October 13, 2017 at 10:149 steps to independently launch ICO
Now many people write about conducting an ICO and all as one argue that this requires some fantastic resources, a huge team and unthinkable advertising budgets. And this is partly true if you decide to outsource everything, and just sit there and wait for the results yourself.
I decided to go my own way: conduct an ICO and raise $ 500,000 without money and a large team. There are only two of us in SmartProgress : I (Maxim Malikov) - a programmer and my business partner - Sergey Zakharov. In this article I will try to tell you the whole path of preparation for the ICO, which took us 4 months.
I learned about ICOs at the end of May, when I came across an article about how a Russian farmer issued his cryptocurrency(colony) and raised funding of $ 500,000. This news shocked me, I realized that the world has changed. More recently, the only way to attract financing was to find a large venture investor, who would also take your share and put his own rules in place.
I realized that this is our chance to attract a sufficient amount for the development of SmartProgress. But I knew absolutely nothing what to do, so I created a new goal, “Conduct an ICO for SmartProgress,” and I began to collect information bit by bit. It is on the blog of this goal that you will see the whole chain of events.
All articles assure us that the first thing to do is take care of the legal side of the issue: open a company, preferably in Singapore, open a bank account, order a package of documents from lawyers: White Paper, Terms of Condition, Privacy Policy.
In my opinion, this is a waste of money. If you want to collect exclusively cryptocurrency, then feel free to postpone the opening of the company and bank account until the successful completion of your ICO. This will save you a few thousand dollars and a couple of gray hair. You may not collect any satoshi at all (0.00000001 BTC). And even if you collect it, a legal justification is required only for the withdrawal of your cryptocurrency to fiat (ordinary money).
As for the documents: Terms of Condition, Privacy Policy, then they are basically all standard, and even lawyers make them according to the template. Therefore, take any you like on the Internet and replace the name of the project. About White Paper I will write further.
We save: about $ 5,000 and a month of our time.
This step must be completed as soon as possible. The whole ICO movement is taking place on this forum, and the greater the rank of your account, the higher the confidence of investors.
It will be a big mistake to publish your announcement about the ICO from the beginner's account. There are restrictions on the forum for leveling, so the rise to Jr. Member will take you 1.5 months, to Member - 2.5 months. Therefore, register an account and start writing comments on it, increasing your rank as soon as possible. And further. You should know that, according to the rules of the forum, beginners are not able to publish pictures, which means you can not make presentable posts about ICOs like ours or Polybius .
Here there is all the information about the ranksand periods of change of ranks, you must have time to collect a certain number of posts by the date of change of periods in order to move to the next period.
We do this stage in parallel with the rest of the preparatory work and devote 30 minutes a day to comment on other people's posts.
There are 3 options:
1. Create your own blockchain.
The most difficult and expensive. Only needed if you are creating a blockchain project. If the goal of your ICO is simply raising funds, then this option is not for you.
2. Tokens in Ethereum.
The option is much simpler, because works on the existing Ethereum blockchain, but you will need to write a smart contract. You can certainly get confused, but why such difficulties, if there is an option even easier?
3. Waves tokens.
Waves- A blockchain platform for the issuance of cryptographic tokens and crowdfunding campaigns. Its main purpose is to issue its tokens and it solves this problem in a couple of clicks. The easiest and fastest option. We chose him. It will take you a couple of hours to try, test and understand in practice how all this works.
White Paper is the main document of your project, it should contain: description of the idea, development history (if any), competitive advantages, project team, development roadmap, how much money you need, what they will be spent on, terms and details of your ICO . This is more a creative work than a legal one, you must write it yourself and it should be perfect.
As an example, you can look at White Paper SmartProgress ( eng ).
White Paper should be written in English, other languages as desired. White Paper can take anywhere from two to four weeks to get a good look.
There are several options, depending on which platform you decide to issue your tokens on.
