10 Lessons Learned Doing ICOs

As a blockchain entrepreneur, ICO platform coder, ICO advisor (and advisee), 2017 has been quite the year. In 2016, we launched our platform — at that time, aimed at enterprises to put their assets on the blockchain — and today, our same base ecosystem of tools serve thousands of mostly entrepreneurs, not large enterprises, from around the world doing their token sales, putting their cryptocurrencies on marketplaces (like ours), and, most recently, allowing their customers to buy their digital/physical products using their custom cryptocurrencies via our embeddable web wallet Stoken beta release. You might find it shocking, but I actually could have made the previous sentence longer.

We have made the creation of ICOs and coin economies accessible to thousands, and hope to do this for millions one day, as the world shifts in its thinking regarding What is money, really?. From legal contract generators for assets backed by blockchain tokens, to blockchain-based legal agreement file storage, to the ICO MKR, to a simple IDE for coding up custom smart contracts…. The list goes on: mobile app and API (public release of V1 of the API, which the mobile app uses, coming soon!). I’m very proud of the work our amazing team has done. The accessibility we have brought to market has drawn some criticism due to the fact that scammers can now more easily scam people with coin offerings. While at the same time, local communities are using our tools to equity-finance infrastructure projects, revolutionize the entertainment industry, and peer-to-peer lend in productive manners. Ying yang, or whatnot. Cash is great until it’s used to pay for human trafficking or illegal firearms sales, kind of thing.

We have had some really cool projects launch/prepare-to-launch using our tools. Part of the growth in adoption is driven by the fact that we just listen to what our users want and rapidly build products purely based off of that. Purely. We don’t do services. Which some find annoying, but we always say: if you need something custom, why don’t we make our products more customizable to fit requesters’ needs and bring value to a much wider audience in the future? The future of money (Money 3.0?) is trying to make its way to the present, and we’re just trying to be useful, scalable disciples.

In conversing with ICO creators, being solicited by tons of blockchain “marketing” professionals due to our upcoming ICO, and advising the largest successful ICO in Korea (BosCoin) to raise over $15m a few months ago, as well as being involved in partnerships with successful ICO’d firms like TaaS, (and to make this sentence really long) contributing to a few of ICOs myself (Cosmos, Storj, IOTA to name a few), I thought I would share some of the things I’ve learned.

1. Slack

Community building is important when doing an ICO. The thing that bothers me is that many successful ICOs engage with their users on Slack leading up to the ICO, and commonly dump Slack after they raise a few million bucks. And sometimes for good reason… some of the people who enter after the project is a success can really turn what used to a productive forum into a dump. We won’t be doing this. In fact, we plan to make our Slack invite-only once we start feeling this. Of the about 700 Slack members we have now, pre-ICO, conversations are productive. However, we’ve been doing Slack and engaging with our community before the letters I, C, and O were on our minds. One thing, though, is that: scammers create bots and create fake admin accounts trying to prey on users to send “pre-ICO” or secondary ICO offers to new slack members via DM and other means. These scammers have been making millions in the past months doing this across blockchain-centric slack channels. But turning off bots for non-admins, disabling @channel of non-admins, and just staying pro-active can overcome some of this. Once it gets to a certain level though, gotta use Slack as it was originally intended: closed group. It’s not a Facebook group.

2. Social Media

We use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn primarily. We should use Medium and HackerNews more often. On Facebook and Twitter, we like to post the day-to-day. At least that’s how we use those. We create a lot of products all the time and one of the big learnings for me, at least (and this might be different from others, or most, that don’t have products) is I had to learn to create “hype” around things we were working on, instead of things we’ve already done. As one journalist told me, especially when it comes to blockchain, there is a lot of “looking over the horizon” and not at what we have now, even if that’s what we were expecting to find or will lead to what’s over the horizon.

3. Board of Advisors

If you’re Elon Musk or Satoshi Nakamoto, you don’t really need to worry about your board of advisors… But actually, that’s not true at all. Not only does a reputable assembly of board members to advise you bring legitimacy to your project, I find that having a diverse group across many sectors brings, though sometimes frustrating and time-consuming, so much intangible value. We have a guy from Samsung on our board who said some painful but true stuff…We have a hedge funder who has helped us understand a market that would totally love our current tools if presented the right way. We have the corporate IBM blockchainer who can tell us all the stuff that the bureaucrats just miss. Then, there’s the legal professionals who take a lot of time nitpicking at everything, but if you get the right ones… all set. But have these people. And develop protocols to get them together.

4. ICO Countdown sites

There are about 5 major ICO countdown websites, including ICOCountdown.com (we are usually #1 there), ICO Tracker, Smith & Crown, among others. Most of them have offerings whereby you can advertise, but this can be costly. However, with a strong whitepaper, you can usually get listed based on content. Many people who participate in ICOs find ICOs through these sites, so getting listed, however you do that, is a must. Getting reviewed, even better. Having videos, decks, a thriving slack community, etc are all things these sites consider when making determinations. They also consider what is listed as number 3.

5. BitcoinTalk

I helped BosCoin with this one. It’s certainly not for everyone. YOur /r/bitcoin reddit group and this group, while not the same, are related. It’s the place where every new thing is a scam until proven otherwise… and even then still a scam. As Proof, we haven’t been as proactive as we should have been on Bitcointalk, but partially because we like to Bitcoindo, instead. However, we plan to change this. Bitcointalk logs how much time you spend on the site, as well as how much you contribute publicly, so before just hopping in and making posts, maybe a few months before get very active and engage with the community, build alliances, etc. One strong piece of advice would be to find an advocate within the Bitcointalk community to start a thread about your project and move from there. Also, they have an interesting markup for signatures… you might want to hire someone from bitcointalk to make one for your team, as that’s one of the little things that matters there. Many of your medium-sized investors dwell here.

