Airdrops as a Way of Raising Finance

ICOs are soooo 2017. Freestone’s bold prediction is that airdrops will explode in popularity this year.

Why Airdrops?
They bypass all those pesky regulators in one deft step! It also obviates the need for all those expensive ‘ICO advisors’ that amazingly appeared about two weeks after the ICO crazy started last year.

“For only $50,000, let our experienced consultants guide you through the minefield of raising finance with an ICO.”

‘Experienced consultants?’ It was only invented two weeks ago!

I’d have much more respect for them if they had offered their service on a no-win-no-fee basis (in fact, that’s a project I’d be happy to start with someone).

People’s interests have to be aligned, we need to move away from this parasitic way of doing business.

Anyway, Airdrops as a way of raising finance, back to the matter at hand!

Watching the verbal contortions that the EOS project has had to do to appear compliant with regulators, and this a big multi-billion dollar operation, it struck me that the ‘little guy’ has no chance. What should have been a new dawn… a way of projects raising finance cheaply and easily without getting caught in the webs of the regulators, or sucked dry by sundry middlemen, quickly reverted to the old way of doing business. It typically takes a few hundred thousand dollars to launch an ICO now, and 70%+ fail to reach their funding goals.

Could Airdropping be a way to fix this?
My idea is simple. I’m STILL trying to figure out a way of raising finance for my own (no techie, non-blockchain) project. It struck me that a no/low-cost way of potentially generating funds (and interest) would be to create, say, 10 million tokens on Bitshares or Ethereum, then airdrop 5 million of them to anyone holding a particular crypto (maybe Ether). Or a more sophisticated way might be that they have to claim them by joining a Telegram group, or watching a 2 minute video about the project. Most people that receive our free tokens won’t be interested in the project (though hopefully a percentage would be), so now we have to figure out a way of giving the tokens value. That’s the tricky part!

What could give the airdropped tokens value?
That's the tricky part. I can see various almost worthless airdrops in my MyEtherWallet that I've been sent, I'm guessing those projects didn't gain traction. We need a mechanism of getting large numbers of people engaged with the project, or it just disappears into obscurity. We need to bootstrap an active community with the airdrop that would become enthused supporters of the project. Maybe this could be connected in some way to Smart media Tokens, or Communities on Steemit when they come online.

Maybe we could give tokens to select 'thought leaders' in the crypto space that would talk about the project and raise awareness of it, I know that this is an accepted practice.

Holders could be entitled to a discount from us if they used our service, or you could pay for the service this way. I.e, instead of charging someone $250 for a consultation, they can pay with 250 tokens instead. This might peg the tokens at around $1 each. Or alternatively each token holder is entitled to a dividend each month based on some metric (number of patients seen for example).

Tokens will also gain a value if they start being traded back & forth, but this would probably only happen AFTER we had established that they had some intrinsic value in the real world.

What’s in it for us?
Well as we had retained 5 million tokens, and the tokens became pegged at around $1 (in this example), then we had successfully raised $5 million, all without having to comply with any regulators or pay ‘advisors’ a dime.

Thoughts please.
Is this naive? Has it been tried before? Anyone interested in joining the project?