HandyCon 2025 | Day 2 - Formo: Product Analytics for Decentralized Apps - YouTube

Transcript:
(00:00) [Music] hey how's it going doing great doing great thanks for joining us am I saying that right y that's right that's y excited to be here and and excited the floor the floor is yours just hit share whenever you're ready got it let me share my screen all right so hi everybody I'm Yos excited to be here and and thanks for thanks for your your time and today like to share more about product analytics for decentralized apps um I think identity tools handshake and and onchain data is going is is a wealth of
(00:39) information that a lot of folks in in wepr hasn't really tapped onto yet and today I'd like to just share some of the problems that we have in in web tree and and decentralized apps uh and how additional data and identity systems can can help address some of those issues so a bit more about me I'm I'm Yos I have about 8 years in software six of those years in in web 3 and the last four years I spent at chain link as an early contributor uh the last project I worked on there was a chaining staking uh which
(01:11) is like a 1 billion tvl protocol on ethereum I'm a founder and an engineer and right now I'm building data and analytics tools for for Builders and and daps onchain so building building onchain and building DBS and building on the decentralized web is it's really hard and according to recent survey but by previe on Suma crypto here are some of the top challenges that that Builders face when building a consumer crypto product and some of these are things like transaction uing and swapping signing in and funding
(01:46) and a lot of these has to do with wallets users have to think about setting up a wallet keeping the the seed phase safe thinking about paying for gas and and funding it and all of that is really complicated but today I'd like to just zoom in on two things on this list the first is user acquisition and the second is product analytics and we'll start with the acquiring user uh first so unchain user acquisition is is cursed is cursed with too much money and too much speculation on the left you see a diagram of the retention rates of
(02:21) different decentralized chains um and you can see a very clear Trend retention rates are poor across the board incred incredibly poor and the average TR rates are far below of that in web to in general the rates are at about 5% after about six to to eight months so what are the problems with user acquisition in in on chain first is the excessive hype and speculation in the space a lot of projects and users focus on short-term vanity metrics such as um social followers likes and retweets maybe some basic like tvl or activity numbers and
(03:05) it's created this industry of air drop farming where people actually spend full time um hunting for air drops and and being mercenary users and surprisingly this creates a high drop off rate for post air drop once people get their their air drop or their tokens they have no other reason to stay and they leave and this short shows that so we have poor retention longterm in across I think the decentralized web and adrop driven acquisition which is I think so far has been one of the key growth strategies for many projects is
(03:43) unsustainable unsurprisingly so on this table on the top left you can see some of the projects in web3 have launched acquisition air drop driven acquisition uh you can see the number of tokens are addir dropped the value when they addir dropped it and the number of users who received it and across the board you can see very high CAC or customer acquisition costs and basically this is how much each project paid the user to use their product and after they've paid this cost UPF front to the user it doesn't take long for activity to just
(04:17) plummet to numbers before the air drop or even worse so this this approach of acquiring users on chain is clearly not a long-term strategy it's not sustainable um and has some has many issues associated with it number one is the Civil farming as high as these numbers are it wouldn't be so bad if it did acquire like real long-term users but the the reality is in most cases these these users are farmers so these projects would basically throw away a lot of their their money their funds to acquire users that don't stay around to
(04:59) acquire a local quality low impact so acquisition is broken in in in in web3 and and the on the decentralized web and these these mercenary farmers and users crowd out your your real users um these are not your real users and and we need we need to find a better way to acquire real users there is this General trend of in web 3 where people launch Tokens The Tokens vest and the builders or the or the team just cash out and leave and do it again and in most of these cases we have to ask is that project viable is that sustainable or is
(05:41) it is it is it something else and I think as as you know Founders and builders in the space we can try to consider Sounder Alternatives when it comes to metrics instead of likes and followers and number perhaps even the number of active users we can focus more on things like CAC the customer acquisition costs um if I have to pay my users more to to get them to use my product is that really a viable viable model you can also look at arpu average revenue per user how much are are your user spending how much are your users
(06:18) using your product then there's churn the retention rate of customers lifetime value and there's all kinds of benchmarks that we can we can use from from the web too side of things that will that can help us create more viable projects uh that doesn't cost us much to acquire and gives the project reasonable Revenue to keep going and and and reach a product Market fit and and growth sustainable growth so at this point you might be thinking yeah okay I should I should measure my key metrics and and
(06:51) run a viable business very easy getting all this data should be should be easy right unfortunately it's not it's not as easy as you think in web 3 and this brings us to our next biggest challenge when we build consumer or consumer app in in web3 and that is analytics and and product analytics at the bottom of the list here so one of the one of the biggest challenge of analytics and data in web3 I think is the fact that users are both offchain and onchain like the typical users journey in in in the decentralized web
