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
- Confirmed Peter Whalen, Direcor of the Garber Center for Venture Capital and the Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Penn State University, as an advisor.
- Green Light Digital, LLC — Marketing Agency.
- Meeting with Ali Eatemadpour, Attorney at Eatemadlaw; SAFT.
- Q&A with Can Kisagun, Co-founder and CPO of Enigma.
- Bounty Program Initial Draft Completed.
- Engineering: Finalize Bounty Program, User Login Optimization, Crowdsale Smart Contract Testnet deployment.
New Advisor
This week we were pleased and privileged to welcome a new Advisor.
Dr. Whalen is the director of the Garber Center for Venture Capital as well as the Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Penn State University. Peter moved to Penn State in the Fall of 2015 from the University of Denver where he served as an Assistant Marketing Professor for six years. His academic research has focused on the interface of marketing and entrepreneurship, more specifically on theory related to opportunity creation, effectuation, service dominant logic and planning. He has over fifteen years business experience in sales, promotions, research, consulting and entrepreneurial start-ups. He holds academic degrees from the University of Oregon (PhD in Marketing), St. Louis University (MBA) and Florida State University (BS in Marketing).
Dr. Whalen will be invaluable to ICOToday as he advises us on our marketing strategy as well as helping us secure strategic partnerships.
Marketing Agency.
This previous week, we continued our search for a Marketing Agency and ICO consulting Agency. We managed to speak to Green Light Digital, LLC, an ICO marketing firm based in Orlando. We had multiple conversations with the founder and we now have a deep understanding of the services they provide and the results we would expect from them. They have worked one previous ICO, Viva, and one ongoing ICO, Open Money Digital. A document detailing the services they provide will be sent to our advisors. Below is an overview of their Services.
Product: They will not offer any product help. They will, however, assist in writing the copy on the website, white paper, and any other corresponding documents.
Legal: None
Marketing: Writing the White Paper, Content Strategy, Social Media Marketing, SMM — Forums and Chats, Traffic, Media, Organization of Bounty Program, Go to Market Strategy, Token Sale Architecture, Graphics, Chat group management.
Cost of Services: $50,000 over three months. Half would be for buying advertisements.
Overview: Green Light Digital was very responsive and seemed to offer a more involved service. Relative to all the other services that we contacted, this is the best. However, we have not yet made a final decision and are still looking for other options before we finalize our decision in the upcoming week.
Attorney/SAFT
Following our Meetup in New York a weekend ago, we scheduled a phone call with Ali Eatemadpour, Attorney at Eatemadlaw, who we’d met during there. The conversation was meant to discuss the classification of our token as a utility token vs a security. We detailed to him our call with the SEC and the steps that we’d taken thus far. He asked questions about our platform and our upcoming ICO in order to familiarize himself with our product and timeline. He decided to take a few days to analyze our white paper, Privacy Policy, Terms and Services and overall product in order to advise us on what we needed to do. We then scheduled another meeting for Monday 10/9/17 to reconvene.
Moreover, during this last week, the SAFT Project was announced to huge fan fair in the ICO community. SAFT, a initiative led by Protocal Labs, creators of filecoin, and Angel List, was launched to help companies launching ICOs to offer tokens to U.S based investors. The SAFT Agreement would limit the token sale to accredited investors and would offer a promise of issuing of future tokens. The agreement is based on Y-Combinators SAFE agreement and has already been used by some ICOs, including Enigma. We chose to use SAFT for the first tier of our pre-sale. This would ensure legal compliance with the SEC in the case that regulation is brought down soon. We are also reviewing this with the attorney and will finalize in the upcoming week.
Q&A with Can Kisagun, Co-founder and CPO of Enigma.
Since the Q&A was confidential, we chose not to publicly share the details (our advisors will be emailed a copy of the meeting notes). Overall, we gained unique insight into how Enigma structured their ICO and all the different steps involved from the inception of their idea to launching one of the most successful ICOs. The most important take away was that launching an ICO was a multi-month long process that was time intensive and difficult.
