Travel Tech Meetup (Feb15) Recap — Running a Successful ICO
Thank you everyone for coming to our Travel Tech Meetup on February 15th in San Francisco — we had a blast! To get notified on the upcoming travel tech events — signup for our community newsletter & join our Facebook Group.
Winding Tree has just completed the token generation event having raised over $13mln. As this news is spreading, many startups in our community are asking for tips on launching their own crypto crowdfunding campaigns, so we shared our lessons learned at the meetup and here’s the recap.
Crypto Investing Landscape
Currently, with new ICOs popping up every week, crypto investing is on the rise. However, based on our experience, the landscape has not matured yet — the basic principles of good investing, safety and security, proper process and even just basic common sense is often overlooked.
Because of the hype associated with ICOs and token economy — for many investors your ICO will be their first ICO. This means a lot of handholding and a high risk of first time investors making bad mistakes due to lack of experience and proper knowledge. An example would be contributing from an exchange wallet which we warned against via all our community communication channels in advance. Funny thing is that even exchanges warn against it on their sites, but purely because it’s not as common knowledge as “Don’t share your passwords” — many people will make that mistake. Our recommendation — inform, communicate, anticipate and be prepared.
Token Sale Model
There are many models that have been analyzed by crypto community, each coming with its advantages and disadvantages. Make sure to research and pick the model that best fits your vision. LIF Token sale model is based on Market Validation Mechanism that is designed for maximum decentralization, transparency, accountability and team motivation to deliver the product.
With uncapped sale in our case — it was critical to create the right balance between allowing as many people to participate without having FOMO and ensuring we have some urgency & time sensitivity baked into the process.
Marketing
As the ICO hype continues we keep seeing more and more ICO marketing agencies, listings / reviews / emailing / community management services popping up. Our recommendation is to test out these services with shorter / smaller engagements before fully committing. Some of these may end up being straight scam, some — just poor quality and only a portion — legit, knowledgeable professionals.
Regulations
Research and have plan A, plan B and perhaps plan C for where your token issuing entity is registered. Regulations may change very quickly and may cause delays. Originally we registered in Switzerland, but had to go with plan B — Gibraltar — purely because the government audit in Switzerland could potentially delay our ICO even further.
Additionally, research KYC requirements and any restrictions for particular countries to participate and plan ahead your communication to the community. We required KYC for contributions of 15 or more ETH and we did not accept US contributions due to US regulations.
Process
Test the process as thoroughly as you can in advance. Test multiple wallets and anticipate the questions or points of confusion that different wallet owners may have. Test thoroughly your KYC process with your KYC provider (we used Onfido) and anticipate where your investors may get stuck.
Create & share How To Participate Guide with your community in advance. Listen for their feedback and learn what is still unclear about the process and adjust the guide. Create general FAQs, share in a blog post and in your pinned message on Telegram. Create ICO page FAQs to provide maximum guidance during the ICO. Make sure it’s as easy for the first time investors to participate as it is for more experienced contributors. You’ll save time and efforts on customer support, emails and handholding if you create proper guidance for the newbies.
Community Management
Communication with the community has proved to be the key factor of success. Transparency with the community about what/how/who/when/why has given us a lot of credibility and trust, creating a pool of super fans who organically contributed a lot of their energy and time into evangelizing the project & educating the rest of the community. Additionally, having a strong vision and taking no bull..it from negative folks has earned us community respect.
We’re also very happy about our decision to build our community management team from those very super fans who were not only knowledgeable about what we’re doing, but also passionate about the vision.
Community management team has proved to be critical in building that trust, delivering communication, providing handholding for newbies and resolving issues. We hired managers to cover communication on Telegram, RocketChat, Reddit and support emails 24/7 in all major timezones.
As mentioned above — no matter how much and how well you communicate the proper process for participating in the ICO, there will be people who will ignore the process and potentially not only mess up their contribution, but also become the victims of scammers.
Scam is a hugely important risk to consider. There will be attempts to impersonate admins/team, there will be attempts to lure contributors into a fake process. We even had to deal with fake (but perfectly scraped) websites created to scam people which we had to request to take down. We also have seen scammers poaching for US investors offering them a “work around” to participate in the ICO. Communication is the key once again — post scam warnings in blog posts and Telegram, launch a Telegram bot that informs the community about the risks of scammers, communicate that the team will never private message anyone asking for deposits or urging to click links, list official team / admins usernames and remind the community to always check against that list if they suspect impersonation. Create a single proper participation process informing the community that any other process is a scam.
Put Your Best Foot Forward
Finally, an ICO is a one time effort, and it’s a very short but intense effort. Your team will have to perform at the maximum capacity doing their absolute best in a very concentrated timeframe. To succeed, you’ll have to give it your best shot.
Big shoutout to JetBlue Technology Ventures for supporting the meetup and coming to meet the community and The Vault & their incredible team for hosting us!
We at Travel Tech Con are super stoked to be part of Winding Tree success & are looking forward to working towards fostering open innovation in the industry together. We will have multiple opportunities for Travel Tech Con 2018 attendees to learn more about open data, decentralized distribution, Blockchain in travel and running a successful ICO — all of it and more comes with both Startup and Regular Passes.
Pitch and Demo applications are open as well — register your startup early.
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