A white paper has become a must-have attribute of any ICO: it instills trust and a sense of credibility in your potential investors. Take a look at a crypto expert ripping through a white paper to see what you can do better.
Putting a white paper front and center on your website is the first thing to do before reaching out to the crypto community. As soon as serious albania phone number data investors land on an ICO campaign website, they start looking for a white paper with details on a product roadmap, industry and competition landscape, tokenomics, etc.
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Get Out a White Paper
At the minimum, you must reserve some space in your white paper for the following bits:
- Problem and solution definition
- Market & competitive environment analysis
- Details of your token economy
- Team overview
You may want to review the white papers from the 10 most successful ICOs to get a head start with your white paper.
Collin Thompson, a co-founder of Intrepid Ventures, suggests that you also publish a position paper before releasing a white paper. The position paper a digital marketing plan is much shorter — two or three pages long or a point-blank one-pager. You can use the position paper to gather the initial feedback and write a killer 30-page-or-so white paper.
6. Build Your Community
Since your potential investor is practically anyone with a crypto wallet, you need to target them via all available marketing channels to generate interest in the upcoming ICO and the cryptocurrency. Running social accounts goes without saying, however, the tech-savvy public will expect at least a presence on Reddit and BitcoinTalk forums.
Next on the marketing to-do list is adding your ICO to ICO listings — sites displaying past, active, and scheduled ICOs. Just search for ICO listings on Google to get a nice list.
Doing interviews and visiting conferences goes a long way as well. Besides getting a chance to pitch your ICO to industry veterans, you will also make necessary connections to get that special advisor on your advisory board.
Since ICOs are still relatively new, it’s only bz lists natural that people will bombard you with myriads of questions. So, make sure you have a public Slack, Telegram, or Discord channel set up to chat with your supporters.
7. Pick Token Sale Model
Currently, an ICO launch mostly takes place on the Ethereum blockchain platform because it supports smart contracts — the prime tool for automating token generation and distribution. We’ll talk about this in a moment. Meanwhile, let’s look through some of the popular models of token sales.
Soft Caps
The soft cap is the minimal amount of funds the ICO needs to raise to become successful. When ICOs fail to reach their soft caps, contributors need to request their investment back.
Hard Caps
The hard cap is the maximum amount of funds allowed for raising. An ICO stops once it has reached the hard cap.
Uncapped with Fixed Rate
- ICO’s duration is not limited
- Fixed token-to-cryptocurrency exchange ratio
- Early contributors get a discount
- No limit on the number of contributors and amount raised
Capped with Fixed Rate
- ICO’s duration is limited to several months
- Fixed token-to-cryptocurrency exchange ratio
- First-come-first-serve basis for tokens offering
- The number of tokens available for sale is limited
Check out this brief video detailing an innovative token sale model employed by Raiden to grasp the idea of the next model we will discuss:
Dutch Auction
When using the Dutch Auction approach, you don’t have to set the price of a token in advance. As soon as the sale starts, a smart contract begins accepting bids until all tokens are sold. All bids align from high to low, and higher bids get priority in receiving tokens.
Hybrid
As the number of ICOs continues to grow, companies keep innovating token sale models trying to mix different approaches. The goal here is to get tokens distributed among a quality user base, interested in your product and not planning on immediate speculations as soon as the token becomes available for trading.
One thing to note here is that overcomplicating the sales model for ICO could repel your early supporters and make the ICO vulnerable to attacks.
8. Develop Smart Contract and Mint Tokens
To generate the tokens and automate the token distribution process, you need to develop a smart contract. The industry standard is the ERC-20 token. It’s a specification that outlines smart contract parameters for an ICO.
In everyday practice, companies vouch for smart contract templates provided by OpenZeppelin on an open-source basis. These smart contracts have been hard-tested by the blockchain industry veterans, who have already run a successful ICO. And some extra caution with your investors’ contributions can never hurt — as soon as a smart contract is deployed to the blockchain, you have very little control over it.
Therefore, you should audit your smart contract before deploying it to Ethereum. Usually, after rigorous internal testing, companies make their smart contracts available for a public review and offer bug bounties for reported glitches.
Besides developing a smart contract for minting tokens and distributing them among your supporters, you might also want to develop a web app with UI for the personal account. Such an investment management application will help contributors monitor their assets and access project info at any time.
9. Launch ICO
When the day X comes, just as programmed in an Ethereum smart contract, the ICO will begin automatically. It’s always a good idea to create a web interface to allow live demonstration of the token sale process.
10. Post-ICO Life
Let’s hope that with the right team your ICO will launch successfully. From this moment, your company will be closely watched by blockchain experts, multiple ICO listing sites, homegrown experts with a strong following on YouTube and other social networks. It’s not the time to rest on your laurels.
It’s vital to keep communication flowing with your community of supporters, provide transparency with the deliverables, and certainly keep building your great product!
Now, you know how to start with the launch of an ICO and hopefully are inspired to keep pursuing your project. Since companies often need help with ICO strategy development and execution, Velvetech is here to help.
Let us know if you have any questions about launching a successful ICO or developing smart contracts and other ICO technology. Velvetech will be happy to help you run a successful ICO!