Bitcoin Forum

ICO guides are not what will save ICO's, But it's a start. the problem with ICO's is that in the first place most of them open with the purpose to be a scam.
So to all those bad apples out there, I don't refer to you.

For the real projects out there that want to provide real value and contributed to there target audience,
this ICO/STO marketing Guide  (https://guerrillabuzz.com/ico-marketing-the-definitive-guide-2018/)includes basic guideline, an important point on how to build your marketing campaign, no bullshit, and no false promises.

ICO's/STO's are crucial for the ecosystem be able to grow, that why I mad this guide. I hope that will help to some of you.


"Try to explain your idea to one of your non-technical friends.
Did they get it? If the answer is NO, work on it until it becomes YES"

the people who create ICOs must be honest and sincere people. they must be people with knowledge of laws and with knowledge what they intend to create. must be people who know of the difficulties they will face in the real world. I get shocked when I see many ICOs. I am shocked because many ICOs are Copy/Paste of other projects... there is a great lack of ideas and innovation... see how many people create ICOs to make exchanges, and note that they want to make exchanges equal to the exchange that already exist.

To be honest, most ICOs don't bring any value, they are just re-hashing what already exists. Everyone wants to create an ICO, everyone wants to create an altcoin but most don't have any idea about the market, the ecosystem, etc.
And most projects suck to market properly. I am a member of a community managers group (real community manager, not bitcointalk community manager btw) and when I told them what ICOs are doing, they all were laughing
I even remember a website using anime pictures from dragon ball z, WTF

No, they aren't, Satoshi didn't need any ICO to create Bitcoin from scratch, alone, free of charge and fully-working on day one. Yes all these shitcoins need tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to launch their crappy networks that are just copying the structure of other similar projects. And there are more examples of decent non-ICO projects, for example Monero and Grin. They are farm more valuable than EOS and other hot ICO coins.

And we don't need to make everything decentralized, in many cases it's impossible or counterproductive, it's totally okay to have centralized services that use Bitcoin and Lightning.

Yep, they want to scam and they are greedy. They want to raise millions of dollars just to build a debit card. Before you fix stuff such as marketing and so on, the project itself must be analyzed. I do think ICO is not inherently bad, it's just business, but if these crappy ideas come and go every time, I do think ICO will die sooner or later.

Instead of ICO guide, I think development guide is what those people need.

This false marketing of shady ICOs was one of the reasons, why companies such as Alphabet (owner of google) introduced a ban on cryptocurrencies advertising in general.

Sometimes these turned scam ico token projects are not all really scam right from the start of their project. They are just not good enough in maintaining their project’s product that made them discourage to strive and continue till their ICO and launched date at least.

Yes for the most of icos but not all icos, remember there was a lot of successful ico and that depends on how your perspective about that. In my understand if most of them are only trying to create a platform that plagiarized the existing platform with the new improvements.

Agree, that a shame

Most Project ICO last year (2018) is not really worth to invest or join, they don't even "REALLY" think about the future of project that they create (I guess they don't know what project about they are working on.)

most of the project ecosystem last year is: Gather Some Friends -> Create Project -> Create Team -> Profit -> Leave -> (Create New Project).

hopefully this year will be better and investors will be smarter

In fact, a large number of ICO are only interested in enriching their own personal, and not creating a real product!

Starting a coin from the scratch would be the best rather than ico's, because not all of the projects are honest with their product, some of them are just want to raise money and abandon the project or you would call it scam, starting from scratch is better because the devs are active on the development of their product they are foreseeing not just the short term, ico's tend to have a small roadmap.

the people who have created a website related to ICOs and now have nothing else to talk about apart from still trying to convince people that ICOs are a good thing, are damaging the cryptocurrency market more than anybody else.
in my opinion they should start believing that the ICO era is slowly coming to an end and the choices you made and investments you made were in a wrong place. you need to change course of your website before becoming another tombstone in the vast altcoin graveyard.

this was very evident last year, and it resulted to many projects sharing the same whitepaper claiming to provide better exchanges, but today they are all no where to be found.
ICOS are mostly just a dump and pump scheme, aimed at running away with funds

but how can investors be smarter? scams in 2019 have got a better whitepaper

that's the case of mostly ICO and it's gonna be hard to change because if the dev state the truth about the development and it's project real value then it's gonna be hard for them to raise fund.
if all dev ICO out there can be honest about the project then the image about ICO was a scam will dissapear in everyone eyes.

There are 3 most common types of ICO.
With code copied from another coin and renamed.
Scams that promise stuff they aren't planning to deliver.
Those that start good and devs have great plans but somewhere along the way they fail or get discouraged and abandon the project.

90% of these things exist only because people are greedy.

Unfortunately, many ICOs cannot survive in the real conditions of this market. The lack of experience and professionalism even in a cohesive team will not allow the project to develop. Brilliant ideas alone are not enough, because they require a lot of work and knowledge to implement them.

Yeah sure, they should provide honest information, but as long as ICOs are largely unregulated this isn't going to happen any time soon.
Which is why I just stay away from ICOs in general.

Instead of trying to get money from the public, they should just look for private investors and start their project like any other company would.

So many people are aggrieved with ico project because of the scam it ends up with. The worse is tricking bounty hunters and giving them hope to gain something from their labour at the end of the bounty but nothing comes in.

I think that an ICO is worth investing only if they have filled several aspects. A working product is here, the team that stands behind this project is real , the whitepaper is well written and they have a big community.

Sometimes ICO companies talk too much and it becomes evident to the community, so it is actually negative for the project raise, not positive.

This is a free market and that is just the major problem of ICOs, they take advantage of it because it isn't regulated by anybody and use it to scam a lot of persons of their hard earned money.

