pollak (founder of Base) used DeForm and Jesse introduced the product to the Coinbase team, who eventually became DeForm customers.
This all happened because Jonas (RPGF lead) used DeForm from ENS.
🫳🎤
One-to-many use case
Although the primary use case for DeForm today is for marketers or community leads, there’s a path for DeForm to become a tool used across teams. Before I wrote about DeFormed the hackathon project, I wrote about the idea of user research in web3 a month prior.
Use wallet activity to complement your Qual + Quant user research
Honestly, I’ll be surprised if the user research behemoths like Nielson, Qualtrics, Kantar, Gartner, or IPSOS aren’t already thinking about this.
Blockchain data is public
This is additive to existing methodologies, it doesn’t disrupt them
It strengthens the rigor of user research practices
It can make studies have longer lasting impact
So what are some possible implementations of this?
New users
Build customer personas of new users who connect their wallet based on their historical data. Not just signals in the short amount of time that they enter your ecosystem.
Identify familiarity with a particular set of products based on the wallet’s previous activity with them. You can personalize content or products based on that wallet’s ‘skill or familiarity level’.
Note that this won’t be helpful if the activity is coming from a fresh wallet with no historical activity
Competitive analysis
Are your sales down? Wallet analytics can help tease additional insights to understand why that might be. Maybe users aren’t purchasing your product anymore, but they’re buying a competitor’s. You can map why that might be the case and timebox it to a competitor promo. Or maybe they’ve left the ecosystem entirely.
Back to the historical data point I made earlier. Maybe your user came from a competitor’s smart contract. You can see if they transacted with them.
Persona analysis
Instead of having your user research participants respond to where they buy their clothes from, you could deterministically identify where they purchase from.
Product, Data, Design, and Marketing teams can work together to create dynamic persona models not only based on first party data, but also public blockchain data for these wallets.
Eg: If a user’s wallet interacts with A, B, or X they go from a ‘Spender’ persona to a ‘Saver’ persona or from ‘Customer’ to ‘At Risk’
DeForm can help with user research today with its capabilities, helping to analyze users and wallets by a variety of attributes.
Today it’s used for growth and marketing purposes. Tomorrow, it will be used for growth, marketing, product, analytics, and more as teams share DeForm internally, just like Slack a decade ago.
What’s next for DeForm?
Rolling out Campaigns publicly
As successful as Campaigns is so far, it’s currently in Beta. Once public, Campaigns will be a self-serve product, just as Forms is.
Closing enterprises as clients
The team is working with some large internationally recognized consumer brands. Although I wasn’t able to get Catherine to share any names with me (shucks), I was able to glean that a majority of the brands DeForm is in talks with are not active in the space. In fact, they want to work with DeForm as a partner for their launch and GTM efforts.
This is notable because 1) major consumer brands are still interested in the space, thank you sweet baby Jesus and 2) DeForm is a key partner for their marketing efforts. It’s a tool that hits the sweet spot where it can be easily used by crypto-natives and people who know little to nothing about wallets and blockchains.
Onchain Hubspot?
Currently, DeForm has 2 products: Forms and Campaigns. As successful as these products have been so far, it’s safe to assume that more products are in the pipeline, eventually turning into a suite.
Forms and Campaigns are focused on acquisition and engagement, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see more features or a separate product focusing on retention down the line, supported by a massive identity layer in the background.
What about Product Market Fit?
Ah, yes the elusive PMF. Although it doesn’t seem like it, it’s the core theme of this piece. One of the impressions I had early on in my conversation with Catherine was holy shit, does DeForm have product market fit?
There’s no sure-fire way to determine if a company has reached product market fit, but the anecdotes that were shared certainly indicate signs of it:
People were willing to pay for DeFormed even when it was a hackathon project
Working with some of the largest brands in crypto
In conversations with large consumer brands that haven’t entered the space yet
Strong PLG flywheel with millions of responses collected and campaign participants
Although many of us are familiar with PMF as a concept, it feels foreign because crypto is volatile, it’s focused on the financial aspect, and PMF is more of a moving target instead of a binary condition. The best examples of product market fit in this industry are generally boring (but important!) for the average consumer like stablecoins or speculative/unsustainable like pump.fun or friendtech for a few weeks.
This reminds me of Marc Andreessen’s famous quote about product market fit:
You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.
This doesn’t mean the DeForm team isn’t working their asses off nights and weekends. Nor does it mean they have actually achieved PMF. However, the signs are there and the team’s approach hopefully serves as an inspiration for all the builders out there.
See you Thursday!