1. Ethereum smart contract.
You write a smart contract that serves as a kind of merchant. Buyers send ether to the contract account, and the contract automatically sends your tokens in exchange. On the one hand it’s convenient, because the buyer immediately receives tokens in his ether-wallet account, and on the other hand, we limit the acceptance of funds only to ether. In addition, again, difficulties with writing a smart contract.
2. Waves DEX.
On the Waves platform, you can create public applications for the sale of your tokens in various currencies: USD, EUR, BTC, ETH, WAVES. Buyers will buy your tokens directly on the Waves exchange, and money will be credited to your account.
This is the easiest and cheapest option. In fact, without writing a single line of code, you created a way to sell your tokens and you don’t even need a website. Enough White Paper, which will write the name of your token, its address and the start time of sales. At the appointed time, you create offers and wait for purchases.
3. Creating your own site for the sale of tokens.
This option, although laborious, but we chose it.
Firstly, in our White Paper we declare that we are a team of experienced web developers with many years of experience. Therefore, it would be strange that we were too lazy to create a special site for ICO.
Secondly, the site gives us additional features, such as collecting email addresses, affiliate program, accrual of various bonuses, etc.
It took us 1 month to develop the site.
Bounty program is a reward for people who help in promoting your ICO. Payment is made by your future tokens, i.e. this is free marketing, especially the most effective one, and you need to focus on it.
When writing Bounty campaigns, they set a budget in the form of a certain percentage of the funds raised. Its size ranges from 2 to 20 percent, depending on the planned amount of funds raised. The less you intend to raise funds, the higher the percentage you should set aside for Bounty. A budget of less than $ 40,000 is already perceived as small.
For various actions of the participant should be accrued "share" of the total budget. For example, if a user with the rank of Member sets your advertising signature on the forum (an inscription that is automatically added under each post of the user), then 3 shares are charged to him, and if a user with the rank of Hero does the same, 6 shares are awarded to him. After completing the ICO, the budget is divided by the total number of shares and is paid to Bounty participants in the form of your tokens, depending on how many shares they earned.
For what actions can I reward participants?
These are only the main Bounty campaigns, there are no restrictions, you can come up with your own. But the more campaigns you come up with, the more the overall budget will be smeared, and if the total budget of the entire bounty campaign is not so big, then additional smearing will make it even less attractive from the participants.
Having analyzed a large number of participants in various Bounty campaigns, I came to the conclusion that the most effective channels are translation and signatures.
Campaigners on social networks for the most part create fake accounts with winded subscribers. Therefore, the effectiveness of this channel is practically zero. And those who have a real untwisted social account with a target audience are not ready to participate along with such fakes and receive the same payment with them. For them, the option of an affiliate program with a percentage of the funds raised will be more preferable.
As an example, you can see our Bounty campaign .
At this point, you already have a boosted account on the BitcoinTalk forum, written by White Paper, and a token sale tool has been created. It's time to set a sales date. As a rule, this is + 1 month from the date of your full preparation. This month is given to you on a marketing campaign. Less time may not be enough, more - investors' interest will cool.
The classic ICO duration is 30 days. Successful ICOs can collect the maximum amount in a matter of hours, but, and if you do not collect the minimum amount in 30 days, then you will not collect it for a longer period.
You will need to publish the announcement of your ICO on the forum in the “Forks” section in the main section in English and in the local section in Russian.
Your topic should begin with the prefix "[ANN]", which means the announcement of the ICO. When the ICO begins, you will need to replace the console with “[ICO]”.
There are 2 options for designing your topic: text and pictures. As practice shows, a post decorated with pictures looks more presentable and investors are more loyal to it.
In your topic you need to take out all the basic information from White Paper, but not to oversaturate it with unnecessary details.
Be prepared for the fact that in the English version of the forum your trust will be lower than zero. For various reasons, the teams from Russia and Ukraine in the English segment are biased and it is believed that we are all scammers, we want to raise money and dump. Therefore, you should work out the objections to this and have a good justification of why you can be trusted.
