Taking brands onchain.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to spend more time writing, for three reasons:

1. To share my experiences as a crypto founder and hopefully inspire those on the cusp of building in web3

2. To shape conversation around why going onchain will be a game-changer for brands

3. Finally, to connect with others who share similar values, skillsets, and backgrounds as me

This first post will be a short introductory post, where I’ll touch on my background, journey, and why I’m excited for the future of the onchain economy.

Hi, I’m Catherine. I’m building DeForm, which is a one-stop shop for your team’s token marketing needs. We’ve worked with hundreds of brands including Coinbase, Forbes, and Farcaster to process millions of onchain marketing operations, from managing lead generation to loyalty-building initiatives. I’m co-founder and CEO by title, and my responsibilities today primarily involve: design, sales, investor relations, and party-planning.

Prior to DeForm, I did a few things:

• I was on the founding team of Jira Product Discovery, a new business line at Atlassian focused on transforming how product teams collaborate

• Founded non-profit Codeology to empower students in their career search

• Graduated from UC Berkeley with B.S. in Computer Science

My journey into crypto started in 2016 during the first ICO-craze when people were excited about Bitcoin, Litecoin, Antshares, decentralized Uber, Airbnb, and everything in between. I bought my first Bitcoin using a “makeshift L2,” aka my now fiancé, using internship money but didn’t think too much of it beyond the speculation. My natural interest had always been between the lines of consumer products, B2B tooling, and art.

You can probably guess, when NFT summer & DAO fall hit in 2021, I went all in.

First, I began working on a generative NFT project based on anime and ninjas, and this opened my eyes to the future of creativity, digital ownership, and royalties. We were one cycle too early to the Solana ecosystem, which had extremely limited tooling and distribution at the time. While the project never fully took off, it was still a great onramp to art, culture, and crypto.

A few weeks later, I became involved with CityDAO, an organization that purchased a 40-acre land in Wyoming using NFT funds. It was amazing to me how quickly you can crowdfund millions of dollars online and assemble an internet workforce of lawyers, engineers, designers, and marketers via shared mission & equity. For me, DAOs were interesting not just as a potential paradigm shift in ways of working, but also because they highlighted the underlying infrastructure-level innovation that was happening around digital identity and finance.

I knew I needed to build something in this space. That’s why, in 2022, I decided with my co-founder, Kei Yoshikoshi, to start a web3 company focused on community tooling for onchain organizations.

Unfortunately, not long after we incorporated, the Russian-Ukraine war started, Luna crashed, FTX happened, and we were faced with our first crypto winter as builders. We also quickly learned that DAOs without sustainable revenue were challenging to work with due to missing decision-making infrastructure & leadership. Throughout 2022, we iterated through numerous ideas and refined our conviction for how exactly web3 will get meaningfully commercialized and widely adopted. Many long nights later, I came out of the cave more optimistic than ever.

Throughout crypto winter, we focused relentlessly on two things: community and customers.

• My team — Despite market conditions, my co-founder and teammates made every day SUPER exciting. There was always something big happening weekly, from attending hackathons, releasing new features, closing partnerships, to launching new customer use cases. This made my work extremely meaningful.

• The Pudgy Penguin community — Pudgy Penguins was my gateway into the world of web3 brands. I started paying attention to them in the fall of 2023 when I came across their content on TikTok and Twitter Spaces. Luca and the team's vision and execution around onchain IP licensing and retail expansion blew me away, and I immediately decided I wanted to be a part of this movement. I quickly connected with community organizers worldwide—shoutout to the ladies from Pudgy Korea, Malaysia, and Puerto Rico for the warm welcome to the International Huddle! Now, I'm helping establish Pudgy Penguin's roots in San Francisco. At the DeForm office, we've hosted numerous community events and brought together legendary traders, bankers, and builders who rally around the present and future of what these cute digital penguin pictures could one day become.

• The SF crypto community — It was slightly funny to me that all the SF builders didn’t know of each other’s existence in SF or would choose to meet IRL at a conference. So when Farcaster Frames launched, we worked with our investors and the Base team to run a 1-day hackathon. During this experience, I experienced one of the most intense concentrations of builder energy, radiated by those building the internet of tomorrow. Surrounding myself with these builders whom I consider friends fuel my energy every day.

