ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings has succeeded in grabbing the attention of a really vast populace last year, with a staggering 1199 ICO raking in over 7 Billion USD. Interestingly, a prominent share of the ICOs funded projects are based on the decentralized ledger technology or blockchain technology and promises to make a big impact on the respective domains due to its decentralized nature. ICOs have helped a good number of entrepreneurs realize their projects by selling the idea to the general populace and accordingly raising funds. Startups are unchained by bypassing the regulated and tedious fund-raising process required by banks or venture capitalists. However, latest trends point out that ICOs aren’t performing very well, 75% of the ICOs fail to attain their soft cap. Today, making an ICO successful is really challenging. In this article, we’ll see the prime factors that drag an ICO into failure and how one should tackle it to make an ICO successful.
Launching an ICO is no cakewalk, one has to go through a series of procedures and steps before they can launch their ICO. For any ICO, the most important piece is the token distribution and token sales. The second important part for any ICO is everything else other than token distribution and sales. Every ICO founder is aware of this fact and they spend a huge amount of money to build up a platform to do token sales and distribution. The woe is, they spend too much energy, money and time to build up the platform and miss out to focus on other important pieces of an ICO campaign such as community engagement, marketing, advisors onboarding and so on. Such inadequate focus leads the founders to a mediocre execution of overall ICO campaign, and sadly, they fail before reaching the softcap.
There is a major dent in investor confidence in ICOs due to the alarming rise in the amount of ICO scams surfacing worldwide. Fraudulent ICOs have looted millions of hard-earned money of investors worldwide last year and this has ignited an alarm for the investor community. Investors are increasingly wary about investing in upcoming ICOs, given the alarming rise in the number of ICO scams with each passing day. Most ICOs make tall claims about their offerings to attract investors but underdeliver on their promises once they receive the funding that they seek. You may have a truly revolutionary product, but without the backing of a prominent influencer or a celebrity, your product may never reach the light of day. Because investors are sceptical about ICOs and they only wish to invest in projects which have a huge backing. Unfortunately, if your team does not have such an impressive backing, it is most likely to fail unless you can attain trust from the investor community about your campaign and project.
Step 1: Don’t reinvent the wheel
As said above, the most important piece to make your ICO successful is the platform for token sales. And if you spend your valuable time, money and energy on hiring someone to build a tokensale platform, you are essentially reinventing the wheel. The best option is to choose a proven ICO platform like CoinFactory. Choosing such a platform gives you a bunch of benefits;
Rather than reinventing the wheel, spend your time, energy and money on marketing and other ICO planning, which would definitely pay back once the token sales are launched. If interested, you can download a complete ICO checklist from the given link. This checklist would help you understand various processes, action items and deliverables you need to take care of your ICO campaign.
Step 2: Make your ICO campaign trustable for the investor community
This was the most challenging thing to do. But, it’s not anymore. CoinFactory'smilestone contract feature makes an ICO trustworthy. Before jumping into how CoinFactory makes your ICO campaign legit in front of investors, let us see a bit about the platform.
CoinFactory built by Accubits Technologies is the #1 ICO platform available on the market today. This unique platform plays the perfect host for the companies looking to launch their ICO, by offering end-to-end services. It is one of the most secure and highly scalable platforms to launch ICOs. To its credit, it has the distinction of hosting aXpire—the first and fastest of its kind ERC223 token based ICOs in the world. Its unmatched customization options and superior security features make it the platform of choice for users both small and large, having helped them rake in over US$ 120 million through just nine ICOs. The platform employs a transparent mode of payment wherein customers pay the license fee to avail of all related services, right from setting up the system on the servers of the user. This helps provide the in-house engineering team with a complete access to the source code, giving the user complete control over the system. Moreover, the enterprise-grade, round the clock support, backed up by the extensive and highly competent team of Blockchain developers, DevOps engineers, backend developers, and security testers at Accubits ensures that even smaller players have an equal opportunity to market their novel products to the mass audiences, without involving themselves in the technicalities of ICOs.
Unlike normal ICOs, CoinFactory’s optional ‘milestone-contract’ based ICOs stores a part of raised funds in a smart contract. The platform allows the founder to define various milestones for his projects and a group of champions from the investor community can verify the completion of a milestone. Doing so, the fund for the next milestone will be released from the milestone contract. These milestones can easily be tracked by investors, wherein they can verify if the ICO has delivered on its commitments at each stage, and accordingly, the defined funds for next stage is released from the contract to the wallet of the founder. This helps bring about a sense of accountability for companies involved in the ICO and also helps instill a sense of security among investors. This helps companies differentiate their offerings, build consumer trust, and in the process, significantly increases investment.
With all the technical aspects of things off their shoulders and the subsequent significant reduction in capital investment, companies can focus all their resources on their core strength and let their product shine through. This revolutionary platform is undoubtedly the need of the hour and would most certainly bring back much-needed sanity to the highly lucrative, yet chaotic world of ICOs. A win-win situation for all. Make your ICOs successful, Happy ICOing!
