We need to talk about ICOs.
I believe in them, wholeheartedly. I really do. But I am at that tipping/turning/fork in the road point in my ICO attitude.
There are SO many ICOs. So many are legitimate and so many are not. That is the current reality of it. With Governments worldwide wanting to regulate ICOs, the Crypto Community (CC) are screaming out ‘Wait! we need to educate people! We need to show people how to spot dodgy ICOs!!’. I was on board with this type of thinking and spent time finding ‘boxes to tick’ and what to ‘look out for’ and handing that information onto others as a bit of a guide to help discern whether or not an ICO is worth investing in or not. Which seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was. BUT I have had so many ICOs come across my table lately. Seemingly good people with seemingly good ideas but they did not even come close to living up to what many people in the CC have come believe is a good ICO. Just because you can sell ice to an Eskimo doesn’t mean you can sell a token.
It has quite clearly become a pissing match between ICOs as to who can raise the most money. ‘I raised 17 million!’. ‘Well…. I raised 56 million!’. And on the discussion goes. Quite frankly… this is bullshit and it has to stop. It is insane and you are probably going to fail because you have too much money. Throwing money at a problem will NOT SOLVE a problem.
It is time we start demanding more from ICOs.
Here is a little guide, in my humble opinion, that will help bring integrity and true creativity back to ICOs!
ICO Guide
Keep. it. simple.
You are not selling an online course or service, you are selling an idea. I see SO MANY ICOs, especially in Australia, adhering to marketing rules from completely different sectors. Especially the ‘add value’ rule. You go to an ICO site and they are THROWING, no, JAMMING value down your throat. That makes me confused and annoyed. What is your idea? Is it this, no wait… now you are saying its this, hold on… what is this!? Pick an idea and DO IT WELL. That is your value proposition. That is it. I don’t need ‘$100,000 worth of value for only $10,000!’. That marketing trick does NOT WORK in Crypto, stop it!
Its called White Paper for a reason.
Your White Paper… should be white. I don’t want it black with heaps of random graphics and stock photos! I consult one on one with clients all the time and when they meet with me, I like to print out the white paper and we go through it together to make sure its the correct coin for them. It should set out what a White Paper is supposed to set out, use clear and concise language to get across what you currently have and leave it white! By all means, use graphics if necessary, if it helps you illustrate a point. But I don’t care about the Invisalign stock photo model smiling like she just bought your coin and it went to the moon. Your White Paper will evolve with you, keep it simple to begin with and let people know that it will evolve and be amended over time! It doesn’t have to be perfect, it needs to tell the truth and be a work in progress which also acts as a guide for your business! The White Paper is just as much for you as it is for the Public.
Take some advice from Kendrick Lamar…
Sit down, lil’ b*tch, be humble. Never in a million years did I ever think I would apply that song to anything, I don’t even like the song, but when I see ICOs put their hands out for millions of dollars… that song automatically starts playing in my head. You, as a brand new idea with an ICO, do not deserve millions of dollars. If your idea is sound and you do a great job, absolutely, you deserve millions of dollars!! You deserve the financial freedom making the world a better place brings! Until then… no. You need a timeline which not only sets out what targets you would like to hit and how much money you need to hit those targets and your seed rounds should help you humbly fund that.
For example: Hi! My name is Casey, I have this FANTASTIC IDEA its revolutionary and uses blockchain technology! Here is my White Paper (sorry its not perfect, but it is a work in progress and I worked very hard on it), and here is my timeline of what I hope to achieve by when! For me to hit the first mark on the timeline I need a developer, someone to help me develop my white paper and money for basic marketing and to be able to put food on the table and fuel in my car! This is going to cost $100,000.
The first seed round is now open for tokens at 4c, when I hit $100,000 the seed round closes. ‘Get in quick because at only 4c, this is a bargain and you wait! I will hit all my targets!’. The first seed round gets me my 100k and I set to work.
In three months, and all the way along communicating with my investors and answering questions, I hit the next target on my timeline. Time for seed round number two! I need $400,000 to hire a full-time developer that concentrates on the code, another to concentrate on security, a marketing whizz (who has read Casey’s ICO guide! ha!), money to cover our costs for testing the platform etc, and to hire myself full time! Hit that 400k target! YES! Seed round two closed.
Three months have passed and this baby is humming like a dream, we have our prototype, an amazing team, excited investors because they have followed us along and we have kept them updated. Time for seed round three! This time we don’t have a monetary target, we have a deadline of two weeks. This two weeks will help us determine how much we launch the token during its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for! So, we are letting the market decide how much you value our hard work, effort, and dedication to this project!
Two weeks pass, people have gone ballistic trying to get my token at 12c! Hence I figure I can do an ICO for 75c! A long way from my 4c days!
Or on the other hand, people may not go nuts, which lands my ICO in the 15c range, which is FINE! It just means I have more groundwork to do. Maybe there is something I am doing wrong. Maybe my marketing isn’t working? Maybe I’m not being transparent enough? Maybe I’m not delivering the product I promised and have gone off on other tangents about other ways to ‘add value’ to my token. It’s a learning opportunity.
During your ICO, get your 17 million and change the world and let yourself and your investors benefit from your amazing new thing! But until you have proven yourself, been humble, asked for what you need, shown you can deliver, ONLY then, can you put your hand out for millions. Because otherwise you don’t deserve it and you will intentionally or unintentionally end up losing people money and that is not a nice thing to do.
Everyone needs a face.
The time of nameless, faceless, money grabbing, unaccountable corporations is up. You need an active, engaging and passionate face at the helm to keep your investors in the loop and allow you to get a strong foothold of trust in your area. Think Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum, or Changpeng Zhao of Binance. Neither of them are stellar marketers and certainly not George Clooney-esk, work a room socialites. They are themselves, they are passionate and they fight for what they have created and they fight for the people who believe in them! Changpeng Zhao is a major standout at this point in time as, when things go wrong, he is on twitter giving updates. He is honest about what happened, he doesn’t get emotional, he sees a problem and he fixes it. End of story, bravo. People love Binance because it has a name and a face that has proved he and his team can accomplish what they set out to do… time and time again. They deserve all the millions that have come their way because of it!
I could go on and on.
Let’s leave it there! They are a few simple things that you really should keep in mind when starting out in this space because the CC wants to see it thrive. We DONT want to see an uneducated buyer throw money at shitcoins because they heard all cryptos make money. I don’t want to be at a nice hotel in France, laying by the pool next to someone who ‘once had an ICO’. I want to be laying next to the person who successfully delivered, made the world a better place and I want to hear their story.