How we launched our ICO with zero marketing budget (and raised USD 25 million in two days)

We started the Proxeus project two years ago with the vision to create a “workflow and document-automation toolbox” that helps businesses and individuals with specific know-how to embrace blockchain technology without specific technical knowledge. An approach similar to Wordpress for building websites, or SAP for digitizing company processes.

In 2017, crypto crowdfunding has achieved new heights — today there is an ICO for everything and you can hardly open LinkedIn, Twitter or even Reddit or Google without being pelted with ads promoting token sales. The “playbook” for ICOs dictates you to open Slack or Telegram groups and to post the project to Bitcointalk and a series of other forums, while spending a ton of money on “traditional” advertising.

When planning our token launch, we ended up choosing a pretty unconventional approach. Contrary to many other ICOs, we already have a working product. Instead of marketing and advertising a potential future product and rely on a crowd of financial investors interested in short-term profits, we wanted to have success based on projects and performance.

So we decided to focus on what we could do best — execute on PoCs (Proof of Concept projects) with a series of industry clients and use this customer exposure to refine our codebase and finalize the first public builds. We started promoting Proxeus at conferences and building a community of beta-testers who could help us raise the necessary capital for pursuing the project.

If what we build is to have a long-lasting effect on the industry, it has to be put on firm foundations. For this, projects cannot rely on marketing alone. One might say this was a very Swiss and conservative approach, but the responses we got from prospective contributors were very positive and kept us motivated to pursue this vision. We also decided to cap the maximal contribution for each buyer to USD 80'000.– in order to develop a broader user base.

Our token sale was executed on February 1, and we were able to collect USD 25 million from 795 contributors. We are humbled by the trust, the response and the support we received, and will continue to deliver our best to the community and the people that believed in Proxeus to contribute our part to this wonderful ecosystem we call blockchain.

But all this would not have been possible without the tremendous support we got from the community and our partners. We are standing on the shoulders of giants as we were relying on the network, the infrastructure and the expertise of partners that have walked this path before successfully and who were instrumental to reach this target. We worked closely with CTIA (community building in Asia and KYC), Blockhaus (execution of the TGE and systems) as well as Centrality (consulting and advisory). The project would be nowhere without their support.

Now we will be able to go back to testing and building — a whole new journey begins! If you know how specific workflows “work” in the offline world and would like to leverage your know-how in the crypto-ecosystem, we would love to hear from you and help you to make this knowledge available to others using Proxeus and the XES token.