Just imagine a world without hamburgers. And suddenly one genius creates the recipe. Crispy bun , juicy beef, fresh lettuce and sweet and sour sauce. Or barbeque sauce? Oh, you may also add slices of fried bacon! In fact you may add whatever you want and create a unique taste of a hamburger. There are so many options! Surely, in a dream of a perfect hamburger you have already deployed a lovely scenario in your mind where you are starring as Prometheus who brings hamburgers to the world! However, while you were trying to work out the perfect recipe, fifteen cafes offering hamburgers have already opened in your neighborhood. What you will do? Will you open the sixteenth?
And now stop dreaming about yummies and travel back to 2017, where ICO is gaining ground instead of hamburgers. Well, ICO scenario deploys the same way if hamburgers are still the main heroes. After trying it once they develop a taste for it. You might definitely be confused by this statement and say that on the contrary ICO story has already come to the end, that’s far from “happy”. Or you might suggest that it has caused too many problems and add that a world without ICO will be a better place.
We will not start the dispute. It’s a hot potato. You have all the rights to accuse ICO hype in unjustified investors’ expectations. It had a hand in making some investors less wealthy than they used to be, ruined white reputation of world’s financial experts, trod on toes of the tycoons of VC investment, defeated statistics and statisticians. And what about thousands of students who had spent all the savings on Dogcoins and still haven’t woken up as billionaires? How many ex-founders have driven away into the sunset, packing cryptodonkeys in сardboard boxes and wrapping in plastic whitepapers of “really good projects”? Altogether, there is no holacracy in the real world, it is left in whitepapers of blockchain projects.
However, you might be not a romantic type and start bring to bear facts about fraudulent activities of PlexCoins and Benebit, billions of stolen altcoins, disappeared Ethereum, broken smart contracts and boring speeches of boring SEOs at boring conferences, crypto blonds club and all other awkward phenomena of cryptoworld. Do not forget to to put an emphasis on the last word and mention that smart contract is just “much ado about nothing” than a really worthy algorithm. And blockchain? There are no protocols eliminating costs. The cost grows with the increase in transaction quantity. Check mate.
Or maybe you and all your complaints are barking up the wrong tree? Then, why is cryptoworld`s popularity still rapidly growing in spite of all the problems, legislative uncertainties and high risks which it has brought with it?
Hype cycle graph
Instead of answering this question, we would like to ask you to put on the graph a fat red dot defining where we now. And we better leave Wirth’s Law to the skeptics and make the long story short — crypto currency is not a hype, it’s already apart of economic; blockchain — is not the whole technology, it is only at the beginning; ICO market is growing not only in quantity, but in quality as well. Precisely this facts should be taken into consideration when trying to predict the future of these new markets. Of course, as long as you can make predictions in a non-predictable markets.
But now let’s come back to the point when ICO has conquered the world. And you still do not have your own “hamburger shop”, because you are not going to be sixteenth. You examine the market, study cases, mistakes and failures of competitors, explore the product and technologies. What problems do usually companies face while launching an ICO? Why do good ideas die unknown, while fun and scum easily attract money? Will this market be alive in two years? Or tomorrow? Is your guess as good as mine?
ICO — what are the perspectives?
According to the statistics (sometimes statistics might be rather credible), the amount of funds raised via an ICO mechanism continues to increase, despite the fact that experts claimed that the market was already “overheated” at the beginning of 2018. Changes in the structure of the market are also noticeable: the number of industries in which ICO companies are involved has increased. ICO has put the roots down in marketing, financial industry, payment systems, gambling.
Who’s the boss? ICO vs Product
Speaking about ICO the main thing one should always keep in mind is that ICO is just a tool, a mechanism for the product, not the product itself. Lots of companies who failed ICO fundraising due to the lack of the finished working product. Strictly speaking , they even didn’t have MVP. These companies are just going round in circles — “We need money for beta, for money — we need beta”. We can only thank them for proving that ICO doesn’t close this loop.
Another situation is when a startup has a good idea and even develops a really nice product, but it is untimely. Or it is impossible to scale it up. There is just not the market for it.
Even large corporations suffer from miscalculations and market products that outstrip consumer desires. For example — a prototype of the modern tablet repeatedly failed before the release of the iPad. Ford’s failure with the release of Edsel — instead of the expected profit, incurred losses about 350 million dollars.
Google, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, HP — this is just a small list of companies who failed, even having the most powerful R&D centers and thousands of qualified marketing experts. So, how can a startup-beginner, staffed only with a few enthusiasts, determine the right Product/market fit? How to create a product that is not only liked by founders, but is really necessary for users?
Here is the first problem with ICO — the product before ICO floatation should be discussed by interested parties. Before planning budgets for marketing campaigns, companies would be better to proceed with organising public discussions, surveys, interviews, in other words, verification of the idea. Teams and founders should understand the real needs of the market. In case they find out that the idea is not likable, or what is worse — not understandable for their targeted audience, it’s better to cut down on planned presales and trips to the conferences and get back to the drawing board.
It takes two to tango…
…however, more people are needed to conduct even a small survey. And what is your plan if you need not just a group of people but childless blonds, about 35 years old, with no pets, who are technical professionals, with IQ of 147 and are eager to spend money on blockchain? I dare say, after a long search you’ll find out that — such women do not exist, are already dead or not born yet. So where can we find people interested in discussing your ICO? Still no clue ? One more time. Where can we find people eager to discuss hypothetical ICO that exist only in your mind and may never be born ? So, here is the second “ICO problem”.