(07:29) starts on web too it starts on let's say social channels like Twitter or LinkedIn as well as websites and normal normal web uis uh where they might um first learn about your project on on on a a growth campaign or a tweet or somebody's post on a social network and then they click through to your website they learn more about what your what your project is about and then finally start connecting their wallet on on your dap and and um perform some user actions on on on on web too still and then at some
(08:05) point you the user would perform a transaction perhaps on a blockchain or or other other parts of the decentralized web um that where the conversion happens so the the targeting and engagement that happens in web 2 and the conversion that happens in web 3 are kind of split into two different worlds and to understand and to get the metric that you need you kind of have to understand two very different worlds and whatever tool for data or analytics that we use will have to span these two very different internets for for for every user for
(08:43) every web tree user so why is analytics in web3 so hard um as I mentioned earlier the big reason is data fragmentation a web3 users Journey happens across two different worlds offchain and onchain and also on multiple wallets user have multiple wallets and we somehow have to resolve those multiple identities into one single unified profile and for many team collecting aggregating and processing all this data is really hard you you kind of have to build data pipelines you have to have a good understanding of a lot of data
(09:19) engineering tools and techniques you might have to build a data platform either in-house or use a third party tool to do it and for many team including small team and startups and Scrappy teams of Builders you can't most of the time you cannot really dedicate a a dedicated data team to work on this stuff if you're a big team with with big Enterprise perhaps you can do that you can build a lot of In-House tools and and all these data pipelines uh but if you're a small team you're busy enough withes and building your own core
(09:52) product so data fragmentation is a big problem and the second is the lack of web through native tools that that you can use existing tools like Mi panel or HubSpot or the tools that you're used to in web 2 a lot of them work fine for let's say the first half of the users Journey the things that users do on the web on the UI but most of the time they cannot see things happening on chain or on the decentralized web and so what happens is when you end up using these tools these existing tools you can only see half of
(10:25) the user journey and you cannot follow the conversions and the the final steps of of the the user so as a result teams cannot really use existing tools effectively and and most of the time these tools ignore the rich data that's onchain data like your handshake profiles onchain names addresses onchain activity all of this is has a wealth of data it's a gold mine of user insights because it's as if you can see everybody's browser history you can see what they're doing what platforms they're using what apps they're using
(11:01) even if they haven't used your app specifically and so that's a wealth of insights for the product teams for marketing teams uh but we haven't really been able to tap into that as effectively as of as of today I think so there are a lot of data obstacles faced by teams building in web3 um ranging from user segmentation and we saw earlier that not all users are created equal but how do we differentiate between the high value users the high and users from the farmers and and what drove the users to to to your project
(11:37) what's your profile are they a Trader are they collector what are they interested in then there's the this Obstacle of onchain attribution where do our users come from when somebody creates let's say a handshake name or make a transaction on your on your daap where did that come from did they first learn about us on Twitter did they learn learn about us from another dab perhaps project you kind of need end to endend attribution from offchain to onchain and a lot of tools don't really support that
(12:10) and without this knowledge you can't really know if things are which which campaigns or which growth initiatives are working what's my Roi what's my acquisition costs it's impossible to know that if you don't have n to1 attribution then it's the question of data engineering a lot of us are not expert data Engineers so analyst and a lot of Team struggle with setting up analytics you might need to Learn Python you might need to learn some SQL and you might need to get help from from your
(12:40) engineers and who who I imagine is already busy with like a core product and feature stuff so a lot of obstacles um to get all the metrics that that you need that I think makes makes product analytics and and user acquisition really really hard in in we free so how can we solve this I mean these are two big challenges which I think is not going away anytime soon um but I think there are solutions in in the Horizon so I think Bas based on what we've seen um entity and attribution are really key ingredients for growth if you can
(13:16) understand and build up profiles about each user in web 3 and what they do to have a better idea of what their interest are uh it unlocks a lot of opportunities for growth if we can link uh crypto native state in data allet addresses with web to data it's I think it it creates a lot of a lot of useful data that we can we can we can work with so that's what I'm working on with formal formal makes it easy to digest web three data we help you collect data from all kinds of sources including blockchains and and daps and other
(13:53) sources to help you understand who your users are where they come from and what they do on your on your D um and you don't have to worry about building your own data pipelines if have data platforms you can just plug it in and and get the data that you need so I'd like to now do a quick demo um show you some screens of what formal looks like um the way you get started is you just install like a small SDK it's a small code snippet on your website or on your dap once you do that and we support multiple platform such as just the
(14:24) browser we support react and nextjs as well and all you do is copy paste this this code snippet and you'll start collecting data this is a a page our overview page where you can see a quick summary of all your basic metrics things like the number of visitors um the number of wallets number of transactions and you can filter based on time like the last seven days and so on so you can see a quick summary of your key growth metrics like existing sort of web to analytics tools we can we allow you to see where uses are coming from what
