I was told by a professor at UCLA and 3 alumni that I need to raise at least $500K to have an ICO

But I thought the ICO was to raise money?

They told me that you cannot have an ICO without a budget of at least $500K to $1M (to pay for marketing, website, and legal), and I keep asking myself why the hell anyone would have an ICO if they have $1M? Would you not instead take that money and go build your product?

People are literally raising money to raise money

They also said I should go through a Venture Capitalist or something of the sort in order to raise money to have an ICO. This is sick as the whole purpose of the ICO is to raise money (and provide a token that can be used in your ecosystem), so why would you need to raise money to raise money? These “companies” are raising money to pay for advertisements and marketing to brainwash unsuspecting people into buying their token, which if it was any good in the first place they wouldn’t need all this fancy pancy bull.

Any company doing this is almost guaranteed to fail for a few reasons:

• They didn’t even bother trying to be creative, as if throwing money at something will solve it
• They started off selling a good chunk of their company in order to raise money for who knows what
• They don’t really have any good ideas, just money to initiate a ponzi scheme
• Their tokens are worthless and have no real world value (buying a skin in a video game…really?)
• If anything goes wrong in their company the only thing they know how to do is throw money at it…what happens when the money runs out?

The Beauty in Bootstrapping

First off I don’t have any choice other than to bootstrap this, but fuck it I prefer it that way. I mean if I had $1M my team could go start our company and not do an ICO, but I don’t, so an ICO is a really efficient way to raise the money our company needs, and on top of that with the nature of what we are doing (creating the future of housing and a blockchain based marketplace — see tmrrw.org to learn more) we can integrate a token into our ecosystem seamlessly.

We are currently in the stages of preparing to launch our ICO, we announced the date some days ago and are now trying to build awareness and interest for it. We are working on getting the alpha version of our marketplace going before the launch to give the Time Tokens immediate use, and after we (if we) raise the money we will work hard to get out the brick & mortar marketplace (which will only sell products that can be traced on the blockchain from materials to final product and will only accept Time Tokens as payment) and build the first iteration of the House of Tomorrow (a house that incorporates all the important technologies available and is completely solar powered), all in Los Angeles, CA.

So how have we gotten to where we are now and how are we getting to where we need to be?

• Met with architecture firms who will help us bring the house to life if the ICO goes as planned

• Built the website ourselves

• Shot & edited the video ourselves

• Created the token using Ethereum’s ERC20 contract

• We’ve done everything ourselves — about ~$250K saved according to the UCLA alums. However there are things we need money for (like buying land and building the house) that we can’t do ourselves and that is what the ICO is for.

• Now we are spreading the word and hoping for the best. If it works out then awesome, we accomplished what we set out to do. — another ~$250K in marketing expenses saved.

If you’re interested to see where we are at, see our website: tmrrw.org