The world of tech and startups moves at a dizzying pace. And with the arrival of blockchain-based currencies, there has never been a better time to be an investor, or to launch your own Initial Coin Offering (ICO). But while these processes are relatively straightforward, they can also be highly risky for social marketers. This post aims to demystify the process and ensure that you’re primed for success.
1. Find Your Company
First thing’s first: you need to find your company. If you want to be an investor in the cryptocurrency space, you’ll want to look at coins that are offering tokens that are distributed on the same blockchain as your chosen coin. That way, there’s some element of trust between the token and the venture: if (when) project fails, you have something worth buying back from its developer.
That said, it’s not easy. The ICO market is flooded with bad products and poor developers (not every ICO is a fraud, but many are—so be very careful).
Here are some tips for finding a good investment:
– Check out their website for a bit. If it looks bad, you should probably look elsewhere. If the developers aren’t putting real effort into their project’s public image, they won’t be putting real effort into the behind-the-scenes stuff either.
– Spend a few minutes looking at their whitepaper. Does it look like they know what they’re doing? If they don’t, that’s an indication of a lack of tech knowledge—and if they’re working on something technological, that counts doubly so.
– If their website looks like it’s been built by a marketing company, or their Twitter handles look like it’s been paid for, or the discussion on Reddit is full of half-baked conspiracy theories, that’s a strong indication that they’re not competent enough to run an ICO.
– Look at the GitHubs and Bitbucket repositories of the team. Is there anything unusual? A lot of people think that The Pirate Bay is bad news and many developers will inadvertently allow their Github repositories to be “hacked” into by other people. But if there’s anything unusual about the repository it might be worth taking a look.
– Go to the project’s website and see if you can spot any typos. Guest posting sites are here.
– Check their Bitcointalk thread (if they have one). Is there anything that looks fishy? Such as obvious spelling mistakes – or a recurring theme of sales posts immediately appearing on the thread?
– If you’re trying to invest in someone who has an established team, hire a private detective. Or even better, build one yourself. This is an art in and of itself, so I can’t really go into great detail here. Just think of it as “the smell test”.
– If you’re chasing someone who hasn’t started their ICO yet, as a general rule, you should wait a few weeks to see who else wants to invest. Understandably, investors are going to want to know that the project is alive and well. If there’s no interest in people who haven’t invented yet…
2. How To Do The Sale
Now that you’ve found your company and purchased some tokens – and hopefully without too many problems – how do you sell them?
Well, first of all, you need to check the legality of running an ICO in your jurisdiction for manaul outreach (although this guide is written for UK investors… if it’s legal elsewhere then there’s nothing anyone can do about it).
Otherwise, the main way to sell tokens is with an ICO’s own website, which will give you an opportunity to find buyers and let you set some rules for the sale.
You’ll usually want to set the price of your token at a level that’s attractive enough for people to buy, but not too far above the real-world value (for example, what would you pay for that asset if it were real?). This ensures that people are willing to pay more than they would in order to make money from your venture – and at a low enough price that they can easily recoup their costs.
This part of the process is easy: just keep your finger on the gas.
Now, here’s where things get difficult. You’re going to be selling your tokens as soon as possible – and you probably want to sell them every few days for token marketing.
To do this, there are a few tricks:
– You need to build up a fair amount of a project’s tokens in order to ensure that the sale is successful. This is called the reserve pool. The simple answer is that it’s all in your ICO website – but it can also be done with some cleverly crafted text. For example, if you say “we have 10% of our tokens available for sale now”. Then after the sale, you can announce “we have 20% of the tokens in reserve now”. But if that seems too dull – here are some more interesting ways to do it:
– After your ICO, you want to build up a couple of thousand tokens in order to sell them as part of a bull run, as that will result in a much higher price. This can be done by starting a “post-ICO token sale” (where you simply sell the leftover tokens) or by holding an asset.
– Build up your reserve pool with private sales beforehand (a lot of ICOs use this tactic).
