How to Run an ICO Campaign for Free in 2018
You’re here because you want to launch an ICO in 2018, but you don’t have the upfront capital that people are quoting you to do it.
Some say $1M, some $500K.
What if I told you you could run a successful ICO for under $10,000? Or even for free?
The landscape is changing and more services are readily available that even the playing field than ever before. Below, I lay out some of the tactics we used to launch MAKE, a mobile app that pays users for going viral and sharing media on the apps they already use. Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly not easy, but it will be extremely rewarding in the long run.
A Better Way to Publicly Fund
ICOs are such an innovative tool on their own. They’re like crowdfunding on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, except your investors get something much more valuable than just a promise. You fund your business and pursue your dreams, and the more successful you are, the more your supporters profit. They don’t need to wait for an exit or another funding round. Everybody wins.
Launching an ICO is a lot like running a Kickstarter. Instead of a working prototype, you need a rock solid business plan that both uses blockchain and will scale. This makes the arena very competitive, but also makes creative ideas stand out much more than the overly technical ones.
As to whether or not you should launch right now — this article explains in detail why now is the perfect time to launch!
What You’ll Need
Looking back at all we did to bring the MAKE ICO to fruition, it all boils down to creating or sourcing these 8 core assets:
- Whitepaper
- Team & Advisors
- Website
- Social Channels & Telegram Group
- Video
- Bounty & Airdrop Program
- Listings
- Distribution and Smart Contract
It seems insignificant, but it takes a lot of time and effort to find the right partners, choose the right branding, and get it all done on a budget. Now I’ll walk you through how to do accomplish all of these tasks on a shoestring budget.
Whitepaper
The very first thing you need to start any business is an awesome idea. There is so much opportunity to get creative here. Blockchain is providing you a once-in-a-lifetime opening: an internet do-over. If you’re not inspired you can borrow heavily from existing SAAS businesses! You need to take advantage of this.
Your whitepaper is your company’s bible, outlining what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. It should answer all of the questions you foresee being asked; it should be bulletproof. That being said, it also needs to be as simple as a children’s picture book.
As it turns out, not a lot of people read whitepapers, but those who do tend to tear them apart. So how do you accomplish such a daunting feat? I’ve written an in-depth article on how to write your whitepaper to appeal to techies and investors alike that you can find here.
I’ve given examples and even outlined a fake company’s document (a blockchain Uber called RideShareCoin). This should save you a lot of time and stress over the next few weeks. Now get to work!
Website
I know the title says “for free,” but I think I’m still in the clear here because you could get away with using free hosting (I like x10Hosting) until you’ve pulled raised some funds. A domain name is usually an impulse buy at under $10, but if you’re really strapped for cash you could use a domain registered name for the time being — even a Wix site.
If you don’t know how to make a website, I’d suggest starting with a free website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly to get something out there. If you think you’re up to the challenge, hop on Youtube and learn how to make a Wordpress site. This will be the most versatile, cheapest, and produce the best results, long-term.
With that being said, you need to remember you are competing with teams who already have a lot of money to spend on their campaigns. I hate to say this again, but you need to be creative to come out on top. Make your site look beautiful — use high quality photos (pexels.com has amazing stock images), sharp graphics (Inkscape is a powerful, free vector design tool), and beautiful icons (Flaticon.com). Browse as many site designs as you can, narrow down the landing pages that make you stop in your tracks and emulate those. I like to browse through ranking sites like https://www.landingfolio.com/ to quickly pick up design trends.
Now, just like the whitepaper, your website needs to sell your idea quickly. For this reason, you need to pick the best 2 or 3 features of your app and stick them right up top:
“Get paid to take pictures of food!”
“Vote to lower your electricity cost!”
“A livestreaming platform with real rewards!”
Sure, these are like clickbait titles, but people use those for a reason: they work.
Emulate good product pages until you have a perfect pitch.
After that, make sure you include these details from your whitepaper:
- Token Sale Details (dates, volumes, discounts)
- Tokenomics
- FAQ
Finally, update your website constantly as your delivery improves. This is your elevator pitch and needs to be a lightning-fast sell. Take your time and make quality your top priority. You don’t need to be expensive, just look expensive.
Team & Advisors
Now you have a website. You look official and your project is public. Here is your first campaign challenge — you need to sell the project to other people.
