FinTab ICO as it was
On July 1, we met in the office, discussed all the conditions and began to develop the crypto-currency accounting service and prepare for the ICO: WhitePaper, Bitcointalk topic, advertising and advisers, a month later we earned our first million — everything is nice and easy. In fact, everything was completely different, and we have not earned our million yet.
We’re within touching distance of listing on the exchanges and replacement of the beta-version with an improved one, so we decided to show FinTab ICO from the inside.
Beginning
In June Mikhail (the CEO and the inspirer of the project) came up with the idea of making a service, when he got a problem of accounting for crypto-currency. The existing services at the time did not meet his interests and eventually he was keeping a record of his portfolio in Google sheets.
The rate was automatically loaded from https://coinmarketcap.com/ and everything seemed to work, but the script constantly froze, completely manual input of transactions gave a lot of hassle, and it was easy to make a mistake that made all statistics incorrect. Realizing that it is impossible to work with the tables, Michael decided to create a system for personal accounting. This idea was actively supported by Grigory (COO) — at that time they have been developing the Internet agency. And Nikolay (CTO) was invited as the lead programmer.
Our purpose was not to create a service for public use, and an ICO was an abstract concept. We just wanted the service for ourselves. But the next 3 weeks changed everything:
- We met experienced traders and realized that the problem of accounting for crypto-currency was crucial not just for us.
- We introduced our idea in Golos and finally made sure that people are interested. Thus, in just two weeks, we collected 249 applications for alpha-testing.
It’s funny, but then we thought that we would do ICO only in a year :)
3. We had a clear plan: alpha-testing, beta-version, replacement of beta with the improved version, the beginning of monetization and scaling. We lacked only investment. At the end of the third week we decided to take part in the “race” of the ICO projects.
Pre-ICO preparation
From that moment, we began to rediscover the world.
In classical Internet marketing, everything is relatively simple and straightforward: you sell something specific, this has a shell (even if not physical, but at least you can see it), each product or service has a certain value, it’s quite predictable demand and price.
We need to sell a token. But what is this and why is it needed? We just want to make a service and sell a subscription (a classic SaaS product). We were analyzing the other projects: why is no one selling their own product? At the same time, they collected crazy money, even for the sand quarries ICO (wtf ?!) or for some abstract concepts such as the next most promising blockchain.
We started selling something that we did not fully understand. At that time, there was not so many guides and information on how to conduct the ICO. There was a couple of interesting chats like “How we conduct the ICO”. We called ours in a similar way, to hype slightly, but we are planning to rename it. It describes the step-by-step advancement of the ICO, but not all of these projects ended well, and in retrospect we understand the authors did not write about the most important moments (perhaps they did not know how).
We did not know who to turn to for advice, we found the guys who were in on this, asked them, but received an answer that their help costs 1 ETH per hour. On this occasion, we want to convey that our consultation “How not to kill the project” will cost you only 3 ETH per hour, if you book it today :)
But there are really cool guys (only now we began to distinguish the first from the second and find the second), whose projects are superior to ours, who will gladly share their advice.
As much as we had to deal with the service development, we came to the conclusion that we need:
- WhitePaper
- Landing page
- Announcement on Bitcointalk
- Targeted traffic
As a result, on WhitePaper we made a short summary, where it should be:
1. An understandable description of your product:
— For whom.
— What problem solves.
— Competitiveness.
2. Why is it worth investing in your ICO, not any other? Or in other words — investor interests.
3. Information about tokens:
— The mechanism of tokens — why they are needed, how they will work.
— Reinforcement of tokens. Tokens without reinforcements are a Ponzi scheme.
— The number and value of tokens produced.
— Distribution of tokens.
4. What the collected funds are intended to.
5. Roadmap (not just a date, but a development plan, ICO is just a tool).
6. The team.
7. Specific sections for the project.
8. More graphs, tables, illustrations and diagrams.
We were working particularly hard on points 1 and 3 and, of course, 2.
The current version of WhitePaper is the result of many discoveries, rethinking, communication with interesting and intelligent people. The first version was completely different: we planned to make fixed payment for the service in tokens, investors interests were not worked out in any way. In the next version, we added dividends, but fortunately, we were sent to the right path on time and we abandoned this policy that would have taken the project down. As a result, literally a few weeks before the start of the pre-ICO, we gave up dividends and a fixed price of tokens in favor of burning tokens and a fixed price in USD (the service fee is still in tokens).
