What we've been up to July/Aug 25

Hello friends of Open Format,

Back in January of this year I remember speaking to Andy and Bruce and wishing for some good problems. I couldn’t wait for the point where we could have some good problems to solve.

What I meant by this was: our technology straining (and sometimes altogether breaking) because enormous communities - and I mean 300k+ active user enormous - are pushing us to our limits and forcing us to think about architecture in new ways - good problem.

I mean the fact that we have a community with over 10 community managers wanting to onboard and we don’t yet have a teams page in the dashboard - good problem.

Or the fact that an agency just picked up our product and connected 8 different communities to operate all within our platform, and we don’t yet have a pricing structure for that - good problem.

These are just some of the challenges we’ve been working through these past couple of months and I couldn’t be more grateful for them because they mean one thing - traction.

Right, let’s get to it.

TL;DR

💛 Our customers – We’re onboarding new (huge!!) customers and the feedback and ideas we’re getting back is just incredible.

🚀 Product leaps – Streamlined integrations, multi-community support, and role performance analytics are all now live. Coming soon: our assistant, Aartoo directly in Discord + a live Teams section in the admin panel.

🔒 Privacy-first AI – We’re designing our architecture to store the minimum possible data while still delivering powerful insights – giving communities control without compromise.

🧠 Community Brain online – Memories, context, real time data - we have lots to share on this below.

🎨 Aartoo – We’ve launched aartoo - the assistant our customers chat with and the interface to our whole system. Aartoo is starting to feel like the assistant we’ve always imagined.

🌍 Growth in motion – Aartoo.com launched, Turbo Kudos Season 2, our socials get a revamp, sales collateral and playbooks, and talks from myself & Dan to new audiences.

💬 User love – “Aartoo is more effective than Gemini and ChatGPT for developing engagement plans, because it has the context and understanding of our community. This makes its suggestions more relevant and tailored to our community’s needs” – Beth, CM, Amplify

🤖 Product Update: Aartoo takes shape

With Aartoo, the AI sidekick for community growth, now front-and-centre, we’ve been doubling down on features that position community managers to drive decisions with data

• Streamlined Integrations – Connect Discord or Telegram in just a few clicks. Faster setup, faster insights, less manual work, and Aartoo immediately starts learning from conversations. Generate reports, recommendations, campaign ideas, and more with a quick prompt.

• Multi-community Support – Some of our users run not just one community, but several. Until now, managing them all meant creating awkward workarounds. With multi-community support, managers can now run everything from a single dashboard with an easy ‘switch community’ function. There is a big opportunity here and we’re just at the start of it.

• Role Performance Analytics (Beta) – Communities invest in community managers and/or moderators but often lack ways to measure performance. Now you can view moderator performance straight in our dashboard - everything from time to respond by role to overall sentiment of responses. As one moderator commented to their community manager when they were told about the fact that this was now live.. “oh...s**t we’re on a leaderboard now”

• Coming Soon: Aartoo in Discord – We know managers don’t want to leave Discord to use a separate tool. We’re building a direct Discord interface so Aartoo can live where communities already are. They’ll have a DM with Aartoo in Discord (with other integrations coming soon) and they will be able to ask questions, get actionable data and recommendations straight in Discord.

• Coming Soon: Teams – For larger organisations, Teams functionality will bring custom permissions, letting different departments or contributors access insights securely.

*In terms of the creation of Aartoo - the name, the cycloptopus, the brand - I am writing the lore of aartoo right now (now there’s a sentence I never thought I would say) and will share more on this soon.

🔒 Tech & Architecture: Privacy-first foundations

Most AI solutions optimise for performance at the expense of user data, hoarding vast amounts of information with little transparency.

From day one, we’ve taken a different approach. This month we’ve been strengthening our architecture so that minimal data is stored, models are selected with privacy in mind, and control sits with users. Communities want insights without giving up ownership and we’re committed to building infrastructure that makes that possible.

Our approach puts users in control of their data while still benefiting from AI-powered community insights. This is core to our values and George, our privacy lead, is doing a fantastic job of holding us all to account when it comes to critical decisions that impact this.

🧠 Assistant Update: The Community Brain comes online

Dan and Izzy have been hard at work optimising the four key parts of our Community Brain.

We now have:

• Over 50 real-time Discord analytics now available

• Access to a deep knowledge based on the best and worst campaigns across web3, distilled from literally days and weeks of research and curation

• Optimisations that make the system faster, smarter, and more useful in real-time

The feedback has been great:

“This works like a charm, absolutely love what you guys did here and it's fast too.”

Most communities don’t lack activity, they lack clarity. By combining real-time analytics with a shared knowledge base, the Community Brain gives managers context they’ve never had before – what’s happening right now, and how to act on it.

🎨 UX + Aartoo

• A full brand identity has been created for Aartoo, complete with brand book and visual guide for internal use, partners, and press.

• Onboarding has been redesigned and deployed, making it easier for new users to experience value quickly.

• Aartoo is now fully integrated into the dashboard, bringing all insights together under one clear interface.

• Work is underway on a vision prototype for what Aartoo will become next – an assistant that evolves from reporting to true proactive coordination.

🌍 Growth & Community

• As of this morning (!!) we’ve hired a Head of Sales to come in full time. I feel like it was serendipitous us being connected to this individual based on their experience and background and I cannot wait for them to get started - Tuesday next week!

• Turbo Kudos Season 2 kicked off with our tech powering new ways to reward contribution - this is a really significant experiment because it lets us compare the volume of meaningful contributions both pre and post aartoo.. As a part of this we have also launched a Turbo Day NFT collection!

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

• As I write this, Dan is speaking at AI Builders in London. It is awesome to see our AI pod leader on stage in front of hundreds of people talking about our approach to AI - yes Dan!!

  
  

  

  
  

• On Wednesday I spoke at Loop, the Global Community Summit infront of 300 people. My talk was about the future of participation economies and the shift from engagement metrics to participation metrics - if anyone wants a listen, let me know.

And finally, our asks

We’re hiring a full stack developer. If you know anyone who might be suitable, please put them in touch!

Do you know of any web3 projects who could do with Aartoo as their assistant? Let me know.

Bruce and I are heading to TOKEN2049 Singapore in a couple of weeks - are you going? Do you know anyone going who would be good for us to meet up with - customers, investors, partners? Any side events you can help us get into? Please let us know.

With love and gratitude,

Sarah & the Open Format Team ✨