Additionally, he stressed that the community was their most valuable asset. Therefore, moving forward, we will work tirelessly on building relationships with our initial users and supporters. We will continue to grow our audience by being transparent and honest about our plans for the future. We believe that our product will show our supporters our dedication to our vision. We will continue to listen and seek out any feedback that could help us improve.
Bounty Program
We decided to model our Bounty Program based on a few previous ICOs. The purpose of the Bounty Program is to incentivize the ICO community to share our upcoming ICOs with their followers as well as create content to share with more people. The incentive will be ICOToday Tokens. This will help grow our audience and increase engagement with out platform. Most if not all ICOs that have launched in the last few months have had Bounty Programs. Although not all Bounty Programs are successful, we studied and took the best features from those that were successful and fused them into ours. Although this is just the initial draft, there will be three main pools: Social Networks Pool, Content Creation Pool and Translation Pool. The
Social Networks Pool: Aimed at growing our audience on different social media platforms, forums and chat groups. Users who share our platform will be rewarded based on the number of people who they redirect to us.
Content Creation Pool: We are looking for bloggers, journalists, and video content creators who are willing to write about the ICOToday platform or our upcoming token sale. This will create more searchable content and expand that number of people who have heard about ICOToday.
Translation Pool: Since ICOs serve a global audience, we want our platform to be accessible to as many localities as possible. One of the ways we will accomplish this is through our translation pool, where users translate our white paper to different languages will be rewarded with ICT.
Engineering
We made significant progress this past week on our Engineering tasks. Below is a detailed analysis of each of the major Tasks.
User Login/Sign Up Optimization
While restructuring our back-end, we decided to improve the user interface and overall security of our user on-boarding experience. Following the update, a user’s password will be hashed twice, once in the front-end by the SHA-256 hash algorithm and once again in the back-end. Therefore, for hackers who are trying to monitor the communication between our browser and server, all they will be able to get is a hashed password. Furthermore, since it takes about 0.1s to hash a string using the SHA-256 hash algorithm, for hackers looking to use a brute force attack, they will have to waste 0.1s for every password combination that they would like to try, making it economically impractical to use the brute-force attack on our platform.
Personal Feed
We also added a personal feed to our platform. Now, a registered user on our platform will be able to subscribe to numerous ICOs and get updates displayed on their feed. This will allow for a more tailored and customized experience for each user ensuring they do not miss important updates from the ICOs they are interested in.
Exclusivity
After consulting with Dr. Peter Whalen and several of the other advisors, we realized that in order to build the community that we want ICOToday to represent, we needed to ensure that we limit the viewing of the rated ICOs listed on our platform to registered users. This will not only ensure that our platform attracts the most dedicated and experienced of investors, but will ensure that our brand is differentiated from the plethora of other ICO listing websites that offer no unique insight into each particular ICO and more than often just list whichever ICOs that are interested in being listed and paying for their listing fee.
As we build ICOToday’s brand, we want to build a brand centered around trust and community. Limiting access to unregistered users would differentiate us and give us a competitive advantage. We predict that this will increase the number of signups for our platform as well as our token sale white list.
Crowdsale Smart Contract Testnet deployment.
We deployed our Pre-Sale smart contract to the Rinkeby testnet and will be doing intensive tests this upcoming week. We believe that this measure of manually testing the contract is a beneficial addition to external auditing of the smart contract. The idea is to go through dry run of the pre-sale and the crowdsale to ensure that everything works accordingly. We will also be contacting a few smart contract auditing firms this upcoming week to establish relationships and get quotes on their services.
We also made numerous other small bug fixes and enhancements to our platforms. However, the major updates were listed above. We deployed our public beta to a test server and have been conducting tests there for the last few days. We are planning on publicly launching the beta on Thursday 10/12. This update will enable us to move from our private beta phase limited to only 113 users to an open phase where anyone can join our platform, any ICO can apply to be listed, and users can apply to become analysts.
This Upcoming Week
- 10/9 Follow up with Ali Eatemadpour, Attorney at Eatemadlaw.
- Finalizing Marketing Strategy and Agency
- Public Beta Launch
- Bounty Program Launch Plan/Date
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