As for advertising and promotion — we are a living example of how to conduct the pre-ICO absolutely without investments in marketing. Okay, we spent $ 240 on advertising on Facebook, but not a single token was sold. We were able to generate organic, live traffic based exclusively on the work with the community, on our idea and the transition to the beta version. And advertising in the crypto-currency world is a huge expense. Multiply the cost of advertising in the real world by any number from 2 to 100 and you still get a figure less than the cost of advertising in the crypto world.
Pre-ICO
To work without external financing for a long time is a difficult task, and then we understood well that without the investment in marketing the ICO will not work well (It is possible with the pre-ICO but not with the ICO). For this reason, we decided to conduct the pre-ICO.
The preparation was crazy, especially on the start day. We needed to deploy a smart contract (which issued FNT). Previously, it was tested and audited. The personal account for fund-raising had to be transferred from the test mode to the work mode. The counter on the site, showing actual fees, was developed literally in the last minutes. At the same time, everything has been translated into English and instructions and posts about the start are being prepared.
The start was scheduled for 12:00 (UTC), at 11:59 we finished the work on the counter and at 12:00 updated the site and published the news about the launch.
An inexpressible feeling when we saw the first payment of 12 thousand dollars. The first reaction was the counter is not working correctly, but it turned out that someone carefully studied the instructions that we sent 30 minutes before the start and made a payment a minute before the official start :)
For the first couple of days we got a half of the Soft Cap. And in the end, for all pre-ICO we collected approximately $ 78,000.
ICO preparation
Initially, we slightly overestimated our capabilities: we planned to complete the pre-ICO on November 12, and the ICO start on December 1. Even working for 12 hours a day without days off, it was impossible to make it on time (during the peak weeks we have been working like this), it was impossible to prepare in that time. We believe that the ideal solution for everyone would be to postpone the start to the middle of February, but the community did not like this idea, since it was originally designated in WP on December 1, and as a compromise it was decided to move the date to December 14.
As a result, for a month we:
- Completely updated WhitePaper and site.
- Attended several conferences (the results did not meet our expectations).
- We worked out a plan for promotion.
- Placed on the various ICO-trackers.
- Get published in the media.
- Launched a lot of advertising channels.
- At the same time, we have kept on developing the service. We expanded the concept and thought out the FinTab ecosystem.
- We did not have time for opinion leaderships’ advertising.
And with the budget that we had, we were told that we would not even collect the Soft Cap.
Let’s look at the terms of Soft Cap and Hard Cap. If Soft Cap is “typically a lower limit, more like how much a team is aiming to implement the project”, then why should the owners have more money? Particularly encouraging are the projects that have Soft Cap, for example $ 1 million, and Hard Cap $ 21,000,000. Question: 1 million for the project, and the remaining 20 for the Bender theme park with blackjack? ;)
We abandoned these vacuous concepts, clearly distributing the degree of elaboration of our ecosystem depending on the collected means.
ICO
To understand the scope of the study, look at our mind map for the ICO:
We did not have time to implement everything, something was added in process but not reflected in the mind map. The results and brief conclusions:
- Referral systems — there were almost no good referees.
- CPA — almost 0.
- CPC and payment for leads — lots of leads, 0 sales.
- Bitcointalk is the best channel in our case.
- Youtube — ready to compete with Bitcointalk for efficiency.
- Telegram channels — the result is 0.
- Retargeting everywhere and everything — always worth it.
- Trackers — the effectiveness is almost the same for free and paid, but the cost is different. But they are needed.
- Ratings — work, worth paying more attention.
- Media — maybe we do not know how to use them, but in fact the result did not pay off directly. But nevertheless media coverage is required.
- Forums — in the free version you need too many work resources, which is quite expensive.
- Conferences — almost paid off. Most importantly, we learned that the funds are interested in integrating with our service. We will develop this direction.
- Contextual and targeted advertising — does not actually pay off, it works more to reach the audience.
- Banner advertising — does not pay.
