If you’ve read my article, “Killing Marketing Plan for my ICO,” you’ve probably found strange the delay for the following promised next chapters. I know, I am late — that was already 10 weeks ago.
In the last weeks, some important things have happened that made me question and rethink about most of my ICO Marketing assumptions.
I am working for two startups and three ICO projects, and I have been invited to participate in several more projects. All of them with different teams, roadmap stages, and business markets (with diverse geographic and social-cultural sensibilities).
I had to read, review, and comment on several documents, whitepapers, presentations, and reports, as well as do market research and discuss new ideas and specific aspects for each project with founders, advisors, and investors. These have been very intense weeks of learning, developing, creating, and working with people from diverse and multicultural backgrounds. This has been hard work but also very rewarding.
During all those days, after closing all pending issues, I barely found some time to relax and think about all the things happening now — reflections about the ICO market, the models and strategies, and in what way my fundamentals have evolved. This market is changing fast and in an exciting way.
I have become more critical about certain things I have read, the general assumptions. I have started to dig deeper into certain information I have received. I have also begun to have some questions over what I thought was clear to me.
The ICO landscape is approaching the traditional IPO models.
The “traditional” ICO Marketing Strategy needs to adapt. We need to rethink some of the principals that were valid three months ago, and reevaluate the way they should be put in place, or the importance of their outcome.
Investors are demanding more business consistency, as there should have been from the beginning. The outcome of social networks is changing: the thousands of Twitter followers or huge Telegram Communities are becoming less relevant as key features to attract investors.
People have become fed up with the social networks pushing posts; they are boring and start to look the same everywhere.
The Airdrops and Bounty Schemes are reduced to the simple task of populating social media channels, just to make noise to (supposedly) attract “investors.” These activities provide swarms of people just looking for free tokens and returning nothing to the promoters. They are feeding the DUMP stream.
I wonder if relevant investors (the so-called whales) would be attracted to an ICO just because they have thousands of Airdrops and Bounty Hunters.
The “market crash” or “correction” (you choose) created a “cleaning” process on the “micro-investors” ecosystem, those who invest 100USD with the hope to collect 200USD in a few weeks. They have been widely affected, and many have lost their “money” while others are holding their tokens in despair.
Every day we are confronted with new scams, Pump&Dump groups, flocks of self-proclaimed ICO experts, influencers, advisors, marketing and PR agencies, etc.
The ICO/Crypto ban from Facebook (and related partners like Mailchimp), Twitter, Google, and other “Ads” providers, and the continuous and always surprising news about country regulations or temporary bans, and later amendments or decision rollbacks, are making people much more cautious and suspicious about the news and information stream around social networks.
It is increasingly critical to drive with the greatest attention on this new road if you want to reach your destination safely.
Well, at least this last market dump has inoculated a (temporary) caution virus on everybody, and a lot of new business opportunities were created around this new market.
There still are vloggers and good writers and influencers with an important role to attract people for investment opportunities.
And we have an increase of Blockchain-Crypto-Invest events happening all over the world, in the good old-fashioned style of face-to-face contact and promoting your ideas.
The next months will be critical for the ICO global market.
The ICO financing model is evolving as well. DAICO, suggested by Vitalik Buterin in January 2018, and other models will come in a few months. (https://cointelegraph.com/explained/what-is-a-daico-explained)
For most of the ICO projects I am looking at, I would ask, for what reason do they require 10 million immediately? Why not one million now? And after that, on the off chance that you convey what they proposed, we could discuss the following five million.
With the new regulatory measures coming our way, we will have soon new tools for legal validation for ICOs and investors. New (BIG) players are coming to the party too. We better watch out — if we don’t, we will become small fishes to feed the Big Fishes.
Now you may understand why I had to throw away my previous articles.
These are some of the new thoughts that come to me lately that have me rethinking and starting to write new stuff about ICO-Marketing-Business.
I have to hurry up, in order to present you the next articles in time and before new and relevant changes come to my desk.
I would be very pleased if you want to share with me some of your thoughts. Maybe we could come up with interesting ideas to share with our community before they go to the moon.
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This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn.