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Megaphone is a Community-Led Brand

Megaphone is a Community-Led Brand

Catherine Chang

Co-founder, COO

Announcements

Jan 6, 2025

I'm excited to announce that DeForm is now Megaphone! Don't worry, DeForm isn't going away, it's quite the opposite. We're expanding to Megaphone. In fact, this is just the beginning.

This article shares why the rebrand, where we're going, and the people behind this amazing milestone.

Why the rebrand?

DeForm began as a hackathon project, built to solve a specific challenge: helping creators collect verified wallet addresses to distribute NFTs to their communities. What started as a simple tool quickly evolved into something much bigger.

Over two years, we’ve uncovered critical market insights that reshaped our vision. First, digital assets are a powerful marketing tool. They empower brands to provide financial and creative ownership to their communities in a way no other medium can. Second, onchain marketing is on the brink of becoming a huge market. We believe digital assets will eventually rival—if not surpass—social media ads as a dominant marketing channel (I mean, just look at $TRUMP). You can read more about this vision in our manifesto.

The market need was clearly visible on a product-level too. We noticed that most of our customers were onchain marketers leveraging our platform to launch tokens, build excitement, and better understand their onchain communities. We leaned in to these product insights and expanded beyond forms, introducing a new product for brands to run a points and quests programs and features to enable token distribution. One year into building for onchain marketers, we achieved dramatic growth: 11x revenue growth from the prior year, over 7M wallets using our platform, and partnerships with leading onchain companies worldwide.

Despite this growth, one thing became clear: our brand hadn’t kept up with our evolution. Many people still thought of us as a forms product, even as we expanded into a comprehensive platform for onchain marketing teams. This gap signaled an opportunity. In conversations with our investor, Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures, he encouraged us to reimagine our visual identity to better reflect our mission: helping communities grow their onchain GDP.

Why Megaphone?

Converging on the Initial Concept

Our team loved “Megaphone” for three reasons:

  1. Strong synergy with our market and vision. Megaphones amplify voices, and this idea perfectly aligns with the goals of marketing. The imagery also lends itself to a unique web3 twist: enabling onchain brands to give their communities a stronger voice.

  2. Easy to remember. “Megaphone” is a tangible object that’s easy to visualize and recall. It also comes with an emoji, creating opportunities for people to rally around a universal online expression. Lastly, the swag potential is very high.

  3. Friendly to everyone. When we tested candidate names with customers, friends, and investors, “Megaphone” consistently elicited positive or neutral reactions. Other names were either too generic or shared strong association with former crypto projects that were deemed as rug pulls—a branding risk we wanted to avoid.

Giving Life to the Megaphone Brand

With our direction set, we began crafting the visual identity. One of the biggest lessons I learned during this process is that creative exercises can often branch out infinitely. Having clear principles to guide decision-making is crucial. For us, these were non-negotiable:

  • Double down on what’s already working. We wanted to preserve the playfulness, boldness, and vibrancy of our existing brand. Instead of overhauling the color palette, we retained the classic pink and yellow colors but slightly adjusted the saturation for a more polished, vibrant aesthetic.

  • Balance fun with trust. While our brand celebrates creativity, it also needs to represent reliability. Our customers include iconic brands like Forbes, Coinbase, OneFootball, and Sanrio, and we manage millions of user records tied to digital asset distribution. Earning and maintaining trust is critical.

  • Create something meme-able. We wanted a visual identity that could be instantly recognizable and easily shared with friends. It had to be fun, approachable, and simple enough for even a child to sketch, ensuring broad appeal and rapid adoption.

A Rebrand Doesn’t Just Take a Team—It Takes a Community

Normally, rebrands are done with specialized marketing firms or design agencies. We took a completely different approach—from concept to execution, our community played a central role in shaping Megaphone. Here’s how the community was involved:

Name Selection

Our investors, customers, and friends from the local SF crypto community were instrumental in brainstorming concepts and finalizing our brand’s new name. A few thank-you’s:

Design and website

Our ambitious timeline of six weeks, packed with holiday breaks, demanded an extraordinary effort from our S-tier design contributors. These incredible designers made it possible:

  • Our lead brand designer (she’s a dear friend & anon, sorry everyone): A Zuckerberg-favorited designer who has worked on all previous iterations of our brand identity, from MintKudos to DeForm, and now Megaphone. For this rebrand, she led everything from brand visuals to the website, meticulously incorporating our vision, product, and customer needs into her elegant craft. Her unique perspective—having seen our evolution from a simple NFT minting tool to a data collection product, and now an onchain marketing platform—ensured that the final design perfectly captured who we are today.

  • Antimo: A design legend on Farcaster and the creator of Neynar’s stunning website, Antimo was the perfect collaborator for our rebrand. We first connected in 2024 when he and Ted (not lasso) reached out to the DeForm support team about the Farcaster conference application form. When I later approached him about the rebrand website-development opportunity, he was immediately excited to jump in—having already been an active user of our product, Antimo deeply understood where we were trying to go. His thoughtful, proactive development approach brought our website to life super quickly and was sprinkled with fun Easter eggs that our team loved. Antimo was an all-around joy to collaborate with, and I’d absolutely work with him again. If you’re in need of some website and design help, reach out to him on Warpcast! Check out his portfolio.

  • Rodney: The animation genius who worked magic under tight deadlines. His animation for our rebrand video perfectly captured nostalgia and childlike wonder, achieving Pokémon evolution vibes while staying perfectly on-brand. Rodney and our team first met in 2022 when he created the animations for Alchemy’s viral Proof of Knowledge NFTs and worked with Albert to distribute them, which lit up crypto developer Twitter with beautiful, sapphire badges. Reach out to him via rodneymanabat (at) gmail (dot) com if you need a top notch animator!

Launch day amplification

The rebrand launch was amplified by our incredible partners at Base. David Tso, Jesse Pollak, Nick Prince, Daryl Xu (now co-founder of NPC Labs), Sarah Wolf and the entire Base team have been instrumental to our journey—from connecting us with customers to recommending our products and even helping close key hires!!!

Base played a crucial role during our 0 to 1 phase. We’re grateful to be building together with them even as we scale from 1 to 100.

Community memes and artwork

A highlight of the rebrand was the creativity it sparked within our community. From memes to artwork, the response to our new visual identity was overwhelming. Here are a few standout creations (special thanks to Derrick Cui and Abstract Hotdogs):

An Angrybird rendition of the Megaphone character, by Derrick

Can’t miss the waifu AI representation of Megaphone, by Derrick

A special 1 of 1 by the Abstract Hotdog team after using the Form module to power their whitelist process. The artwork symbolizes how Megaphone transforms raw submissions into actionable insights: “Collaboration with Megaphone has been of critical importance for us. Our WL Application Form has received close to 40k submissions and it would have been impossible to analyze them all. In this art piece, the human silhouettes that enter the Megaphone building (depicting the people who applied for the form) are transformed into HotDogs after their applications are evaluated. It emphasizes the usefulness of Megaphone during our applications and the success of its analysis.”

As a company that deeply values the power of community, we were thrilled to see the collective potential come to life. From customers shaping our product vision to designers flawlessly executing a six-week rebrand, we’re incredibly grateful to everyone who contributed to the co-creation of Megaphone.

Launch day

Launch day was a success, and we couldn’t be more excited to share our new identity. You can check out the rebrand announcement!

Our announcement received over 40,000 views, and we celebrated by connecting with the local SF crypto community at a Farcaster meetup organized by Geoff Golberg. To wrap up the day, we enjoyed a celebratory sushi dinner, reflecting on the hard work and collaboration that made the rebrand possible; this launch wasn’t just about unveiling a new identity—it was a celebration of our incredible community that made it all possible.

With that, we officially say: Hello world, DeForm is now Megaphone!

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© 2024 Contribution Labs, Inc

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Marketing tools for your

next token launch.

© 2024 Contribution Labs, Inc

Made in SF 🌁