Here the fun begins. All articles about ICOs state that you will need almost $ 500,000 for an ICO ad campaign. On the one hand, they are right, because everything about advertising ICO campaigns is just fantastic money, and even air is sold in this area. But you don’t have to pay for advertising unless you buy it.
All promotion outside the BitcoinTalk forum has a very low efficiency. Because Investing in ICOs is still not a massive activity and only people who are dedicated to this industry are engaged in it. And on the forum, promotion works through Bounty where you are not required to make financial investments.
1. Translations into other languages.
As part of Bounty, you need to make as many translations of your [ANN] topic into other languages as possible.
2. Subscription campaign.
As part of the subscription campaign, participants set your advertising signature and start writing posts on the forum, other participants see this signature and if it interests them, they click on it and get on your site or [ANN] topic.
The more participants in your campaign, the more audience they will reach.
3. Raising your topic in the list.
The activity on the forum is frantic and your topic will go down very quickly, so you should constantly think about how to raise it again up.
- Have you published a Bunty campaign? Write about this in the comment on the [ANN] topic.
- Launched pages on social networks? Write about it.
- Did you translate into Chinese? Another comment.
But don't overdo it. Your comments should not look like spam, otherwise your topic will be deleted, and you will be banned and then months of preparation will go down the drain.
4. Chat with your subscribers.
If you have a website where you collect email addresses, be sure to keep a weekly newsletter with the latest news about your campaign. Tell them about your successes. What languages did you translate into, how many subscribers did you collect, where did you publish announcements about the upcoming ICO. Constantly fuel the interest of potential investors.
The start of token sales is scheduled for October 22 at 14:00 UTC. In the first 24 hours, tokens will be sold with a 20% bonus. ICO will last 30 days until November 22. Leave an email on our website to receive news and not miss the start of sales. If you still have questions about ICO SmartProgress, you can write to our telegram group .
I decided to go my own way: conduct an ICO and raise $ 500,000 without money and a large team. There are only two of us in SmartProgress : I (Maxim Malikov) - a programmer and my business partner - Sergey Zakharov. In this article I will try to tell you the whole path of preparation for the ICO, which took us 4 months.
I learned about ICOs at the end of May, when I came across an article about how a Russian farmer issued his cryptocurrency(colony) and raised funding of $ 500,000. This news shocked me, I realized that the world has changed. More recently, the only way to attract financing was to find a large venture investor, who would also take your share and put his own rules in place.
I realized that this is our chance to attract a sufficient amount for the development of SmartProgress. But I knew absolutely nothing what to do, so I created a new goal, “Conduct an ICO for SmartProgress,” and I began to collect information bit by bit. It is on the blog of this goal that you will see the whole chain of events.
What steps are needed to conduct an ICO?
Stage 1: Legal Issue
All articles assure us that the first thing to do is take care of the legal side of the issue: open a company, preferably in Singapore, open a bank account, order a package of documents from lawyers: White Paper, Terms of Condition, Privacy Policy.
In my opinion, this is a waste of money. If you want to collect exclusively cryptocurrency, then feel free to postpone the opening of the company and bank account until the successful completion of your ICO. This will save you a few thousand dollars and a couple of gray hair. You may not collect any satoshi at all (0.00000001 BTC). And even if you collect it, a legal justification is required only for the withdrawal of your cryptocurrency to fiat (ordinary money).
As for the documents: Terms of Condition, Privacy Policy, then they are basically all standard, and even lawyers make them according to the template. Therefore, take any you like on the Internet and replace the name of the project. About White Paper I will write further.
We save: about $ 5,000 and a month of our time.
Stage 2: Register for BitcoinTalk and upgrade your account
This step must be completed as soon as possible. The whole ICO movement is taking place on this forum, and the greater the rank of your account, the higher the confidence of investors.
It will be a big mistake to publish your announcement about the ICO from the beginner's account. There are restrictions on the forum for leveling, so the rise to Jr. Member will take you 1.5 months, to Member - 2.5 months. Therefore, register an account and start writing comments on it, increasing your rank as soon as possible. And further. You should know that, according to the rules of the forum, beginners are not able to publish pictures, which means you can not make presentable posts about ICOs like ours or Polybius .