6. People

Usually, when you do an ICO, you’ll need to increase the size of your team: specifically in the marketing and community engagement divisions. Then, there’s the the consultants who specialize in offering ICO marketing services. Necessary evil. Select based on the recommendation of previous ICOs. All of them will say they helped TenX and Bancor. Now, while Tendermint did their $20m+ raise in about 30 minutes without much advertising or PR, they were very close with the whales. Regarding people, identifying these whales, or other large investors, to lead investments is one of the most important areas of an ICO. Typically, your everyday investor who puts in a few thousand bucks of their life savings, wants to see other, richer folks have invested. Getting and focusing on these people, who can attract the other people (often they are the same), is key. We like to take the whales to pool parties when they visit. Regarding hiring, we just brought on an ex-Morgan Stanley professional who has raised and managed funds in the half-billion dollar range. Money is cool.

7. Paid Advertising

They say: the more places people see you there better. So, you have to advertise on Facebook, on CoinMarketCap (of course… about $2,000/day to be on the top), Etherscan, Google, everywhere… Sponsoring conferences. Everywhere. Conferences have probably been the most productive for us. Conferences, conference, conferences. Don’t have a large ad budget? Google and Facebook uber-targeting. Track your links to keep optimizing that ad spend. But the principle is make sure the same people are seeing your value proposition in different places. Also, advertising lightly months before and then gaining more momentum within weeks is the way to go. Whether this is true or not, getting people, at least familiar with your offering early, helps results. This is why so many announce a date and then push back about a month. Hey, Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor could have boxed a month ago and got the thing over with. They were fit to do so. Yet, we anticipate the end of August and will pay whatever to see that fight last minute on Pay-Per-View. Furthermore, our advisors over at TaaS basically put it this way: take the money you get from the presale and put a bunch towards advertising. Don’t even think. Just advertise, as we have often heard from successful ICO campaigns. That’s not that intuitive to me, but I just try to learn from the best and adapt.

8. PR

We have talked to several PR agencies. There are essentially 3 kinds. Ones you are referred to by trusted parties, ones that you find by searching, and ones that find you. The first group is the best and often the most expensive. Usually, you can get your reference to negotiate a discount, though. Never pay the listing price. For the other two categories, there’s an easy way to pick the best ones: how many sites have written about the? How is their own PR for their firm? Nonexistant? Hey, some people trust people with bad haircuts to cut their hair. One biggy: fintech PR is not same as blockchain PR. In fact, they are very different. Regarding fintech PR through, it is better to reach the fintech crowd. The blockchain crowd will be connected via some of the previously mentioned lessons/routes. Another big one: don’t buy articles with CoinIdol and the like. Yup: wasted $300 on that… Good PR, third party impartial-ish verification of what you’re doing, is a driving factor by many when it comes down putting in $100 or $1,000 into your ICO. How to get good PR? W’e’re still working on it, but hire journalists that work in the fintech space as consultants. Do what they say. Then, just do newsworthy stuff. Don’t think about what your competitors are doing for press… because that’s old news… and that’s not press-worthy. Do something funky and new.

9. Asia

We’re based in Korea. Korea is much different from Japan is much different from China is much different from Singapore. many people like to focus on China because of the historically large amounts of crypto trading volume that happened there. We’re getting our whitepaper translated to Mandarin, as most probably should. For China you need a consultant in China to do the work, as well as fintech PR firm in China if you’re serious. More importantly, if you’re not Chinese, a Chinese visa because you should visit a lot. Doing pitch competitions in China helps. The connections from the competitions will get you invaluable meetings, talks opportunities, etc. Make sure you have Wechat. If you’re not using Wechat, you’re not doing China. Regarding Korea, get as much hype everywhere else, and the momentum will follow along in Korea. It won’t start here, but when there is smoke in Seoul, there is immediately fire. They call it the fast-follow. For Singapore, usually you’re not allowed to solicit ICO info, plus it’s tiny. Japan is all about getting the whales on board. Wouldn’t focus too much on much else there. India: I’m still learning and know nothing. There is a lot of potential there. All in all, Asia is where it’s happening, but so is Europe and North America… and in that order.

10. Partnerships

When I was working on the BosCoin ICO, they partnered with Cosmos and did awesome cross-promotion. Finding ICOs with similar visions but different markets can be a great way to leverage both parties’ communities and do awesome things. Furthermore, partnering with firms that had previously successful ICOs, providing them with your coin in exchange for recommendations/ feedback is certainly good We’re working that now. Landing big partnerships with household names like Visa, etc also helps in the trust-factor department for people considering participating in your ICO. Monaco did a great job making people think they were partnered with Visa. These kinds of partnerships also help you a lot with #8. However, there are lot of ways to do bad partnerships. Usually you will know if it could work out within the first 15 minutes of an initial phone call if it’s new. But it’s better to go with groups in your primary or secondary networks. This is why having the right people as described in #6 is so important.

These are the 10 top things/areas I’ve grown my understanding in so far going down the somewhat beaten path of ICOs/token sales. I obviously have much more to learn and will share those learnings going forward. In upcoming posts, I will write about the process of getting listing in exchanges, as we work to do this and many of our users do the same. All in all, as with anything, the main thing I’ve learned from doing ICOs and other initiatives: Love what you do and the people you do it with. Eventually, you’ll do well, because by doing that, you’ve already really reached the goal.

By: Mike De’Shazer, FinTech Exec & Coder

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-lessons-learned-doing-icos-mike-de-shazer