Round II | Public pre-sale reopening for new whitelisters today at 13:00 CEST
The public pre-sale round as long since been completed. We raised 1908 Ether from 824 contributors. Read more about the completed pre-sale in this blog post.
Last Wednesday at the 25th at exactly 13:00 CEST GUTS Tickets launched the self-developed ICO application for the first time. Main reflections on how the app delivered on managing the pre-sale flow can be found in this blog which is dedicated to this subject alone. The blog you are about to read will mainly focus on how we'll move forward from this point.
The lower you go, the more you need
As mentioned in the aforementioned blog, the whole point of the ICO application was to show the community our technical capabilities in handling queuing and giving people a better(and more fair) chance to GET in. By demonstrating our in-house and tested tech to the community, being it in communicating the status in line as well as ensuring it doesn't have to come down to timing and hoping for the best. Granted, we made some UX/communication mistakes, it was a test run after all. More on what we'll improve for the general round later on in this publication.
Countless ICOs that preceded us have demonstrated they where able to close back-door deals in the private pre-sale with so called strategic partners, something we did as well with our €1.8 million private-presale round (for the record, this is only 12% of the total tokens sold in the ICO in general — this is a quite low ratio especially considering the conditions/counter favors these early-birds have put in to be able to participate in this private pre-sale). In this public pre-sale we wanted to show the community we didn't only have a mall group of hard-hitters and strategic ticketing players backing us, but also a a large quantity of supports and advocates of our cause. We succeed in establishing both these targets if you would ask my extremely biased opinion on this.
Vires in numeris
At the moment I am writing this more than 500 individuals have participated during the 24 hours our 6 ETH capped pre-sale was open, accounting for more than in 300 Ether contributed to the presale, putting the total raied i n the whole ICO at +8000 ETH!
Some misjudgements on our side
The decisions to put the cap at 6 ETH was purely based upon the amount of people we had received a whitelisted from in the months preceding the public pre-sale. Apparently a portion of these people that we had whitelist requests from where either misinformed, uninterested, unavailable or didn't have the intention to participate in our ICO the first place*.
*This group was formed due to a bounty program that was interpreted by its participants. At some point we had a 2% bonus referral program running that was misinterpreted in its terms and conditions by a lot of bounty hunters(probably due to their lack of understanding in the English language) This misunderstanding resulted in +-400 whitelist requests of 'contributors' assuming they would get a kickback by requesting a spot on our white list alone… This while the terms of this bounty program clearly stated actually participating in the ICO was necessary for this bounty/bonus to actually tick in.
UX/Communication problems
A lot of people also where confused about how the application worked and assumed they where too late to participate, and that their 'turn was over'. This is a UX mistake on our part and we plan on improving on that for the general sale. When the ICO pre-sale contributors were told to enter the queue, they saw their spot was № 6xx+ on the list, resulting in them to conclude that they would never have a chance to contribute. This caused them to leave to queu. All the while a large portion of the people in front of them where either faulty bounty entries or weren't awake/notified correctly (a lot of emails landed up in spam) Well, that’s something we took away as improvement points by this pre-sale from a testing perspective!
Concrete improvements to the ICO application
For the general round we'll also add the ability of whitelisters to provide their mobile number to us (optionally) and ask them for permission to send in-browser push notifications. This is also the exact type of communication strategy we use for consumers buying our smart event tickets in 'real-life' so we know it works!
About double whitelisting
We allowed people to get whitelisted during the last 2 days and we added some new functionalities like automatic whitelisting in the ICO application on the crowdsale contract after a contributor entered a correct white list request. We tested this new functionality intensively, so it is now possible to let let new whitelisters contribute and so are now ready for new submissions (after of course the current queue has run its course)!
This automatically whitelisting does indeed open us up to the ability that already contributed people can now again whitelist themselves (meaning people that already hold GET will fill in a new white list address to contribute and get a new spot in line).
While this behavior is not directly the philosophy behind why we built the ICO application we can't stop or control for this and therefore will 'let it happen'. There are quite some new contributors(we know this as we see there are a lot of new IP addresses making requests!). All new sign ups on the ICO application will get notified as soon as we open up the queue at 13:00! (additional note: we are open! GET in line here)
Our Dutch base
If anything can be concluded of how the initial public pre-sale processed thus far is that it demonstrated the strong dutch base of supporters we have behind our project. While we are of-course proud of the support we get from our country men, we do want to get a more international community behind us. Our Dutch support it quite expected in a way as the event organizers backing us and the comedians they represent are quite well known in the Netherlands. Giving us more credability than just another ICO with some partners, as the Dutch where able to actually see this is 'the real deal' and not just some marketing smoke their representation in our base is completely explainable.
Let's get to work
This conclusion we are currently so Dutch based community wise made us realize we'll have to communicate to all contributors better that the ambitions of GUTS Tickets are much bigger than dominating between our borders. Upcoming announcements and partnerships will consolidate this ambition, so hold tight!
More about the GET-protocol ICO
If you want know more about the GET Initial Coin Offering, read our white paper, visit ICO website, sign up for our Rocket Chat, Telegram or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment.