I don't think it can get to a time where everyone carrying out ICOs would be honest, I just employ us to be more careful about ICO this days and try to make research on team behind a project before making any investment, this is to protect your fund.

There are a lot of problems with icos the most strange thing i someyimes notice in new icos is that they are trying to raise much more money than is required for the development of their product/service/software/app or platform for example after reading the project details or whitepaper you think that 1 or 2 million will be enough for development of such a project and app but when you keep reading you come to know that they have a soft cap of 10 million and hard cap of 50 to 100 million which seems rediculous to me, so yes icos need to be realistic.

The reason why it looks like they talk too much is because generally, it is not so easy to convince investors to put in their money into a project they are not seeing or around, so most ICO end up talking too much in the name of being transparent, when I would not blame them, some of them marketers and they are trained to do so, if they don’t talk much about their project, we will still say their whitepaper is not comprehensive enough or they are not being transparent.

Many ICO false giving information to their investor, where before investing always said never late for getting profit with our ICO because have higher price after listing on exchange, but always drop price after listing on exchange.

Either ICO or STO projects it entirely depends on the team ,they must be devoted to there projects and they must be professionals so as to have positive results on the long run ,I will advice newbies to be very careful selecting ICO projects because the scamming rate is alarming and many scam projects are still around

When their intention is to make money and run away they will do anything to the investors to convince them to invest on their project so the people are much aware of the fake marketing and ratings to avoid getting scammed.

There are some keys values that makes ICO succeed ,no matter what
1) a brand new project we've never seen in crypto space is needed ,there are too many copycats projects nowadays and its so tiresome ,this types of projects won't do well in the future or even died in just short term
2) the teams backing the projects must be pros to be able to deliver at best and make sure they can tackle any issues because good projects have issues too either techy or software based.
3)ICO projects with private funds means even if there hardcap is not met they will proceed and ddo what they can to make sure the project is a successful one ,it shows how devoted they truly are and not just here to make money out of people

ICO's are not getting too much funding right now anyway, comparing what ICO's are getting today with what they were getting a year ago they are down probably more than %70 right now and that means people do not trust ICO's as much as they used to.

That in return means there is a lot more competition in ICO world and the ones that looks like scam or looks like they are not even good do not get funding, I am talking about ICO's who are not even scammers, actually trying to build something but with not enough marketing or not enough good idea behind it they do not get funding.

That is why bad marketing to try to scam people will not get funding anyway. It is a Darwinian way of eliminating the bad ICO's from our system but I still like it, survival of the best will continue to shape the ICO market.

Unfortunately, humanity has not come up with a panacea for greed, and therefore in the ICO we also see this destructive effect. To combat this phenomenon, we need specially trained people and even organizations, otherwise we will be bogged down in false marketing.

I think that with STOs we are moving towards the right direction. Such a fundraising method allows more security to the investors and can assure that a project won't end like a scam. This market will be improved within the next couple of years.

Companies are just taking advantage of the fact that ICO is a free market and anyone can decide to start up an ICO to find a way to scam people of their money, especially newbies who don't know about crypto and are excited to make investment in crypto within any proper investigation on whether the investment is a scam or it's genuine. I don't think we can stop the ICO move, we can just take precautions.

Many projects will seek out some well-known ICO evaluation sites to get the score of the project, but it is difficult to identify whether the project is a scam.

'Kinda true considering that so many people are always doing their own observation even there's some youtube content creator that always discussing about credibility and whitepaper of certain projects.
Also, in the chatting group of every project there will be always someone asking question in regard to their suspicion.

that is what is called campaigns, ico campaigns, political campaigns and other campaigns, they always talk sweet and promising when they market their desires.
according to my observation so far of successful ico, those who have a real program, tokens will be used as a tool for a real transaction not only to be traded on exchanges, this type may in the future reach a price above the price of ico

Security for what? that's just a marketing gimmick and no more. have you seen an STO that has already proven their documents that already approved by the regulators? I never saw that before, use the name of sto just another kind of marketing.

There should be a legal entity that protects investment in the ICO and the ICO team must go through several selections as a condition of having permission to develop the ICO project, I think it can reduce ICO scam numbers

I agree that ICO must be real and honest. However, what has happened so far is that many ICO has committed fraud and that has caused many people to suffer. This must be a Team assigned to conduct an ICO audit. So that the ICO scam can be immediately known and immediately reported to the moderator. if this can be done, I think there will be many people who believe in the ICO.

This is the logical and rational explanation for a theory of success. But look back on the short ICO history of the crypto sector and you realize a few things do not add up. Some ideas that were brand new and original never took off,,, like last years in 2017 I saw and joined even a first taxi/ride hailing service, but it failed. Instead, some cryptokitties game became popular.

I have also seen great devs join projects. Vitalik Buterin himself lended his name to so many projects that failed.

So I have to say,,, luck plays a big factor. And greed of investors.

no there should not. because you are piratically asking for centralization and that should never happen. not to mention that legal entities don't care about these things.
it is so easy to prevent fraud in altcoin market if people simply stop being stupid and greedy! if everyone started really analyzing things they invest their hard earned money in, then we wouldn't see so many shitcoins around in first place.

changing everything from the beginning seems to be better for the continuation of the future ico. the initial guide to ICO is very important, and must be in accordance with the final target of ICO, up to the release of the product. this will be difficult, because some teams are always nervous when the end of ico. all of this must be changed from the beginning, so investors also do not hesitate to invest in ico.

I believe that in the near future there will be a way or technology that will return the former glory and trust of investors to the ICO. Otherwise, due to fraud, this mechanism will remain only for gathering audiences.

The success of an ICO or any other project is it's marketing, and it can be true that the marketing became one of the most deciding factor on the success story of an ICO or project.