ICOToday Briefing for Advisors — 10/22/17
At ICOToday, we decided to write a weekly letter to our advisors describing in detail the past week’s progress and the plan for the upcoming week. The letter will be distributed to our advisors at the beginning of each week and will be published to our Medium blog shortly after for transparency with our community of supporters.
The previous week’s briefing can be found here
This Past Week
- Marketing
- Public Beta Launch
- Bounty Program Launch
- Analyst Applications
- Legal
Marketing and Public Beta Launch
Over the last week, one of the main priorities was deciding on a marketing agency. Following numerous conversations, we decided to proceed with Green Light Digital. We began working together last week. They helped set up and launch the bounty program that has now had over 1,400 participants in 2 days. Moving forward, we will continue working together to execute on our launch strategy. We will focus on two important things for the next 3–4 weeks: Enlisting credible and qualified analysts and growing the number of users on our platform.
Enlisting Analysts
We will be setting aside a portion of our tokens to reward those community members that help refer people who eventually become analysts and reward those community members that help review and improve our rating system. After listening to incredible members of our community and the effort that they put into their responses, we felt that we had to show them that we cared and appreciated them. More details about how this program will work will be released soon.
We have currently received over 350 applications. However, most of the applicants will not become analysts since they are unqualified. Our plan is to announce our confirmed analysts and begin adding ICO evaluations by the end of the week. We are being deliberately selective to ensure that we only confirm the best.
Our analyst application process requires users to submit an application on our platform, which includes their personal details including their resume and Linkedin profiles and submitting a comprehensive written evaluation and rating of an ICO of our choosing. Based on the submission that they provide, we then make a decision.
Growing User Base
We currently have a little over 1000 registered users in just three days since launching our public beta. We are excited about this next month. Members on our Telegram group have been especially helpful in refining our rating system. The passion and thought that they put into the conversations is inspiring and have reinvigorated the whole team to ensure that we are delivering the best product.
Our aim is to sustain our current growth rate. More importantly, however, we want to grow our Weekly Returning Users. As of now, it is too early to quantify, but we want our users to find enough value in our platform for them to return and tell their friends about us. Announcing our initial Analysts and adding ratings will be a big step in the right direction.
Furthermore, our referral program, where users get tokens for referring friends to register through their sign up links, has started working. Hundreds of users have already earned tokens. This along with our other strategies will keep new users flowing in.
Bounty Program
Our bounty program launch was successful. As we mentioned, we currently have over 1,400 participants. Our bounty program is dynamic. We have set aside 1% of total tokens for participants. Each day, we have different tasks that participants can earn stakes by completing. These tasks range from following us on social media to sharing our Medium posts. We have implemented some novel ideas to our bounty program that we will be announcing soon. Moreover, the top participants in our bounty program will be placed at the front of our White List and will have access to a discounted token price before our crowdsale. More details will be announced soon.
Engineering
The last two weeks in Engineering were focused on fixing minor bugs and improving the current features.
Major Features
For Users: View detailed reports and scores of ICOs, subscribe to your favorite ICOs and view important updates on your personal feed, follow analysts and see their analysis on your feed.
Upcoming User Features: Users will eventually be able to easily participate in token sales through our one click token sale feature. They will also be able to deposit and withdraw funds from their ICOToday wallet.
For Companies: Get your ICO in front of our users, Get professional and comprehensive ratings from our analysts.
Upcoming company Features: Company dashboard with detailed information about who participated in their ICO including KYC/AML/Accredited Investor and the ability to limit certain people from participating.
Legal
Following numerous conversations with our legal advisors, we decided to limit the participation of our first Tier of the Pre-sale to Accredited Investors. We have not yet announced the dates, but this would ensure that we fully comply with all SEC regulations. Moreover, we have been working through the legal framework for listing ICOs and enabling our users to directly participate in other token sales through our platform. This is quite complicated and we are still working through it. However, it is clear that we will review every token that users can participate in for legal compliance.
Furthermore, we will have three different account levels: email verified, ID or passport verified and Accredited Investor verified. Each of these different levels will have different permissions on our platform regarding which ICOs they can participate in. Companies will be able to select who to allow to participate in their token sale based on the country of residence, Accredited Investor status and any different requirements that they may have.
Our platform will fundamentally consist of two main entities: the listing and ratings section and the Token Sale participation Section. The Token Sale participation section requires more legal work and we continue to finalize our framework. The listing and ratings section is relatively easier. All ratings and reports will not be investment advise. Instead, they will be the opinions of the analysts themselves and this will be communicated directly to the users on our platform.
This Week
- Growing the community
- Enlisting and announcing initial analysts
- Adding ratings and reports for ICOs on the platform
We are excited about the upcoming week. We have made significant progress thus far, but we still have a lot of work to do. We thank you for joining us on our journey and look forward to hearing your feedback.
Best,
Joseph Kitonga
CEO, ICOToday
