Marketing the project before going to ICO: specific actions

Alexander Spirin, project manager of the KickICO platform, wrote a column specifically for the Netology blog about how startups conduct marketing campaigns before the Initial Coin Offering.

The goal of a blockchain startup is to create a self-sustaining system. Every system needs blood; In blockchain systems, the role of blood is played by cryptocurrency. To raise funds for the issue of your own currency, an initial coin offering (ICO) is held (read the glossary for more information about ICO and other terms). Some people argue that the purpose of an ICO is to attract money at any cost, while others argue that it is to create a community. We at KickICO say that ICO is just a point of infusion of blood into the system, and whether the system works or not depends on the activities after the ICO.

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Training program: “Digital Product Manager”

Once again: ICO in itself means little.

The system will spin up if you manage to create a snowball effect.

But in order for a lump to roll down the mountain and turn into an avalanche, you first need to drag it up the mountain: create a project, assemble a team, attract advisors. Advisors will help attract large investors. Large investors will help attract the community. The community will breathe life into your project and the system will work.

ICO problem

ICO is a hype. And where there is hype, there are hype-eaters. Therefore, there are projects that go to ICO to make money and disappear. It is difficult to punish the organizers of such projects, since cryptocurrencies are not regulated in any way. This year, the Razormind project raised $10,000,000, after which its founder disappeared with the money.

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Special project

The problem worries all supporters of blockchain technologies. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, also spoke on this topic: “Some projects have absolutely no benefit or point in having an internal coin, other than making money on it. I don't really like such projects. I understand that the main difficulty that can be solved in this way is making money. I think it’s worth continuing to think about how to monetize projects in a different way within the crypto ecosystem.”

Crypto investors are also aware of the problem and are now choosing tokens with caution. And taking into account the fact that interest in ICOs is growing and there are more projects, it is becoming more and more difficult to compete for the attention of investors. Therefore, startup founders have to think about proper promotion. In the West, there are specialized PR agencies that work on crypto projects. For example, the Transform PR company managed to conduct 20 successful ICOs.

The Bitcoin News

Country: USA

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Reach: 50,000 readers

The main audience of TheBitcoinNews.com site is residents of the USA, China, Brazil and Thailand. Here you can find all the latest news about Bitcoin and Ethereum, learn about new ICOs and read expert opinions. The site has a full-fledged educational section that will help you understand all the intricacies of cryptocurrencies. The text published on the site will also be seen by subscribers - more than 30 thousand people have subscribed to the e-mail newsletter.

Promoting the project before the ICO

Before an ICO, a startup has two tasks: to generate knowledge about the project and to attract the interest of investors. In the first case, you need to break through your competitors, in the second, you need to prove that the startup is promising and the founders are honest people. This amount of work cannot be completed in a week. Therefore, it takes several months to prepare a project for ICO. During this time, the startup team must introduce itself to the crypto community, prove its worth and gather an audience. The SOMN project posted its first tweet on February 12, and the ICO began on June 15. It took 5 months from the first tweet to the $42 million investment.

I have identified three areas of preparation for entering the crypto exchange.

How to attract big investors

Typically, about half of the funds for an ICO come from large investors: crypto investment funds, venture investors, business angels (helping projects in the early stages of development). A certain number of venture funds are ready to work with ICOs. They want clear explanations from you: what the project is, what date and time you will go public, and how much they can get if they invest in you at a very early stage.

There are not many funds around the world; they are all well-known and are based, as a rule, in China, the States and Europe. The funds gather in a pool of venture investors and can invest in a large block into a promising project.

The goal of the project is to find out where they can meet large investors who are interested in them.

Usually these are conferences and meetups. The question is whether the project will be able to get there and personally meet with possible investors. The process of finding investors through personal meetings is called Roadshow.

The Roadshow tradition came from IPO (Initial Public Offering, the beginning of trading of company shares on the stock exchange). Teams register for all industry conferences they can afford to attend. A small project needs to invest in Roadshow. At first, we did exactly this: we bought seats at conferences, flew to Singapore and Europe, spoke at meetups and communicated with investors there. Only projects that already have success behind them are invited for free.

The goal of a crypto startup on Roadshow is to tell everyone about itself. If the project is well-known, they will invest money in you. If you haven't heard of it, goodbye.

There is always a danger of failure at a conference; you will be asked a lot of tricky questions. If you go through the filter and start a dialogue with investors, they will notice a few things.

Uniqueness of idea and presentation. A startup must be ideally prepared for the Roadshow: not just memorize your White Paper, but prove that you are using blockchain to solve a unique problem that no one else is solving. Alternatively, you solve a non-unique problem, but in a completely unique way.