- Social networks and content marketing — we did not bring it to a sufficient level.
- Sales through the stores — we don’t have a clear result.
In general, we can say that we entered in a “low season” — during this period all the crypto-currencies were actively growing in the market and almost no one wanted to invest in the ICO. Except for the first sales, where people bought tokens due to bonuses, the main sales of tokens fell on the second half of January. Other projects that conducted the ICO on the same dates confirmed this fact.
Weird moments
We present you comic and not very funny questions that came to our mail:
— My wallet was stolen / I lost my private key, what should I do? Can you send me more token to another wallet?
— I specified the address of the exchange as an address where I want to receive the tokens, I can’t find the tokens in my wallet.
— Where are my tokens?
The question is from the person who formed, but did not pay for the order.
— I want to buy tokens for $8. Help.
We mentioned at least three times that we accept dollars and euros when buying for the amount of $ 10,000. Okay, practice shows that people don’t read the instructions. Then when placing and making an order. There generally only a few words on the whole screen “We accept dollars for payment with the amount of more than 10 000”.
— I paid for it, but I did not get any tokens.
Yes, if you did not provide the address. The problem was solved very simply: you need to specify the address to get the tokens, and they will come. It is more difficult to explain the situation to users who bought tokens for BTC, why they need to specify another wallet to receive our tokens.
— A sad story, when people sent ETH to the address of a smart contract.
Why? For each address we generated the separate wallet and only there it was necessary to send etherium. The contract was not designed to accept payments. And as it turned out later, we do not even have the ability to withdraw these payments from it. But there were so many accusations that we want to hold the money and won’t send tokens.
— And the main attraction: “Give me money so that I can buy your tokens.” Only a few times we happened to see such a proposal, but it’s the best :)
But nevertheless, most users responsibly approached the issue of buying tokens.
Entering the exchanges and life after an ICO
Life after an ICO is even more uncertain than conducting an ICO. Over time, more information will appear about this, but so far there is none. All that we see in other projects is the completed result of invisible work:
- We knew that it was difficult and expensive to get to the exchanges, but we did not think that much: half of the exchanges simply ignores, they have long waiting lists, many exchanges work only through intermediaries, and prices on the modest exchanges are from 3 BTC to 120 BTC! (plus percent) on the top exchanges.
- We learned about Market Making. This is very intimate thing in the crypto-currency world. Each ICO does that, but no one talks about it openly. And even fewer knows how to do it ;)
- How the trades occur on the exchange.
- Why projects really do lotteries and airdrops.
We had preliminary agreements with the exchanges and we planned that we would make a listing within 7–10 days at once on 3–5 exchanges with a small time interval. But the situation radically changed: most exchanges prices increased significantly, some are on hold (do not take projects until mid-March), while the rest have the long waiting lists, and the average size exchanges want to see the volume of trading before listing us.
As a result, we are currently trying to negotiate with 45 exchanges and 2 teams that help us in this. Within our budget, we will be able to choose only 1 large exchange and 1 small exchange besides EtherDelta.
A few figures about the ICO
Conclusion — what is next
We have not collected millions. And by the standards of the crypto-currency world we are a micro-project. But we collected enough money to develop our service and go for monetization.
To be or not to be: the product or the token this is the question
Above we talked only about the ICO. Developing the service deserves a separate article.
In an ideal world, people conduct the ICO to raise money for product development. And in fact, only 5% do so. Almost all projects have the following situation:
- They develop the project to create visibility and make it legal.
- WhitePaper says that the team takes 10% of the tokens, although in fact it is from 30 to 70%.
- The only interest is to sell a token, promoting it with by hook or by crook.
- Customized pumps, speculation and so on — manipulating the market in one way or another.
- Well, or the easiest option: collect money and adios.
In our case, from the very beginning (when we did not think about the ICO yet) we were aimed specifically at the development of the service. This remains among the top priorities now. With the development of our system, with an increase in its scale and monetization, the token gets organic growth.
But understanding the specifics of the crypto-currency world, we will not leave aside the token and its position in the market. We are already actively starting its promotion and we are planning to enter the promising exchanges and we are also interested in its growth.
Soon we will present you how the FinTab system will be developed after the ICO.
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