All Start-Ups will go for ICO

Published in

Smart Progress

6 min readOct 5, 2017

The world is changing so rapidly. Just yesterday, to attract funding for a startup, one had to camp on the doorstep of venture funds, send thousands of letters with presentations to various investors, make hundreds of pitches, again and again hearing out unreasonable refusals.

But the old system has given place to a new era, carrying new technologies and opportunities. So, today there’s no longer any necessity for investment funds, and it is obvious to all market participants. If earlier ICOs were held only by blockchain projects, nowadays they are launched by factories and farmers. ICOs have come to replace the entire venture market, and everyone benefits from this, well… except for the venture investors themselves, who have simply lost their dominant position.

Searching for investors

We launched SmartProgress far back in 2012 and all the 5 years of the project development the dialogue with investors in Russia used to be formed like this:

At that, we completed the search of investments in Russia and by the end of 2014 we had won the Startup Chile Grant for the development of the project from the Government of Chile in the amount of $35,000.

In 2015, I went to Chile to do a six-month accelerator program. Within that time, owing to the grant, we were able to launch a new section on SmartProgress — “Coaching” platform. Thus, we managed to increase the income of the project by 3 times.

By the terms and conditions of the grant we were obliged to spend the entire amount during the period of the accelerator program, so getting back home we had to turn ourselves in, using only our own funds again, so I tried another shot of associating with Russian investors, but predictably, neither the grant, nor our case of threefold income for half year had been of any value in the eyes of investors.

Luckily, by this time SmartProgress had already been under full self-sustainment and the income that it brought allowed us to keep the Project without attracting additional funding. As of the beginning of 2017, the Project audience numbered 150,000 users, and the Project’s profit amounted to $3,000 per month.

In May of 2017, one article caught my eye telling how a Russian farmer had issued his own crypto-currency and raised $500,000 for expanding his farming business. Since that moment, the world has ceased to be the same for me. I realized, this is our chance to attract investments into SmartProgress and to propel it to a completely new level! After all, if the $35,000 grant had increased the Project’s income by 3 times, what fold increase will an investment of $100,000 or even $500,000 make?

Benefits for crypto-investors

Primarily, we were to come up with an offer for investors. After all, the token itself doesn’t provide the investors any benefit. For that to happen, we needed to comprehend motivation of the investors buying tokens. And their motivation is simple: they want to buy tokens with a single purpose — to sell them for a large amount of money. Some projects complicate their tokenization, some declare their products can be bought at cheaper prices for the tokens, some state their tokens will allow participating in the project itself. Perhaps, some investors might be interested. But 99% of investors are particularly interested in profiteering. They want to constantly see the growth of the token quotation.

Now the law of demand and supply comes to our assistance.

We declare that after the tokens have been issued and distributed among all investors, we start their immediate payback from the exchange at a market price. Most of the projects that go for ICOs have nothing but ideas and the White Paper, so they can offer their investors only a standby. We however, have a competitive advantage — we’ve got a profit and a successful case of increasing income with a cash injection.

It’s gonna work in this way: each month, we’ll allocate 10% of our previous month profit for the payback of tokens. The larger becomes the profit, the more tokens we’ll buy back. All tokens purchased will be destroyed. Thus, on the one hand, there will be a constant increase in the demand for tokens on the exchange, represented by their payback. On the other hand, their supply will constantly decrease. If the supply on the exchange is not sufficient in the current month, the amount of the payback will be transferred and summed up with the next month’s amount.

Such a scenario will inevitably result in the price rise of the token, and this growth will be infinite.

Preparations

As soon as we decided to run the ICO for SmartProgress, I created a new goal for SmartProgress: Conduct ICO for SmartProgress and started the preparatory work. By the way, I’m still maintaining the goal and keep my diary regularly, describing all my actions and publishing reports on them.

All the groundwork took us 4 months. We really anticipated a lot of work to be done, as it was necessary to sort through all the intricacies of crypto-currencies, blockchain, issue of tokens, to write the White Paper, to develop website and much more. I’m gonna write a separate article on the preparation process itself since it seems to be quite voluminous.

What the money will go to

In the course of preparations for the ICO, we designed our action plan of the Project future development. We identified 3 stages, which we clearly saw and could predict the effectiveness of their implementation.

$100,000

In the first place, we’ll perform a complete technological upgrade of the Project as for 5 years the stack of technologies for web development has radically changed, and stay in-step with the times, we need to make this to significantly speed up the site and lay the powerful groundwork for the Project further development and scaling. We’re also planning to develop new mobile applications, since the old ones haven’t been updated long years and have become practically useless.

$250,000

In 2015, the grant money, enabled us to develop a coaching platform for SmartProgress. It became very popular and much-needed. We increased the income of the Project by 3 times through the use of the platform. And now it is ready to become an independent project. We receive a lot of offers to use our coaching platform for the needs of various training centers, but unfortunately, the adjacency of SmartProgress places some restrictions on its off-site use. Therefore, when collecting this amount, we will split off the Coaching platform ito an independent project, which in our view will give it a great push.

$500,000

Having reached this level, we plan to start a “Western expansion”.

When it comes to the Russian market, where SmartProgress operates — then it is only coming to light, it is actually being created by SmartProgress. Before SmartProgress, such projects simply didn’t exist. There are now several services in the English-speaking market that provide an opportunity to publicly pursue goals:

43things.com — 3,000,000 users

coach.me — 1,000,000 users

stickk.com — 500,000 users

This means that in the English-speaking segment of the Internet, there is a formed demand for this product. And SmartProgress has great chances to take a significant share of the Western market.

How to buy SmartProgress tokens?

The start of token sale is scheduled for October 22 at 14:00 UTC and will last 30 days until November 22. In the first 24 hours, tokens will be sold with a 20% bonus.