Dear friends,
Unfortunately we didn't reach soft cap, that's why every investor will get refund. To receive refund please go to https://ahoolee.io/tokensale and follow our instructions.
We have analyzed all our steps and identified our mistakes:
The most important thing is that we didn't communicate personally with professional investors. We did it on pre-sale but on ICO we were confident about closing the round in any case. This time we were counting on the completed questionnaires: they showed us about $4M of possible investments and we decided that we would definitely collect $1M. One of our recommendations for those who conduct ICO is to start with personal agreements with investors about closing minimum soft-cup amount, and only then go on to ICO launch.
We used too complicated ICO scheme. We decided to go against market rules and act as it is accepted in the venture market - to collect a small round with a huge discount, then collect some more but still with a big discount, etc. We carried out our rounds far apart in time. Such scheme normally work on the venture market but there are other rules in the ICO market. Apparently, crypto investors didn't understand the meaning of this scheme and didn't want to join it.
Huge discounts on pre-sale and seed-round. We focused on the amount of venture rounds in calculating tokens prices. In venture market, a huge discount is given at the pre-seed round due to the huge risks. It turned out that in the ICO market such a discount only discourages investors.
Description of the project was too complex. Unfortunately, we were not able to convey the idea of the project to regular users. It is necessary to present the project in such a way that any user could understand by one phrase whether he needs it or not.
PR in mass media was not provided in time. Well, our partners let us down and we didn't see the necessary articles before the ICO launch. Plan budget for paid publications for such cases!
Work with the community should be more active. We got an active Russian-speaking community and very inactive English-speaking one. Also we moved the links to all communities to the bottom of the landing page, which didn't contribute to users involvement. By the way, in our experience, slack is evil. There’s constant spam and scam. Also, we practically didn't make any newsletters to our subscribers, which is bad! Work hard with your email database, as it pays off.
Advisors are needed from the very beginning. We attracted the advisers quite late. I can not say that this is critical, but it is useful to have them.
Our overconfidence didn’t help as well. In fact, it affected everything but one of the most serious consequences is a too complicated smart contract followed by inability to extend the duration of the ICO, etc.
What conclusions we have made and what we will do next: we will repackage the product and may be even rebrand it. We aim to communicate the globality of our idea to the big investors. We will conduct pre-sale and ICO according to the usual market scheme, attracting professional investors in advance. This is just the beginning!