Months of anticipation and it comes down to this – the ticking countdown timer turning to zeros, and the contributions flooding in from people all over the world.
Just 24 hours later and an office full of exhausted people breathed a collective sigh of relief – we’re on our way. The first 12 hours were hectic – members of the team took night shifts manning the emails, and verifying applications as they came in. As you can see, all of the excitement took its toll…
After 20 hours in the office!
We exceeded our expectations for the level of participation we’d get at such an early stage, and we’ve still got another three weeks left!
Right now we’re on the front of ICO bench and have already sold over $1.5 million worth of tokens in the first 48 hours - 30% of our $5 million target.
This means that we are well on our way to crowdfunding the world’s first free global crowdfunding platform. The next three weeks are going to keep us all on our toes, as more press coverage and reviews get our name in front of an increasing number of people around the world.
Learning From Our Mistakes
As with most ICOs, it didn’t all go to plan, and honestly, the first five hours were nothing short of hectic.
Some last minute issues with KYC (customer identification processes) meant that we had to delay our launch by two hours to make sure that everyone who wanted to, had the opportunity to contribute.
In hindsight, running an ICO on a Monday wasn’t the best idea – it didn’t allow us any time to resolve our issues with our identity partner before the launch went live.
It ultimately meant that it was a stressful scramble from all members of the team to run a large number of IDs through our KYC process manually.
From 2pm on Monday, it was all hands on deck to make sure these got processed within a reasonable time frame. Although this wasn’t ideal, organised teamwork meant that we were able to keep contributors updated and process the manual verifications as quickly as possible.
Scammers
As with most projects in ICO world, we had our fair share of scammers trying to take advantage of people.
We knew that this was going to happen and did our best to warn people. We had a continuously pinned message on our telegram group telling people how to avoid scammers. As soon as we noticed scammers joining our telegram group, we deleted, and banned them as quickly as we could.
Unfortunately even after being blocked, some of these scammers were still able to contact people, and despite our best efforts some people were scammed out of their money.
We are reporting all instances of scamming, to do our best to make sure that this doesn’t happen in the future.
Positive Feedback
Despite some of the early teething problems, and the initial hectic haze, we received a lot of very positive feedback about the way our client communication was handled.
We found that being transparent, and keeping contributors up to date with information was incredibly important, especially in the first few hours when we had a backlog of IDs that needed verifying.
Dedicating half of our team to customer service in the first 12 hours of the ICO ensured that we were able to be transparent and responsive. This meant that despite some of the early hiccups, we reassured our contributors that we were trustworthy, and were doing our best to get them their tokens as quickly as we could.
Some of the comments we received by email were;
“I want to say a very good customer service from admin”
“Thanks for such great community interaction, has definitely added further confidence in an interesting project.”
“Thanks so much for your support and the great work that you guys have done so far”
The majority of people were understanding, and grateful that we were able to keep them up to date and informed. After working through the initial issues with KYC, we were able to streamline our processes and get things running smoothly.
The pre-sale has taught us many valuable lessons that we can take with us going into the main ICO to make it even easier for contributors (and hopefully us too!)
Where Now?
Of course we are over the moon with our success so far, we’ve obviously captured peoples’ interest and its clear the utility that the token will have.
There’s still some way to go before we can start dancing on our desks, but we’re feeling pretty confident that this head start will be enough to tip us over our cap before the end of the pre-sale period.
The chance to contribute towards the world’s first free global crowdfunding platform at a 50% discount is enough to make most people’s ears prick up.
Our Pre-Sale ICO runs until 19th February.
Join us on our journeyto make crowdfunding free and accessible to all.