What is all this ICO talk?
An ICO may be the perfect opportunity for you to get your company up and running. Whether you have an million dollar idea, new project or a start up business.
Business and tech talk can be straight up confusing for anyone who isn’t in the
industry. All the technical terms and pages of information explaining this new ground breaking technology can be hard to take on for someone who is new to this space.
Providing you a helping hand, we have made a brief fact sheet to get you thinking. In future articles we will explore each of the aspect below in more detail.
What is an ICO?
ICO or Initial Coin Offering is a way start up businesses can share their ideas and projects offering a ‘whitepaper’ business plan to potential investors, where they can raise money over the Internet, essentially, it’s crowd funding. Quite similar to Kickstarter but differentiates by using cryptocurrency operating solely online. You invest in them by sending cryptocurrencies or Fiat to a Blockchain project, and in return you receive digital tokens related to that project. All ICO tokens are held in a digital wallet. Many ICOs are for projects that are new and still in the experimental phase. They are at early stages of development or may not have commenced.
An ICO is similar to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) where investors purchase shares of a company. The main difference between an IPO and an ICO is that token holders do not own any equity in the company that they’ve contributed to, therefore the company has no real obligation to the contributor to deliver on their promises.
It is an alternative fundraising service where Blockchain startups issue their own crypto tokens and sell them in exchange for Bitcoin and Ethereum, another form of cryptocurrency.
A brief overview of what you need to launch an ICO
With any business you must do your due-diligence, general practice such as Market Research, Competitor Analysis, Product prototyping etc.. but for this article we will act as if you have explored the idea and have found that it is a viable endeavour, so, what do you need to get your ICO started?
The Team:
Who’s involved in the project is probably the first thing supporters will look at when doing their own due diligence. You should look to build a team that demonstrates technical experience, business development capacity, and knowledge of the blockchain space.
Branding:
Branding is extremely important. Ensuring that your brand’s identity is established, both verbally, visually and consistently. Engaging with a brand and design expert will result in foundational components of your brand-system, which includes: tone of voice, symbol, wordmark, colour pallette, fonts, and example applications of it being used together.
Write a whitepaper:
Similar to a business plan in a way. Your white paper should include literally everything in every possible detail. E.g. Market analysis, legal, development strategies, resources, a detailed description of your team, a roadmap etc. The most serious buyers and the people that are interested in your platform for reasons other than speculation will want to read a whitepaper before supporting a project.
Create an ICO Token:
Decide on how you want to incentivize your contributors with the tokens issued to them. Research is key. Be careful of running uncapped ICOs as people are becoming more weary of it. Hire a Designer to create an easy-to-remember token symbol and you will also need a smart contract developer or a token developer to create your token. Smart contract developers, design and program your ICO token ready for use.
Create a landing page:
A business without a website these days, just don’t exist and the same goes for your ICO. Your landing page should be on-brand, display token sale progress, roadmap visualisation, a brief overview of your project, team profiles, links to your social channels and capture leads in the form of email addresses so that you can constantly keep in touch with your prospects.
Token Sales:
How many rounds of token sales you want? Private sale, presale, ICO and a general sale for each stage having different discount structure is the norm. You might want or need to verify the user’s identity before allowing them to participate. KYC is tricky and troublesome but is legally required for some countries. As this is crucial to security and legals, your constructed team should include someone knowledgeable in this field to help you figure out this process.
Develop a working prototype:
One thing that can make a big difference to your ICO, like any crowdfunding, is seeing the product. As a large majority of ICO’s purely communicate JUST their ideas, if your product is in a prototype stage, that is a massive tick for potential investors as they can quickly see that your team is capable of delivering.
Marketing and PR:
People who invest in ICOs are people who are into crytocurrencies. Advertise in places where their attention isand do your research on what has made a past ICO successful. Questions to ask yourselfL: what blogs do Crypto Investors consume? Where do they go to conduct research into ICO’s? Who are the influencers in the ICO space?
Create brand awareness using your created style guide and run standard marketing campaigns across Bitcointalk forums, Linkedin groups, Facebook groups, Telegram, Slack Quora etc which will be the start to fostering a community, create bounties, get listed on ICO listing websites, go to meetups and go to conferences.
We will breakdown marketing techniques into more detail in our next article.