ICOs, IT products, blockchain solutions are the subject of interest for a certain types of people. As an example we have provided you with a collective image of potential client of blockchain app for dates. Remember that 35-years-old blond from the previous paragraph? So, marketing campaigns aimed at promoting ICO in ordinary social network environment do not ensure the needed CPR and do not attract people who are potentially interested in the product.
Not the least part in the low effectiveness of advertising in social networks is played by the growing attention of financial watchdogs in relation to the ICOs. this attention forces large social networks (Facebook, Google, Twitter) to limit advertising of such projects.
Therefore, creation of a live community from the first days of a project`s existence is not less important for a startup than the attraction of investments. Community for startup is altogether: hot clients, an ideal focus group and excellent moral support.
However, currently despite the overcrowded telegram chats for ICO projects, fewer of them have good community consisting of real people, who can pass KYC.
Problem number three
No vanity in the paragraph with the simple heading. A Simple heading — a simple problem. Marketing of ICO projects is expensive and time-consuming. Marketing costs eat the whole budget. But you need to spend this money because you need to solve a problem number two — to find a community. So how to save money and achieve your goals? Firstly, do not believe that higher budget will ensure higher popularity of the project and more investments. Marketing specialists may scare you with the stories about successful ICOs, whos founders allocated funds for promotion in the amounts equivalent to the annual marketing budget of a small transnational corporation. Don’t believe them.
More than that, hiring 3 marketing managers, 2 PR-specialists, 1 strategist, 2 copywriters, 3 biz devs, while you have only one product and one developer is not an option either. The solution may be found by involving independent contractors — an advertising agency. They will certainly do everything “in the best practice of ICO PR-campaigns”, but remember that the result is not guaranteed by the cost of the bill.
Blockchain evangelist with nice LinkedIn profile
Yes, we do know how to grab your attention. Everyone wants a guy like that. And yes, we are moving towards the fourth problem — the favorite topic of the recruiters around the globe — how to employ the right staff. With the only difference — we have concern only in hiring ICO specialists.
Recently, American comedian Brian Kiley tweeted that his daughter is a millennial, so she is looking for a summer job as CEO. This joke is a short version of how things are happening while searching for good candidates in ICO sphere. The Industry is new and very changeable — there are not enough specialists ready to do a good job for a reasonable payment. ICO projects are not headhunting blockchain evangelist with nice LinkedIn profile, but smart employees with a technical background and awareness of the fact that you do not need to save the world, but just need to do the job well. Such people are as rare as those blondes we mentioned before, whom we never tired to refer to.
Last straw — really matters
In case you have managed to deal with above mentioned problems — let’s call them “corporate”, it’s time get out of the box and continue our fight. The next enemy — problems with security, i.e. with technical aspects of tokensale. These problems are common for all projects, however, the most damages may be inflicted by “real-life” projects.
What does it mean? As we have mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, ICO market is diversifying rapidly. ICO projects which have less in common with crypto world and blockchain technology are appearing more frequently. Of course, they use smart contracts for tokensale, but products themselves are not about blockchain and crypto. Consequently such teams (which usually come mainly from a real-sector economy) lack special knowledge to understand whether or not their tokensale, smart contract and ICO in general is secure and technically efficient.
A separate subsection of this problem is the expenses on developers’ wages for creation of smart contracts, their audit, integration with blockchain and other subsequent services (KYC, payment solutions).
BTW, we have a solution
Why do you want to be sixteenth, if you can have an opportunity to be the first? And help others “to cook better hamburgers”! This is how the idea of creation of decentralized platform “all in one” for solving ICO problems of startups was born and Token0x.io appeared.
Founders of Token0x platform have more than 10 years of experience in IT. They have spent the last few years exploring blockchain technology and ICO mechanism. Long lasting search for product/market fit has led them through advising to other ICOs, incorporating a company and creating a white label product — ICO cabinet, open source product Ethnamed.io and finally creating Token0x.io. Before producing final solution founders of the platform has explored lots of cases of ICO conduction and generalized the main problems which startups had to overcome. Token0x is not the only -platform aimed at automation of ICO process. Wings, Kickico and Icobench were also trying to provide certain solutions at this field.
What makes Token0x unique? Token0x is a platform which provides a wide range of tools enabling its users to solve both communication and marketing problems (verification of the idea, attraction of a community, promotion of the project, reduction of expenditures for marketing) as well as finding out unified technical solutions for tokensale (smart contracts, possibilities to integrate blockchain and other services). Currently, the team is actively continuing to improve technical side of the project. The nearest plans of the founders are to focus on the development of private blockchain, which will be capable of solving problems of Etherium revealed by its founder but still not settled. Such developments will enable the platform to break a new ground as well as become the starting point for the new project.
Notwithstanding the fact that ICO market has a huge speculative component, its main value lies in stimulating the development of new ways of passing decisions and creating new vehicles for funds and asset management. Unlike traditional derivatives markets ICO does not guarantee long-term success for products which manipulate expectations of investors and customer. Projects in order to be competitive and long-lasting should provide technical solutions that can ensure transparency and decentralized control of the assets and funds of the project. Therefore, evolution and popularization of ICO mechanism directly depend on the development of technologies that can guarantee such way of management. At this moment such technology is blockchain. What will be developed further to replace it depends on current focus of ICO market: bloated marketing campaigns or technology evolution. ICO has potential to become an ordinary bubble or change the way we are doing business and making investments. We should discern the positive sides of ICO and leverage them. Therefore before writing vicious comments and blowing a bubble — do something good . If you are not sure how to start doing good stuff, follow this instruction: how to help Token0x and change the world for the better.
Join our community [https://t.me/token0x] or let us join your community and provide you our software powered by your brand and installed on your servers.