Dates for going public. Venture investors clearly know what they want. They invest early, wait for you to go public, acquire large pools of coins, and when the ICO price starts selling them, they sell them and make X6-X10. Any investor will immediately calculate in his head what X he will receive if he invests in you in a closed round or pre-ICO.

CEO personality. This is the face of the company. He must travel and communicate with investors. Investors perceive the personality of the CEO as the core around which the team is formed. If the CEO is not impressed, then investors will decide that they want to get money from them one-time and will lose interest.

How much does the project invest in advertising and working with partners? Investors will definitely ask how much you invest in advertising. The more significant the advertising costs, the more X is expected.

Bonuses. If large investors enter the project, many other investors will immediately follow them. Large investors know this, so they expect bonuses: early-bird, pre-ICO, closed rounds, bonuses for a large purchase. For example, US and Chinese citizens cannot interact with new tokens while the ICO is ongoing, but once the ICO ends and the coins are listed on the exchange, they will be able to buy and sell them. Your big investors are waiting for this moment to sell their pool of tokens and move on to another project, because this is the essence of their work.

Direction 1: Working with the site

Whitepaper (Presentation)

This is a presentation that describes the project in detail: idea, technology, business processes, team, and so on. The document is intended to help the investor make a decision to buy project tokens. This is perhaps the most important information on the company’s website. To understand what a whitepaper is, it is better to look once than to read it a hundred times. Look at the example of the startup Sonm.

Video about the project

Studying a Whitepaper takes time; not everyone has it. So make a short video with basic information about the project. A minute-long video will not scare away an investor from watching it, but it can tell a lot. The main thing is the simplicity of the story. Watch the video of the startup Suretly, which attracted a minimum threshold of $1.5 million in funds on the first day of its ICO.

Team

People trust people. Show everyone who is working on the project. Write about the team, technical and business consultants. Invite escrow to the project - these are people or organizations that will store money and transfer it to developers in parts. This step will show investors that you will not run away after the ICO. It’s good if the escrow is an authoritative person in the crypto world. His photo on the website will give one hundred points towards the project’s karma. The block with the team should look authentic: real photos, resumes, links to social networks.

AdEx Team

Form with the ability to subscribe to the newsletter

Collect a base of potential investors. In order not to lose interest, send them an email once a week with information about the project: news, successes, plans. In the crypto world, it is common to create separate emails specifically for ICOs. Therefore, in order not to be intrusive, give those interested a choice of mailing frequency.

Retargeting codes

Surprisingly, I found retargeting codes on single projects. This is a marketing oversight. Using retargeting databases, you can collect people who visited your website and remind them about the project. Or use databases to search for potential investors. The Similar Audiences tool from Google and Facebook will find people who have the same characteristics and perform the same online actions as your website visitors.

How to attract advisors

The cryptocurrency and blockchain market is too new to clearly determine the best methods of attraction. It is usually advised to write to advisors of existing projects, but this rarely works. Serious advisors will answer you: “Sorry, we are busy with our own projects,” but most likely only those who plan to receive a large payment from you without guarantees will happily agree. Therefore, we recommend investing in direct marketing, that is, in personal meetings with advisors.

To ensure that advisors take you seriously, consider the following points:

• your team must have a set of required competencies;
• you must have a unique idea that offers a solution to a hitherto unsolved problem;
• the solution must use blockchain;
• you have a prototype, MVP or a working business behind you;
• you have the economic and legal justification for the token.

If this is available, then the advisors will help refine the economics of the token, resolve legal and international issues, explain the features of the market and, as a result, help prepare a completed Whitepaper.

Whitepaper. The advisor helps to draw up the main document of the crypto-startup and set out the obligations. Three mandatory parts of the White Paper:

• why the project is needed (the history of its appearance, which indicates: the problem being solved, the solution itself and its justification from the market point of view);
• what is a token for (economics and reasons for growth);
• action plan (roadmap).

Legal status. The advisor conducts a Howey test for your token and finds out whether it has four characteristics of a security. If yes, then the company has many additional obligations, but the legal status of the token increases. A security token is more secure and interesting to large investors.

Token economy. The advisor analyzes the economics of the token. If he doesn’t see a reason for growth, then he understands that the team just wants to raise money, and says goodbye to such people.

Market. Serious advisors will explain to you that large investors will only invest if they see a profit. If there is no clear and transparent token economy, then they will not invest in a startup because they will not receive anything. Most investors are interested in investing heavily in advance and increasing their investment several times when the token goes public. X depends on the prospects of the project.

Direction 3: Paid promotion tools

"Bounty"

In the world of cryptocurrencies there is the concept of Bounty. This is when a person receives its tokens for PR of a project. They pay for activity in social media, translations of materials from the site, writing articles about the project, etc. Even if you think that such a campaign will not bring you fame, look on the other side. People who are interested in ICO (bounty hunters) will come to your site. Then, using the “Similar Audiences” tool, we can find people who are most interested in cryptocurrencies.