Team
When building a team, always start with your network. Friends, friends of friends (this actually tends to be very effective), former colleagues, teachers, teammates, and family as a last resort. If you cant find anyone in your immediate network — post the opportunity where it will be seen: social media, Angellist, Reddit, LinkedIn, or even Craigslist. Once you have one or two people willing to devote some time to your dream, you’re in. I’d recommend finding existing crypto enthusiasts in Telegram groups, on Reddit, or through ICOBench.
Approach people with your product pitch and always include where you see them fitting in. Giving someone a suggestion or few options helps them make choices quicker and more easily.
Advisors
Solid projects (in the eyes of investors) have a large group of successful and recognized advisors. There is no magic number but 5 dynamite mentors should be the minimum. The best approach to finding these people is to jump on ICOBench’s People List, find and contact people who might have a large impact on your project.
When interviewing these experts, you need to look for things that will help you long term. Ask them questions about what they are willing to provide — Can you help us run our bounty campaign? Can you connect us to investors? Can you review our whitepaper and website? Can you help us find other advisors?
Most importantly you shouldn’t settle for a low level of commitment. The top guys have done hundreds of ICOs, there’s not enough time in the week to give even a half hour to each project. Make sure your potential advisor is willing to communicate with you regularly, at least twice a week if you need it.
Shooting for the top guys will likely just put a hole in your wallet(s). I’d recommend finding people with at least 5 successful ICOs as an advisor or 1 successful ICO as a founding team member and working down from there.
Contact them describing your project and asking for advisory help, right away. You’ll usually get an answer as most advisors want to cut a deal. Here’s a template:
Hi Guy,
My Name is Nick, CEO of MAKE. We’re building an app that pays people to share media in the social media apps they already use. We’ve checked out you’re experience and think you’d make a great advisor for our team. I’d love to connect and chat about bringing you onboard!
-NJ
Your bargaining chips here are tokens, status, and, worst case, equity. When negotiating with advisors with no money, you need to be honest!
We don’t have any more budget to pay upfront, but are happy to offer a large share of tokens, a commission on any investment you bring in, and another cool ICO to add to your resumé.
Be persistent and stick to your guns. You’ll find the right guys and make the right deal in no time.
Social Groups
This is crucial nowadays to any internet business. Set up all of your social channels and business profiles and start posting content regularly. To start you’ll need to register a project account on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn, BitcoinTalk, and Reddit. Immediately create a public Telegram supergroup (so you can sticky posts), a subreddit for your ICO, and a BitcoinWiki describing your project.
Have fun with your content — give it some flavor and personality. Be genuine and engage as much as possible. If you can, split this up between your team members and dedicate 30 minutes per day posting (it will make a huge difference). The goal here is to have content ready when you start onboarding new community members.
The best part is, this doesn’t cost you a thing (except time) and will bring massive credibility to your project.
Video
This is your most potent asset. It need to be powerful, flashy, high-quality and as short as possible. If you’re strapped for cash, shoot it yourself! Use the resources available to you; explain your business with props or animations, record yourself in your friend’s warehouse. Be genuine, confident, and sell your idea!
Most people grew up on TV. Put 30 people in a hospital waiting room and nobody talks to each other, they just watch whatever is on the screen on the wall — Even if what’s playing isn’t in their language. Video content is very powerful. This aspect of your project should take the most thought, planning, and careful effort.
You need to engage your audience with this video. My advice is to have one member of your team become a guru at editing video. My free tool of choice is Hitfilm Express 4. Once you make the first video you can make one after then next. Good creative videos are more likely to be shared than anything else, take advantage of this now before you build up a massive community.
This is subject to your own ingenuity but a few rules of thumb:
- Always use abundant lighting
- Never Overexpose
- Always use audio quality that matches the video
Onward and upward!
Bounty & Airdrop Campaigns
This is the secret sauce to any campaign nowadays. It is such an innovative technique and doesn’t get enough recognition. For those unfamiliar with these campaigns here’s an overview:
A bounty campaign is a program set up to reward “bounty hunters” for completing tasks that you outline in return for a future share of your tokens. You’re essentially pre-paying people for marketing help! All you need to do is post your campaign and it’s off to the races.
An airdrop campaign is similar but it’s primary goal is to build a huge crowd. People join and share your telegram group in exchange for a small sum of your tokens. Pretty cool right? These campaigns are quicker and easier to manage than bounties and often use autonomous telegram bots.
