Everything You Wanted To Know About “How To Launch An Initial Coin Offerings(ICOs)”

An ICO is a revolutionary way to raise fund for the truly good ideas and start-ups.

Explaining it in a simple way, the start-ups release tokens on a new cryptocurrency, that investors buy through existing digital currencies, usually Bitcoins or ethers, or legal tender. So, the start-ups can obtain financing for the development of their project. And investors expect those tokens to increase in value and get a high ROI.

But, evolving legal regulations and technical pitfalls make ICOs challenging path for most, however, this does not have to be the case. Our experts become your partner throughout the process of turning your idea into a profitable business.

“Digital Currency is going to be a very powerful thing.”

For instance, Indicoin, a cryptocurrency built on the Ethereum blockchain started India’s first Token sale on October 1st, 2017. The accepted currencies in indicoin are ETH, BIT and LTC and the token amount available is 550 million. The rate of INDI tokens during the Token sale was: 1 ETC= Rs. 12,500/-, 1BIT= Rs. 175,000/- and 1 LTC= Rs. 2500/-. The sale of token ended on November 1st, 2017.

So, ICOs are here to stay and If you feel you may have the next great cryptocurrency idea. Here are a few essential steps to help you get started.

Step 1: Formulate the idea of an effective plan

This step is very important because the first impression is everything.

A truly unique and innovative idea can worth thousands of dollars or more. Being able to sell an idea is vital to your success as an investor, businessperson or sales associate.

A project may not be successful at this stage, as one of the most important things to invest in cryptocurrencies are crypto tokens. And if they have been needlessly used in your project, then frankly you will be sent to make investments somewhere else.

After giving it some thought, you should know the following-

• Why do you want to launch an ICO?
• Whether the ICO digital token can be integrated into the business model in a meaningful way?
• How launching a cryptocurrency will affect your business?
• What are the project’s goals and what’s in it for the contributors?

Once you are clear on these points, you can discuss the finer aspects of the project in detail and help potential team members or investors to gain a good understanding of the project.

Step 2: Create a Talented and Experienced team

ICO is all about to be liked by your potential investors. So, from an investor’s point of view, a great team behind the project is one of the most important factors when deciding on contributing to an ICO.

Conversely, an unproven, or worse still, an anonymous team is likely to serve as a major red flag and stop people from investing. Therefore, you need a team of 5-10 people to launch the project effectively.

What kind of professionals do you need? Namely, they are a content specialist, editors, PR specialists, SMM specialists, community managers, designers, software specialists, and targeted advertising specialists. They also need to know foreign languages, otherwise, you will have to hire more language specialists.

Step 3: Examine the competitors

Analyse the most recent successful ICO projects. As we all know cryptocurrency start-up firms want to raise money through an ICO, so they create projects. This is a great opportunity to learn a lot that will help you launch your own successful project.

Step 4. Register the company

If you do not have a company, then you need to register one. It will give you more chances to succeed.

Some examples of well-known blockchain start-ups jurisdictions:

• Starta – The USA.
• MobileGo – The USA.
• Golos – Belize.
• Polybius – Estonia.
• ZrCoin – Cyprus.
• Waves platform – The United Kingdom.
• SONM – Singapore (formally in Switzerland).
• Exscudo – Estonia.
• BitCAD – Singapore.
• Interesting Fact: Founders or Co-founders of all the listed above companies are Russian guys.

Step 5: Describe the product based on the idea

You understand your business, now make sure investors do too. For this, you will have to present a white paper to them.

A white paper is a document prepared by a party in anticipation of launching a new currency. It details the commercial, technological and financial details of a new coin offering. Put simply, it’s everything investors need to know about the currency before making their mind up if they want to invest, purchase or use it.

Remember, cryptocurrencies are now attracting the attention of serious investors that control the serious money. Therefore, you should aim to build confidence in both those at the lower end of investment and the higher, more lucrative end. And also make it unique.

Finally, make sure that your white paper reflects both your company and your offering with the style and image that you want to become known for. The earlier you build your brand and make that awareness, the better your offering will do it.

Typical whitepaper structure:

• Background – how it all started.
• Introduction – a market description and the use of blockchain technology.
• Market Analysis – a deeper assessment of a market and its growth potential, including competitors.
• Introduction to the product – what product, service or project you offer.
• Product specific section – a more detailed product description, charts, tables, and calculations.
• Technical – a more detailed product description, including the technical aspects.
• Use cases – when and how to apply use cases to your project.
• Pre-ICO – a preliminary attraction of investments for the project.
• ICO – see the step 7, “Describe conditions for investors”.
• Plan for development – what we have done so far and what we plan to do, a detailed schedule and timetable for the project.
• Financial Projections – a spending plan for investments.
• Team – a management staff, key employees, and their skills, talent, and experience.
• Conclusion – a final summation.
• FAQs – collect all possible questions and publish them. As soon as new questions appear, enter them into the FAQ.

Step 6. Launch a website and an email marketing campaign

Right now, there is a paradigm shift happening on a website landing page, as it is a user-friendly design.