Let’s look at how such a campaign works using the example of the Suretly project, which has already been discussed. The startup has a main topic on Bitcointalk, plus a topic with Bounty. It describes the terms of the bounty. Each participant fills out a Google form, performs the necessary actions, and sees their status in Google Docs.

Paid advertising

You can advertise with cryptocurrencies on Facebook and Google. Tested for myself. I arbitrated for Localbitcoins. On Google we can target by topical queries. There are 12 million people on Facebook with the interest “Bitcoin”. Let’s not forget about retargeting codes that gather an audience on the site. Using codes you can catch up with those who have already visited our site. Or create similar audiences (look-alike) and target them. Another option for paid advertising is native advertising with opinion leaders or in popular communities about cryptocurrency. Telegram has many channels about blockchain, for example, BitLenta.

Content Marketing

Since blockchain and cryptocurrencies are a new, complex, and unclear topic, the value must be explained through content.

You will need:

Project blog on Medium. Publish all updates of your project: meetings, partnerships, news, achievements, dates. All of this adds value to your ICO.

Newsletter. If a person is interested in your ICO in principle, but has doubts, convert it into a newsletter subscription. The project’s achievements from Medium are sent to the newsletter; minor news is collected in a pool of updates and also sent out. This way, the backer can decide to participate in the ICO.

Pitfall: when you go to an ICO, they will start offering you a database of addresses of supposed investors for mailing. Other people's databases don't work, collect your own.

Publications in the media. The problem with most crypto startups is the lack of publications on trustworthy resources. To interest the media, your options are: become a newsmaker, pay, or get a free publication, for which you provide very valuable content.

The value of a free publication is higher than a paid one.

The number of industry media in Russian is smaller than in English, but it is more difficult to publish in them. In Russia, they have a negative attitude if the CEO writes about his company. Our media are greatly inferior in terms of traffic, but in terms of the quality of content they are much higher. There are also media in English, but with Russian edition.

The cryptomedia agenda is formed from news and articles. There is much more news than useful materials. Since the USA and China now form the jurisdictions of cryptocurrencies, most news comes from American and Chinese resources. The main pool of cryptowriters consists of news translators.

There are very few people writing good original content, so it is extremely valuable.

There is a shortage of editors in the industry because many writers who write about cryptocurrencies are stream-of-consciousness geeks. Even if the author is in demand in the community, has his own audience on Habré and Golos, when their texts get into the media, they have to be heavily edited because they do not fit into industry standards.

However, many Russian startups are making their way into the market and creating excellent content. Many of our articles are translated into English and published in foreign media, and gradually domestic content is becoming in demand. Therefore, the main recommendation is to write original content based on your experience and generously share knowledge that no one else is sharing.

Roadmap for promoting a project whose ICO falls on week 12

I hope this article helps good projects. Happy ICO everyone!

Editorial opinion may not reflect the views of the author. Send your articles to us at And our requirements for them are here.

Ban of crypto content on social networks

With the growing popularity of ICOs for raising initial capital, the number of scammers who attract investors by deception has also increased. To combat fraudulent schemes, countries such as the USA, Canada, Singapore and Japan regulate the issuance of tokens at the legislative level.

Social media is also taking action to protect users - introducing restrictions on crypto content.

Facebook and Instagram now do not allow posting advertisements about binary options, cryptocurrencies and ICOs. Google will ban such advertising on all of its platforms, including YouTube, from June 2022. Twitter will ban advertising for ICOs, digital wallets and cryptocurrency exchanges, and the blogging platform Medium will introduce a number of criteria that publications about tokens and ICOs must meet.

In the current situation, marketers are looking for a competitive replacement for social platforms to promote ICO projects. And email marketing can rightfully become such a replacement.

Terminology

ICO is a specific niche. It has its own notation that you need to know. Key terms:

1. Pre-ICO or Pre-Sale is a type of short-term investment. The startup allows you to raise the required amount so that the ICO project can be implemented. Investors receive bonuses and discounts.
2. Crowdsale is a key stage in the sale of coins, i.e. the ICO itself. Startups use it to increase the level of trust in the project. Tokens are sold through the developer’s platform or on a cryptocurrency exchange.
3. Bounty is a reward (tokens) offered to an investor by the creators of an ICO for assistance in the development of the project.
4. White Paper – description of ICO. It reflects the essence of the idea, its innovativeness, prospects, methods of implementation, and other aspects that can interest an investor.
5. Jurisdiction is the country where the enterprise is registered and to which the ICO is linked. Optimal conditions in Singapore, Great Britain, Switzerland.
6. Scam is a fraudulent project that seeks to raise money through an ICO without further development of the idea. ICO projects act as a method of enrichment.