Here there is all the information about the ranksand periods of change of ranks, you must have time to collect a certain number of posts by the date of change of periods in order to move to the next period.
We do this stage in parallel with the rest of the preparatory work and devote 30 minutes a day to comment on other people's posts.
Stage 3: Choosing a Token Issuing Platform
There are 3 options:
1. Create your own blockchain.
The most difficult and expensive. Only needed if you are creating a blockchain project. If the goal of your ICO is simply raising funds, then this option is not for you.
2. Tokens in Ethereum.
The option is much simpler, because works on the existing Ethereum blockchain, but you will need to write a smart contract. You can certainly get confused, but why such difficulties, if there is an option even easier?
3. Waves tokens.
Waves- A blockchain platform for the issuance of cryptographic tokens and crowdfunding campaigns. Its main purpose is to issue its tokens and it solves this problem in a couple of clicks. The easiest and fastest option. We chose him. It will take you a couple of hours to try, test and understand in practice how all this works.
Stage 4: Writing White Paper
White Paper is the main document of your project, it should contain: description of the idea, development history (if any), competitive advantages, project team, development roadmap, how much money you need, what they will be spent on, terms and details of your ICO . This is more a creative work than a legal one, you must write it yourself and it should be perfect.
As an example, you can look at White Paper SmartProgress ( eng ).
White Paper should be written in English, other languages as desired. White Paper can take anywhere from two to four weeks to get a good look.
Stage 5: Choosing a way to sell tokens
There are several options, depending on which platform you decide to issue your tokens on.
1. Ethereum smart contract.
You write a smart contract that serves as a kind of merchant. Buyers send ether to the contract account, and the contract automatically sends your tokens in exchange. On the one hand it’s convenient, because the buyer immediately receives tokens in his ether-wallet account, and on the other hand, we limit the acceptance of funds only to ether. In addition, again, difficulties with writing a smart contract.
2. Waves DEX.
On the Waves platform, you can create public applications for the sale of your tokens in various currencies: USD, EUR, BTC, ETH, WAVES. Buyers will buy your tokens directly on the Waves exchange, and money will be credited to your account.
This is the easiest and cheapest option. In fact, without writing a single line of code, you created a way to sell your tokens and you don’t even need a website. Enough White Paper, which will write the name of your token, its address and the start time of sales. At the appointed time, you create offers and wait for purchases.
3. Creating your own site for the sale of tokens.
This option, although laborious, but we chose it.
Firstly, in our White Paper we declare that we are a team of experienced web developers with many years of experience. Therefore, it would be strange that we were too lazy to create a special site for ICO.
Secondly, the site gives us additional features, such as collecting email addresses, affiliate program, accrual of various bonuses, etc.
It took us 1 month to develop the site.
Stage 6: Writing a Bounty Campaign
Bounty program is a reward for people who help in promoting your ICO. Payment is made by your future tokens, i.e. this is free marketing, especially the most effective one, and you need to focus on it.
When writing Bounty campaigns, they set a budget in the form of a certain percentage of the funds raised. Its size ranges from 2 to 20 percent, depending on the planned amount of funds raised. The less you intend to raise funds, the higher the percentage you should set aside for Bounty. A budget of less than $ 40,000 is already perceived as small.
For various actions of the participant should be accrued "share" of the total budget. For example, if a user with the rank of Member sets your advertising signature on the forum (an inscription that is automatically added under each post of the user), then 3 shares are charged to him, and if a user with the rank of Hero does the same, 6 shares are awarded to him. After completing the ICO, the budget is divided by the total number of shares and is paid to Bounty participants in the form of your tokens, depending on how many shares they earned.
For what actions can I reward participants?
- Translation of your announcement on the forum, site, white paper into other languages.
