Best practices in an ICO bounty campaign.

Many blockchain startups choose to launch a bounty campaign prior to, or after, their ICO. During the past couple months, we carefully crafted a list of the best practices in a bounty campaign. We use it to assist and advise our clients at Bounty0x. In an effort to improve the current bounty campaign landscape, we decided to make a portion of this list public.

1. Be selective.
It’s very important that you only reward the very best contributions. Otherwise, your brand image might suffer and serious contributors will have their stakes diluted.

2. Know what you are paying.
Status paid an average of 28350 SNT’s to their translators in the bounty campaign. At the time of writing, that’s around $1.6k, for just translating a 500 word document. Keep this in mind when you decide how many tokens you want to allocate to each task. It can sometimes be a lot more cost-effective to hire freelancers instead for certain jobs.

We recommend our clients to allocate between a 0.5–1.5 percent of their tokens to an ICO bounty campaign.

3. Community.
Your startup definitely needs a channel where it can interact with bounty hunters. This is not only important for answering support-related questions, but also for building a community of early adopters around your product/service.

4. Spread the word.
Make sure to tweet about your bounty campaign a couple times and to mention it in press releases. This will get you a lot more contributors and exposure.

5. Have a clear goal.
What do you want to achieve with your bounty campaign? Do you want to gain more exposure? Or do you prefer feedback and improvement tips instead?

6. Create a bounty page.
Some startups only mention their bounty campaign once in their ANN thread on bitcointalk. It’s very important that you also create a dedicated page for this topic on your own website. This adds a lot of legitimacy to the campaign.

7. Make a participants list.
Contributors are anxious to see if their work got accepted. In order to avoid an overwhelmed support team, your startup should create a participants list. The most effective way to do this is to make a publicly visible google spreadsheet that shows all contributions.

8. Be patient.
It’s very important that bounty tokens are distributed at least 2 weeks after the token is first traded on exchanges. This gives the price some time to grow before bounty hunters start selling their tokens. Additionally, you will have 14 more days to convince bounty token holders to hold their reward as a long-term investment.

9. Monitor Submissions.
To prevent fraudulent submission reserve the right to determine whether any payments will be distributed for any and all bounty submission. Create clear guidelines pertaining to criteria for submitting qualifying bounties. Anticipate receiving many submissions and developing a protocol for tracking all submitted bounties in order to verify author identity.

10. Collecting payment addresses.
Ensure that payment addresses are submitted privately in order to maintain user submission anonymity and prevent bounty participant fund theft.

11. Be careful with scammers.
You will receive emails from individuals that claim to be a bounty hunter and that they would like to change the ethereum address “they added when they submitted the task”. My experience so far has shown that these are scammers 99 percent of the time. Please be careful.

12. Incentivize high performance.
Develop and incentive structure and a mechanism to receive bounties which provide greater impact by increasing payouts as a function of results.