(15:01) devices they're using any like refer and UTM analytics is available for marketing teams we also give you insight into what types of wallets people use on your on your project on your app on your site as well as as well as what chains people are on and then next we can ALS we also show you like a real-time activity feed of what people are doing on on your app and so this is like a real time event stream of of everything that users are doing and we have many different activity types things like page views
(15:36) when users connect or disconnect wallet when you just sign a message or sign a transaction and many more so you can uh so you can understand like key events in your users's journey and identify if there are any drop off points or retention points that that you should pay attention to so this gives you a summary what's of what's happening in real time uh you can also see the list of users and unique wallets and also other onchain identities that that visit your dap or website so each of these are
(16:09) a user who has visited my my dab my project and also some basic information such as is it a new a new user is it a returning user what's their net worth and other details and we can click on any of these to get a deeper view about this user this is a wallet profile page this shows you information about this user some basic information such as when did they first uh when we when did we first see this this user on our project when they last visited the project and their net worth and other information their wallet we can also see if the user
(16:45) has used any other like apps and for example let me just refresh here if they use any other daps in the space which could be interesting if you're building a similar project as well as their their token balances and the goal of this is to just share more information about this user so you can decide if they're a the the type of user that you're looking for you can also see a real- time activity feed of of this user everything this user has done on your project and you can click on any of these to get
(17:17) more details such as if they have if they're using a specific device what browser they're using to give you as much information as as as you'd like about this user and their experience on on your dab so this is what we have and formal is a web three data platform that helps you understand who your users are and what they do on your project so let me come back to my slides so the tool that I'm building hand and we're building handles the data so that you can focus on building that you don't
(17:50) have to worry about setting up data pipelines and all these analytics things that isn't really what you're working on anyway we focus on the data so that you can focus on building we give you a resilient infrastructure we'll bu build on a modern data engineering stack we spend a lot of time researching how to build a proper data platform designed for web 3 so that you don't have to and we collect data from both web 2 and web3 and and unify it as much as we can um there are a lot of challenges here and
(18:19) we are still in the early stages of this what we're building so we we're happy to get feedback on on what kind of data that people are interested in so we can Surface it for for for builders in this space and by using this tool you don't really have to write SQL yourself you can just plug in our SDK and and start getting the data that you need so once you have this data what what can you do well you can track your key growth metrics see if things are working and which things are working and where your
(18:49) users come from you can see what users are doing in real time you can understand your funnel you can see what your top channels are what are your top growth drivers instead of just guessing here you have the data that you need to to take action and and make decisions based on real data so yeah that's that's all I like to I hope we can light up the Dark Forest of web 3 with with more data and happy to help with with this with formal and and this tool that that that I'm building thank you that's that's that's
(19:21) allk you for your time any questions thank you thank you y taking a look here looks like we have some appreciation for the tool or some admiration maybe but um don't know that I see is it possible to build with an API it's one of the questions we have here yeah well I think uh let me read that as can can you query the data directly so we do have a platform API that's that's in the road map so you can query the data directly if you need to maybe if you have your own in-house data as well that you you'd like to
(19:59) combin okay okay possible with a social media app yes so on on the wallet profile Pages for example it's not really shown in the demo but we are linking onchain identities with offchain identities so for example if there's a linked Twitter or or other social media profile to the wallet uh we will be able to show it and you can you can contact the user and similarly like we're also looking at hns doid like each ID has some some optional like Social Links that you can add you can attach to the profile and and that's one of the data
(20:36) sources that we can use to link offchain and onchain thank you I don't know if if we have a followup to that from St on but we are hsid is pretty much a portal to a wallet right am my misunderstanding that so so it seems to be like a natural fit for what you're what you're doing here yeah absolutely okay all right fantastic did we get your contact details in the chat or do you mind throwing them in there for us we have website which is great but also specific for you yep I I'll add it in the chat
(21:11) all right awesome yes well thank thank you thank you very much with that the also you timed it you timed it perfectly something tells me it wasn't your first time doing this your identity online should be yours unshakable Untamed censorship resistant with dox you are [Music] Limitless no middlemen no restrictions just you dox your identity your rules this event wouldn't be possible without our amazing sponsors our bronze sponsors dweb Foundation dox our community sponsors handshake Australia name base DEC centralizers hns
(22:10) Market thank you for your support in building a decentralized future