- Setting your advertising signature on the forum
- Social Media Postings
- Writing Articles
- Video Release
These are only the main Bounty campaigns, there are no restrictions, you can come up with your own. But the more campaigns you come up with, the more the overall budget will be smeared, and if the total budget of the entire bounty campaign is not so big, then additional smearing will make it even less attractive from the participants.
Having analyzed a large number of participants in various Bounty campaigns, I came to the conclusion that the most effective channels are translation and signatures.
Campaigners on social networks for the most part create fake accounts with winded subscribers. Therefore, the effectiveness of this channel is practically zero. And those who have a real untwisted social account with a target audience are not ready to participate along with such fakes and receive the same payment with them. For them, the option of an affiliate program with a percentage of the funds raised will be more preferable.
As an example, you can see our Bounty campaign .
Step 7: Assign a start date for token sales and duration
At this point, you already have a boosted account on the BitcoinTalk forum, written by White Paper, and a token sale tool has been created. It's time to set a sales date. As a rule, this is + 1 month from the date of your full preparation. This month is given to you on a marketing campaign. Less time may not be enough, more - investors' interest will cool.
The classic ICO duration is 30 days. Successful ICOs can collect the maximum amount in a matter of hours, but, and if you do not collect the minimum amount in 30 days, then you will not collect it for a longer period.
Stage 8: We publish the announcement on the forum
You will need to publish the announcement of your ICO on the forum in the “Forks” section in the main section in English and in the local section in Russian.
Your topic should begin with the prefix "[ANN]", which means the announcement of the ICO. When the ICO begins, you will need to replace the console with “[ICO]”.
There are 2 options for designing your topic: text and pictures. As practice shows, a post decorated with pictures looks more presentable and investors are more loyal to it.
In your topic you need to take out all the basic information from White Paper, but not to oversaturate it with unnecessary details.
Be prepared for the fact that in the English version of the forum your trust will be lower than zero. For various reasons, the teams from Russia and Ukraine in the English segment are biased and it is believed that we are all scammers, we want to raise money and dump. Therefore, you should work out the objections to this and have a good justification of why you can be trusted.
Stage 9: Advertising
Here the fun begins. All articles about ICOs state that you will need almost $ 500,000 for an ICO ad campaign. On the one hand, they are right, because everything about advertising ICO campaigns is just fantastic money, and even air is sold in this area. But you don’t have to pay for advertising unless you buy it.
All promotion outside the BitcoinTalk forum has a very low efficiency. Because Investing in ICOs is still not a massive activity and only people who are dedicated to this industry are engaged in it. And on the forum, promotion works through Bounty where you are not required to make financial investments.
How to increase audience coverage in the forum?
1. Translations into other languages.
As part of Bounty, you need to make as many translations of your [ANN] topic into other languages as possible.
2. Subscription campaign.
As part of the subscription campaign, participants set your advertising signature and start writing posts on the forum, other participants see this signature and if it interests them, they click on it and get on your site or [ANN] topic.
The more participants in your campaign, the more audience they will reach.
3. Raising your topic in the list.
The activity on the forum is frantic and your topic will go down very quickly, so you should constantly think about how to raise it again up.
- Have you published a Bunty campaign? Write about this in the comment on the [ANN] topic.
- Launched pages on social networks? Write about it.
- Did you translate into Chinese? Another comment.
But don't overdo it. Your comments should not look like spam, otherwise your topic will be deleted, and you will be banned and then months of preparation will go down the drain.
4. Chat with your subscribers.
If you have a website where you collect email addresses, be sure to keep a weekly newsletter with the latest news about your campaign. Tell them about your successes. What languages did you translate into, how many subscribers did you collect, where did you publish announcements about the upcoming ICO. Constantly fuel the interest of potential investors.
A bit on our ICO:
The start of token sales is scheduled for October 22 at 14:00 UTC. In the first 24 hours, tokens will be sold with a 20% bonus. ICO will last 30 days until November 22. Leave an email on our website to receive news and not miss the start of sales. If you still have questions about ICO SmartProgress, you can write to our telegram group .