To set up your bounty program, head over to the active bounties page on BitcoinTalk and see what people are doing now. Don’t make the mistake of outright copying another teams bounty — it’s been done too many times. Discern what is relevant to your project or business. For example, a media company might benefit more from Facebook sharing than from a BitcoinTalk Signature campaign.
Also, always add innovative challenges to your campaigns. It will make work much more fun and rewarding for the bounty hunters! Try to gamify the experience and watch your social groups grow!
To actually execute the bounty, contact the bounty managers of several ongoing or completed campaigns you like best. Ask them if they’re interested in managing your bounty for a cut of your total tokens. Eventually you’ll find a manager who is confident in your project and willing to do the dirty work. Give them your bounty plan and whatever graphics you’d like to include in your post and press go!
For airdrops, there are new bots and platforms everyday. I won’t delve too far into this one as I think it’s worth a separate post, but checking out airdrops.io or some popular platforms like these will lead you in the right direction
Listings
On Kickstarter or Indiegogo, all currently running campaigns are easily sorted and browsed all from one place. Right now, there are a few teams hard at work creating ICO platforms which will completely replace modern crowdfunding — but we’re not quite there yet.
If you want your project to be seen by investors, you need to start listing it. Private listing sites like ICOBench aim to pull together all ongoing projects, rank them, and add them to an easily navigated database. This is generally where investors find the projects they want to invest in.
My advice is to submit your project to as many of these sites as you possibly can. If some cost upfront payment to use, skip them. There are hundreds of these, all with different pools of investors. The most crucial is ICOBench. After that, submit to at least the top 20 on this aggregate.
In terms of strategy — you need to make your project look as interesting and professional as possible. Make absolutely sure you know the details of your project back to front as this is where the pitching truly begins. When listing your ICO, you get usually get a cover photo, project name, and a brief description. You need to make an impression here!
First, put text on your cover photo, not just your logo or project name. You should have a few words that grab attention, or in other words, clickbait. You don’t have the luxury of paying for more exposure like some of the other projects do. Take advantage of human psychology and lay out terms you know people are looking for.
To help you brainstorm, just head over to YouTube and start browsing. You’ll have an idea of what works and what doesn’t very quickly. For us, we used “Get paid daily doing what you already do”. It’s short enough to read while glancing through and piques the interest of those tired of reading “The future of..” or “The world’s first…” Again, be creative.
Make sure all of your details are perfect (you can adjust some of them later) and list, list, list!
Distribution and Smart Contract
So here’s where you are now:
You have a business plan, a team and advisors, a content distribution network (the bounty program), social communities, and public listings bringing traffic to your project. All you need now is a platform that can collect information, accept cryptocurrency and/or fiat, and distribute your tokens to ICO participants.
Smart Contract
The first piece you’ll need is your token’s smart contract. This defines your token and how it will be used. Luckily, most classic utility tokens are pretty similar — they are used for peer to peer transactions, have a lockup period, get distributed at ICO completion or when funds are transferred, etc. There is a lot of boilerplate code and great tutorials out there if you’d like to take a crack at doing this yourself.
Else, I suggest either:
A. Finding a freelancer on Telegram or BitcoinTalk who will write smart contracts for tokens
B. Use your network — ask your advisors for contacts who can develop your token contract. Don’t hesitate to make open posts on LinkedIn either.
C. Use a SAFT or SAFT-E agreement (to be covered in another post) for initial investments. Then you can afford to pay a reputable software engineer.
Bookbuilding Platform
There are many solutions for bookbuilding platforms that range from custom builds hosted on your servers (can be expensive) to cloud-based solutions. Most of the businesses that we spoke with who provided an ICO platform offered a tokens-only solution. If you are resourceful and use your network, you will be able to accomplish the same.
We went through several options before landing on ICOyard.io who takes a portion of your total raise amount up to a certain number. As always, negotiate privately and use your incentives!
Start Your ICO Today
If you made it through all of that then congratulations! You now have everything you need to run your own ICO. Sure its a lot, but there is so much opportunity in this rapidly growing and changing space that you’ll just need to hit the ground running!
If you are considering starting a software company, project, or full-fledged decentralized app — you should launch an ICO. Regardless of “the market” or how many unused tokens exist now, if you do what you set out to do and create a tool that successfully uses blockchain technology to empower people, your tokens will be used and you will be part of a technological revolution.
If you’re on the fence about running an ICO in todays climate, be sure to check out why now is the perfect time. Should you need any help along the way you can always fall back on this article as a guide or contact me directly!
