How much does it cost to make a successful ICO

Bojan Oremuž
EMMARES
Published in
3 min readMay 1, 2018

ICO is 24/7 work for the team. Days are too short. But what kind of fiat budget is really necessary for successful ICO?
Few days ago I was on this meetup and that exact question was asked by the audience. One of the past ICO founders, who raised around 10 million US$ answered immediately: at least 1 mio US$..or better do not start anything.

Is this true?

Everything in ICO is made in a very short time, so organic growth of a community is an illusion. And that is probably one of the main reasons, that every useful service costs in crypto at least 10 times normal fee.
But current state is as erratic as Blockchain scene itself. Nobody knows exactly what kind of regulations we have and there is no exact limit between security and utility tokens, as many countries try to route everything to security… The same stuff is going on also in investing world.
Influencers, important rating sites, investor ratings, articles in major magazines…. all that creates a hype.

But we are in controversy aren’t we? That means — more money you have, more hype you can do..regardless of the project. And that is in many cases, unfortunately, the truth. Excellent projects without necessary amount of money for hype creation are bound to fail. And that is a pity.

An average projects without any added value and with a lot of money actually attracted investors in the past. Collected a lot, they waste that money and close the operations. How is that possible?
The common checkup was to look at a number of pages on Bitcointalk and members on Telegram. That rule is ridiculous, since a lot of the “communities” have most of their members consisting of bots or bounty type of airdrop users, asking mostly “when I will get my tokens” or commenting “hi”. A new type of “services” called Bump service are rising and making fake activity grow on those type of channels.
Everybody wants to earn money in a Crypto world.
And by everybody I mean hackers, “influencers”, marketing agencies, “Crypto news sites”, even VC funds. And their prices are sky high.

Do we have any warranty, dealing with such partners? Usually not. Upfront and no warranty is standard …
Lack of independent projects due to diligence bodies and much-overrated hype importance is leading into failed projects with huge financing, but with no products in the end. And that will change only when (artificially made) hype will NOT be the most important factor.

My opinion on this matter is, that Crypto space needs to grow up. From hype to real value importance. I believe, we can expect great projects and great added value in the future, but we have to grow up as investors. Not following the hype but following common sense and do your own due diligence and value research. Look at the team if it is capable to realise the project. Look at the total available market. Do we really need that solution? Does the project really need Blockchain or is it used only for ICO purposes? Is it 100% legal?

Bojan Oremuž,

Founder and CEO of EMMARES

--

--