Are your advisors harming your ICO?
We have all been there, searching and googling for the best ICO advisors who would help us raise funds. We have messaged people on LinkedIn, talked to advisors on Telegram and then finalised the best advisors for a fee, only to find out later that all the money went down an empty well.
These so-called “experts” not only couldn’t help us raise a single dollar, but also harmed our campaign through dubious practices of sharing anything and everything.
We, therefore, took it on ourselves to enlighten the community about these dubious practices of ICO advisors and have pinned down five red flags which will help identify a harmful advisor for your campaign.
1. All they are doing is re-posting your social posts
If pressing the “retweet” button is all that your ICO advisors are contributing, then it is time to show them the door. You as a project owner are paying hefty fees to an advisor (which sometimes is as high as $10000 per month) to leverage their expertise in the field in the hope that they will help you identify and fill the gaps in your plan.
However, if all you are getting from your ICO advisors is a ‘nod’ to your every plan and a ‘share’ to your every post, it is time to get rid of them.
2. They haven’t read your whitepaper
An advisor who agrees to consult you within the next 24 hours of you sending him/her a message over LinkedIn isn’t going to be any good provided they haven’t even read what your project is all about.
Don’t believe us? Ask them what they think about your technical architecture or what they think about your business model?
While most of them would reply with ‘it is good’, ‘is nice’, ‘has the potential to do great’, others would simply be ‘make payment first, and we will tell later’.
The real ones would take about 3–4 days of time and would have questions about your project before they even consider taking it.
3. They are associated with too many ICOs
While one does hire an ICO advisor for their knowledge and expertise, it is also their name which when attached with a project adds value to it.
However, if your ICO advisor has more than ten projects at a single instance, let him go right away.
An advisor who buttresses every project which is offered to them doesn’t have much value to their name. It shows they are more concerned about their quantity than quality and that is not a good sign.
4. All they got is a beautiful presentation with no measurable metrics
Coming from a marketing and sales background, most of the ICO advisors have mastered the art of presentation. They will arrive and impress you with presentations and tell you how their custom tailored marketing approach will help you raise millions.
However, the moment you ask them about their success ratios or talk to them about the funding they have helped raise in the past, they will start fumbling like a headless chicken on a noisy highway.
5. They have connections, they have followers, but no contribution to the Blockchain community
Getting thousands of followers, or hundreds of connections on LinkedIn isn’t a great deal. The point is whether your expert advisor is contributing his findings, visions and learnings to the Blockchain community.
A real expert is on a constant learning spree, and the same will be visible in their social channels as they keep on sharing posts, innovations and developments within the Blockchain ecosystem.
If not, then you have got yourself an interloper — one who would harm your ICO in the long run.
While people often tend to blame the idea or the market for an ICO campaigns failure, it usually is the bad consulting and advising practices which cause the ICOs to fail. Therefore, all the CEOs and CTOs out there, it is time to put your head back in the game and search for consultants who not only guide you through every step, but will also challenge what you say at every instance.
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Originally published at tokenasia.com on January 2, 2019.
