A Long but non-definitive list of ICO and Blockchain web resources

smga3000 (30)in #ico • 7 years ago (edited)

Do you have an idea for a blockchain based concept and are thinking that an ICO could be a great way to raise money? It is a great way to raise money, however there is a lot involved with the process of putting together an ICO, from actually having a viable idea, to building a proof of concept then doing the white paper, building your team, establishing your web and social media presence. I am currently going through this process with my own ICO for my game company www.saavgames.com and the ICO is at www.saavcoin.com. What I found was interesting, and in return for you reading this post, I’m giving you the list of ICO and crypto websites and youtube accounts that I put together.

I’ve been releasing commercial software on a variety of platforms since the year 2000. I had a big PR list of places that I’d send press releases to and content for possible stories. None of those places charged any money to run that information. So in preparation for our ICO, I gathered all the sites that I could find and prepared to submit information. What I wasn’t prepared for was a large portion of them came back with a price list (if they got back at all) to simply add you to a flat list of ICO’s, and this price averaged from $2,000 to $4,000 USD. The lowest I encountered was $150, the highest was $10,000. Very few of these companies would provide any detailed analytics to justify their pricing. Having 50,000 followers on Twitter doesn’t actually mean anything with regard to click through rates for example.

To start off, you want to put a really nice announcement on Bitcoin Talk https://bitcointalk.org - now, I probably hadn’t researched this enough and my own proclivity is towards non-marketing style information, so my post was a raw informational one without graphics or marketing talk. I almost immediately got this private message:

Hello,

Would you like to bump your ICO ANN thread and bounty thread always?

We have +100 bitcointalk accounts and we can making 100s of good comments to your threads and bumping it to receive the most possible of traffic.

Here is the details of our offer

400 good comments about them project + 100 on bounty thread = 1 btc
1000 good comments about them project + 300 on bounty thread = 2 btc
2500 good comments about them project + 600 on bounty thread = 3 btc

No wonder so many of these sites are concerned with spam, the volume is insane. The problem with a company doing an ICO is that the money comes in after the ICO, so all these front loaded costs become problematic. Of bigger concern is that almost everything you read about an ICO was paid to get in front of you, the reviews, the videos, the writeups, the listings the press releases. Very little of it was done without some palm greasing along the way.

It’s still the wild west in the crypto crowd, it reminds me a lot of the mid 90’s when we were first building internet companies and Internet Explorer was just coming out. There is a ton of opportunity here, but sadly a lot of fraud and abuse as well. So, with no further adieu, here is my non-definitive, but long list, of ICO and blockchain news resources.