Website structure:

• Subscription signup form.
• Roadmap: what we intend to do and a detailed schedule through all its quarterly periods.
• Description of your ICO.
• Team: high-quality photos, brief biographies, and links to the social networks.
• Press release: like links to publications and videos of presentations and speeches.
• Product description.
• Working case examples.
• Documents: Terms and Whitepaper.
• Partners
• Contacts and social media channels

What can be sent to subscribers:

• Subscribers Newsletters – keep your updated on what’s happening in the project.
• Reminders for an investment date – on weekly, monthly, annually basis for 1 day prior to a start date.
• Reminder for an investment start date – just five minutes before the start.
• Security notifications and links to step by step guides.

Step 7: Describe conditions for investors

At this stage, you need to decide whether you will have a pre-sale and a pre-ICO. Recommended doing both. This step lets you find bugs using users as well as master your campaign on social media channels.

Project checklist:

• ICO start and end dates (recommended timeframe should not exceed four weeks)
• What type of money is accepted (Bitcoins, Ethereum, and others)
• Are there any ICO’s that have a working product?
• Is there any Roadmap?
• what will the tokens be based on?
• Tokens: What is the number of tokens issued? Is there any limit on the number of tokens issued? What will happen to unsold tokens?
• Is there any Escrow (the backers that have access to raised money)?
• Token distribution: how many tokens will go to a team, an ICO and bounty activity.
• Is this distribution an automatic or a manual?
• Who are mentors, advisers, and experts?
• What are the terms and conditions of the bounty program?
• Is there any hidden cap that stops raising money?
• Can the US citizens and citizens from other countries invest in the ICO campaign?
• Is there any motivation for investors like participation in profit, management, buyback and in the exchange market? Is that a long-term or a short-term investment?
• How much money is needed to raise to consider the ICO campaign successful?
• Is there any money return to the investors if the project doesn’t reach its funding goal?
• If the ICO project was completed successfully: What will the raised money be used for? Are there any new schemes or ICO campaigns to run for?

Step 8: Create social media channels

• Blog for a website
• Technical support
• Reddit
• Medium
• Telegram
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Slack
• LinkedIn
• If you have open source code, then add a link to GitHub
• If you can afford, use YouTube and Instagram
• If you know the Chinese language, use Weibo

Parts of channels means communication, others only informing. Follow the balance: give users the opportunity to ask questions and maintain official channels for ads and news.

Step 9. Develop and launch a bounty campaign

A bounty is a reward to users for PR activities such as to sign up for forums, participate actively in foreign language discussions, translate documents into a local language, share blog posts on social networks, and so on.

Step 10: Place the project on the list of ICO Trackers

Trackers carefully analyze your project and add it to a listing queue if it is not a scam. Some websites may charge a fee from $1 to $3 thousand dollars for it.

List of some main trackers:

• Icoalert.com
• Icorating.com
• Icocountdown.com
• Smithandcrown.com
• coinschedule.com
• Theblockchain.com
• Icotracker.net
• Tokenmarket.net
• Ico-list.com
• Tokenhub.com
• cointelegraph.com
• Icobazaar.com
• Coingecko.com

Some Chinese trackers:

• Icoage.com
• Ico365.com
• Btc9.com

New trackers come up every month. So, the list can be doubled during the preparation of your ICO.

Step 11. Use media sources to place your materials

This is pure PR work that includes compiling a list of websites, preparation of materials, and work with website editors. You can get more PR materials on the Internet.

Step 12: Launch an ad campaign

You can use any traffic sources to achieve your goal. As the main task here to sell tokens out for the first day or even an hour.

Step 13. Create an account for investor

The main account options should be able to receive cryptocurrency, transfer issued tokens to a wallet and have settings.

Additional functionality: Uploading of identification documents and additional protection.

Step 14. Translate your project into other languages

You yourself may translate it or use bounty campaigns. Here are the most popular languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, and French.

It is desirable to completely translate the site. There is no need to translate a whitepaper entirely, keep in mind only a few geeks will read it to the end.

Step 15: Issue tokens

Unfortunately, there are not so many options: Ethereum tokens based upon the Ethereum blockchain, Waves platform tokens or you can simply create your own tokens.

Step 16. Launch an ICO

Finally, the most awaited day has come. It is preferable to control an ICO campaign around the clock. Keep an eye on the process of raising money and stir up interest on social media channels, and try to make a fuss over it.

Conclusion

ICOs are going to continue being a part of cryptocurrency and blockchains. We simply cannot overlook the good that they have done. From giving birth to innovative technologies like Ethereum and Bitcoin to giving DAPP developers, around the world.

No doubt, every new thing brings some fears, speculations, myths and a blizzard of questions with it, which make the adaptation of it quite slow but which new thing does not go through ups and downs.

Just we have to look forward, what we can all do is act more responsibly and do our own research. Study the white papers, interview the team involved with the specific projects that are up for ICOs and then invest your money.

Do you have any steps or sites not listed here? Please share them in the comments below and let me know what was helpful for you!