What's next after Alchemy...

I'm excited to be building DeForm 🚀

Last week, I stepped away from my role as Developer Advocate at Alchemy.

Today… I’m very excited to announce that I’m joining DeForm as Founding Product Engineer!

If you can’t already tell, I’m more bullish than ever on the future of web3 and its impact on the world.

At Alchemy, I worked on the foundations of blockchain infrastructure from a developer perspective and saw the beginnings of many powerful use cases being explored.

With DeForm now, I’m very excited to go deep and build on one of these use cases, with an exciting team at an early stage startup.

I know this career change may be surprising to some people. In this post, I’ll take a few moments to share my thoughts on why this opportunity is so exciting for me.

Crypto DevRel @

Alchemy

In the middle of 2021, after 6 years of professional software engineering, I started a YouTube channel and then got connected to Alchemy to try out a new career as a Developer Advocate.

The company had fewer than 30 people at the time, the vision to build blockchain infrastructure made a lot of sense, and everyone at the company was amazing. All the fuel was there, we just needed to light some matches by showing the world how awesome Alchemy is. It felt like a no-brainer to me. So I said hell yes, let’s do it.

I started out doing what I knew how to do — write code and make YouTube videos. That quickly ballooned into so much more. Hiring, contracting, building demo apps, traveling around the world, creating partnerships, fostering community, and on and on.

Fast forward to now, and it’s incredible to look at what we did in just 1.5 years:

• Grew the Alchemy team from 30 people → 100 people

• Increased the number of developers building on Alchemy by 10x

• Increased the number of subscribers to the Alchemy YouTube channel by 10x

• Launched Alchemy University from 0 to 75,000 students globally

• Supported the Alchemy Ambassadors and Guild Coordinators to scale community

• Supported tons of product launches, i.e. Goerli Faucet, NFT API, Spearmint, alchemy-sdk, and more

I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunity to work with this world-class team of people with godly levels of hustle. Without this team, it would not have been possible to launch these products and move these kinds of metrics.

So many people from the Alchemy team have made a deep impact on me, including but not limited to: Nikil, Elan, Jason, Andrew, Angelina, Alvaro, Dan, Cody, Brady, Isaac, Aniket, Ajay, Ramiro, Irene, Rodney, Alex, Alex, Lauren, Kurush, Rishub, Paul, Blake, Shelley, Bastien, Andrew, Kunal, Aaron and Vitto. I’m looking forward to building the web3 space with all of you as as an industry partner and alumnus!

Product Engineering @ DeForm

In October 2022, while on PTO at ETHBogota, the MintKudos team and I hacked on a fun little project called “DeFormed: decentralized google forms”.

This idea was something that the MintKudos co-founder, Catherine, had brought up, and I resonated a ton with it because of my experience with Road to Web3 and Alchemy University.

To help you understand the problem being solved here, consider job applications for Alchemy community members:

• As students complete Alchemy projects, they earn Proof of Knowledge NFTs.

• As a community leader and hiring manager, I want to give priority job application access to students and community leaders who have earned the most # of Proof of Knowledge NFTs, for roles like Alchemy Ambassador or Guild Coordinator.

• As community members start applying for these opportunities, how can I verify that their Proof of Knowledge NFTs are real and truly owned by them?

  • Ask them for a wallet address?

  • Check that wallet address’s NFT holdings?

  • Then ask them to sign a message proving that they actually own the wallet?

  • Check their Twitter account?

  • Check their Github?

  • Then repeat this process across 100s or 1000s of applications?

For each of these steps, you need to index, query, and sort through tons of blockchain data as well as connect to a myriad of social media APIs. And you also don’t really know if people own the accounts they’re self-reporting if you just ask for addresses and handles.

At scale, this problem of finding out who your users are and learning about their online reputation and behaviors quickly becomes nightmare, and it’s incredible how something so simple in concept is actually so hard to accomplish, especially when we add on-chain data into the mix.

That’s why the idea of a DeForm is so compelling. As the internet continues to mature, the number of digital communities and internet identities will increase exponentially. We need ways to sort through and verify all of the useful data in the ether.

I worked with my amazing ETHBogota hackathon team to spin up a prototype in 24 hours:

albert @thatguyintech

🎉 Introducing DeFormed - decentralized google forms 😁 Create surveys for your token-enabled community. 1. Login with email, social, eth wallet 2. Create form 3. Collect feedback 4. Analyze responses w/ tokens, NFTs, and on-chain activity Wanna try it? Comment and Sign up👇🏼

And hot diggity dang, this project resonated with a lot of people. The tweet thread launch got over 200,000 views in a day. Our hackathon judges immediately connected with us on telegram for next steps to trial the prototype. We received hundreds of early access requests on our waitlist within 48 hours.

And that’s how DeForm started. Six weeks later, the alpha version came out:

catherinechang.eth is in SF @unhappiimochii

🎉 We launched @deformapp last week! Here’s our story 🧵:

And right now, DeForm is entering its earliest inflection point. The company is early and has the potential to become a huge platform that bridges the web2 and web3 worlds. DeForm is similar to, yet also different from Alchemy, in that it’s also an infrastructure company, but instead of tools for developers, we’re building tools for marketers, community managers, product researchers, and protocol creators (basically everyone else).

Also, the team is amazing. I’ve watched the DeForm co-founders Catherine and Kei begin their journey from the very beginning. They’ve always had an intense focus on iterative, customer-first, well-designed product development, and they’ve assembled an early group of incredible talented engineers and designers who know how to work hard and play hard.

So all of this brings me to today.

My first day at DeForm!

I’m stoked to be transitioning from a developer relations engineer back into a product development role, exploring the next phase of DeForm and doing my part to build a new foundation for the web3 industry.

As founding product engineer at DeForm:

• I’ll be doing everything I can to build the best tools for fighting scams, acquiring users, and rewarding real community members.

• I’ll be shipping code and iterating on features to deliver better versions of DeForm to customers day after day.

• I’ll be building and executing DeForm’s GTM strategy to define our product’s presence in the industry.

And of course, I’m very excited to help grow the team, so please reach out and chat. I’d love to help you find as much joy in your web3 career as I have found :)