• Solving a meaningful problem by monetizing pre-product — Contrary a lot of advice we received, which encouraged us to give our product away for free and prioritize building brand equity during the bear market, our team was constantly finding ways to monetize pre-product and pre-feature stages (using pure mockups) to validate our product direction. We aimed to ensure we were building something useful even during the bear market, so we could enter the bull market with an extremely valuable offering.

• Working and growing with the right customers — To build mindshare, we heavily prioritized working with brands that have a strong, existing presence and demonstrate long-term potential for success. An investor once told me that during a bear market, you're betting on your customers' growth as much as they are on your ability to continue servicing them. We've had the pleasure of working with some of the top brands in web3 who are paving the way for web3’s future.

• Providing exceptional customer service — That said, we didn't just stop after securing these household names. We're actively engaged in Slack and Telegram DMs with nearly all our customers, ensuring we're available when they need us. We've tackled UX issues together, developed custom workarounds, and collaborated on entirely new concepts—ranging from incremental improvements to transformative 10x changes.

In hindsight, crypto winter was extremely sobering. During the bear market, distractions fade away. The market quiets down. In those moments of solitude, as peers pivot to the AI craze, customers shut down due to financial constraints, and friends share their burnout from crypto, you can’t help but frequently reassess why you actively choose to be here every day and how you can build a better future.

Going through the crypto winter of 2022 - 2023 forced me to develop independent conviction that’s rooted in raw customer needs, market realities, and technological limitations of today. What we’re hearing consistently now is that many brands are leaning into a digital assets as a 100x-er to their current digital marketing strategies, and here are their top 5 reasons:

1. Going onchain allows brands to unlock the creativity of the internet: going onchain turns brand equity into a reusable lego block that can be built upon by anyone in the world, whether they’re an artist, developer, or creator. This allows brands to leverage the power of the global community to create utilities and perks at scale, therefore accelerating their growth and impact worldwide.

2. Smart contracts enable new revenue streams via royalties between businesses and creators, on an international level: a shared internet currency and the ability to program money will enable international creators and businesses to engage in royalty sharing and co-marketing more easily, reducing the logistical and trust issues associated with traditional revenue-sharing partnerships.

3. Blockchain identity unlocks new ways of co-marketing and rewarding loyalty via digital assets: blockchain data access is permissionless, adhere to a shared standard, and contain a sea of information about a consumer’s social associations, taste, and investments. Brands can use this information to continuously airdrop digital assets as gifts to loyal, engaged users within a community or even across communities as a form of co-marketing and shared user acquisition.

4. Community-owned digital tokens reduce a brand’s dependency on social media networks for distribution: by distributing ownership in the form of tokens to its community, brands can create and scale their own ecosystem of promoters across the entire internet and not just be limited to the confines and algorithms of specific social media platforms.

5. Crypto enables brands to quickly form and access global capital: having assets on onchain allows brands to immediately start tapping into the $1 trillion in liquidity that exists online today. This can enable quick capital formation (e.g. fundraising events) and allow community contributors enjoy asymmetric upside benefits of potential token value appreciation.

Throughout history, regardless of the era or technology, projects, brands, and creators have consistently sought meaningful connections with their audience: the 1900s were defined by offline advertising via radio and TV, while the 1970s introduced digital advertising with the advent of email; the early 2000s saw the rise of social media advertising alongside the adoption of web and mobile technology. Now, in the 2020s, with the emergence of digital assets, we are stepping into the age of onchain marketing.

Our mission at DeForm is to help every brand go onchain.

By guiding brands through the complexities of token distribution and growth initiatives, we help our customers and their communities connect more and own more, through the power of digital assets.

If this excites you, I’d love to chat! Follow me on Warpcast & Twitter.

Btw, we're hiring! If you're interested in joining our engineering team, send me an email at catherine (at) deform (dot) cc .

If you want, you can support our journey by minting this post into an NFT. Holders will be able to shape what I write about in future posts!