The Reality Behind ICO From ATF

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First of all, let’s set up some important points from where we’d like to start: ICO is great and the general concept that it’s carrying within. We are not aiming to criticize the structure of ICO, but people and experience we’ve had when decided to go along this path. This article will primarily focus on the story from our perspective: representatives and those, who contribute daily in ATF to make this project even more potential.

Additionally, we will touch on some advice to those who have just started their journey in this industry. We hope this message reaches those who may seek for some help or advice as this article uncovers some reality we have faced along this journey.

This is purely our experience, we will not uncover stories that occurred with our friends, they are not fictional and carry exclusively our opinion and subjective point of view that we want to share with you.

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Surely, the idea of ICO is great in terms of an ability for business to raise funds without losing the control of their company. In ventures, you divide the shares of the company, investors may interfere at any time and can take the same amount of decisions the outcomes of which may not always end up good for the company. When running an ICO, you are purely focused on production, whereas in other fundraising methods, you are focused on meetings and reports (let’s generalize it for a global view).

ICO carries more of a democratic approach in this case: you are able to raise money in a fast period of time, pay the investment returns to the contributors and begin to produce faster. We are not hiding a fact that by this time we have potential partners interested in cooperation. What we have not repeated as many times as this, is that we are not aiming for gathering as many partnerships as possible, but to launch the production.

In order to adequately start this article, we must highlight some segments that each project follows to conduct a good ICO: website completion, community management, advisors and etc. Of course, there’s more than just that. We will highlight especially these areas and describe what were the difficulties and traps on our way.

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Website

When we first decided to investigate more about an ICO and its general procedures we did not know a lot about it, to be honest. Having analyzed tendencies and what could be our possible way of raising funds, we have decided that this could be our small step in this big journey. Surely, we’ve looked at many successful and not quite ICO’s, observed the mistakes and learnt from them to prevent them in our scenario. Also, we have gathered feedback from those who already conducted several ICOs in order to have a better overall image of this procedure. Our first step was to search for specialists in this field, however, our first disappointment appeared when we started to realize how the price was elevated and exaggerated for what seemed to be a regular task in a traditional fundraising field.

Nevertheless, we continued to search for those who could prepare the project, in particular a website, to be launched adequately to an ICO market. This is how we came to our first unpleasant moment. The company (Let’s call it company A) offered us their services in terms of web design, maintenance and full creation of what we have needed as requirements. They were ready to do exactly how we wanted it and when we needed it. The problems began when the website was suffering with system bugs on every inch of a page. The overall usability was an awful and unpleasant experience. Not even we could not show it to public, we were scared to visit it ourselves.

We were told about some “unexpected” circumstances that we have not mentioned in our agreement and technical tasks, meaning the price was even more elevated and in order to solve them, we had to pay additionally to what we have had already paid. At the end, we had to stop our cooperation and create a new website from scratch in order to avoid the initial problems we’ve had with an interface and usability of our website and then add what we actually wanted to see on our web page.

Advertising ICO Agencies

On our way to a “dream ICO”, we have contacted several companies that specialized in this segment. They had positive ratings and feedback from their clients, something usually many of us pay attention to. All of those professional companies are ready to take a responsibility for everything, except for the final results. There’s a different justification why they would avoid it, but none of the professionals were ready to actually provide a service with a guarantee of the dedication, full commitment to work and responsibility.

Let’s stop at this point for a moment to discuss one aspect we tend to forget: when you are a startup company, one guarantees everyone is ready to give you with a 100% assurance is that your business is not going to go well at all. Anyone, who has ever tried to launch something on their own from the scratch see this reality and understands the risks. Agencies, that call themselves “the sharks” in the ICO industry do not want to give you a guarantee of their commitment because by the end of the day, their failures may be their visit card. That is an optimal position to minimize all the risks and always stay in the sunlight.

Coming back to our storyline: throughout a period of one month we hired a professional company that was ready to bring us onto the next level in the game (let’s call it Company X). Company X estimated their services at $25.000 and by the end of our first month of a cooperation, we saw almost no results produced, and even the results that were produced did not qualify as “decent”.

Advisors

Many advisors love to promote themselves everywhere claiming to be “the one” for your company. As in our case, we have faced the advisors that were promising to reach for the stars together, sign the contracts and agreements and after one month we begin to see the same we have seen with the Company X. Understanding the situation and weighing the outcomes, we have offered to pause the cooperation until the further discussion. In response, we have received a negative escalation of the situation with some outcomes we did not predict: threats and blackmailing, resulting in the advisors spreading the news that our project is a scam and in reality, does not meet the requirements to be considered a promising project at all. In order to prevent the spread of this news, we were offered to pay $80.000.

Of course, we did not pay that money and were not even planning to. The contracts and agreements were the guarantee of that professionalism and full commitment from the advisor which we did not see. Eventually, we have faced many of those specialists who work with a formula “pay me or I’ll scam you”. This is something we are not even surprised of hearing by today.

Community Management

One of the very common tactics is to use fake accounts of the representatives of the project. For instance, we have found 6 fake accounts of our CEO in Telegram. Please, be very attentive and always check the information given on our official website and social media channels.

Furthermore, when we’ve signed our agreement with a company that was supposed to provide us with a full service of community management, the accounts that were given to us were registered on their profiles. Eventually, we were blackmailed to pay an extra to have those accounts registered on our names and have a full control of them. Since the quality of their work did not meet our requirements, we were looking for options to change the service. We were lucky to attract new community management specialists to join our team, who recreated our social media profiles and started to put them to work.

More about risks and frauds

One of the biggest challenges our team has seen was a case with a fraud that created a fake account which was very similar to a famous company specializing in advertising, promoting, listing etc. of cryptocurrencies and ICO projects. An email had an impression to be authentic from the actual company. We were offered a big package of services and a payment in tokens with a 3X multiplier coefficient. Then, the same fraud intended to blackmail our team, claiming to write articles about our project that we are scammers and so on.

“Have you noticed that the crypto world splits into BTC maximalists and those who love putting labels like “scam coin” and don’t see anything in between?”, ILYA TSIGVINTSEV

Many of the IT hackers love the scheme of finding weak spots in the system and then ask for big stack of a reward, threatening to conduct DDOS attacks and other methods to “lay the project down”. Surely, this follows again the idea of publishing news of scam project and everything we have stated before.

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Despite what we have explained, you may have an impression of ATF being close friends with the word “unlucky”. Not at all, instead, it gave us a stimulus to produce even better, prioritize our needs and needs of public, forge the team and continue to move according to the route. First seeds planted, first results shown, the work can be described as “boiling” rather than “non-stop” or any expression that symbolizes the rhythm we are living in. Our team continues to carry out trials and tests, put in work and seek for even greater results.

Up to date we are actively involved in calculations and design of the ATF industrial farms as our project becomes more and more demanded among the investors and we already have the real buyers.

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Surely, this may seem as a flat criticism and pure neglection of an idea that we may have not succeeded in every area where we wanted to dominate, however, this may also signify that we share our experience and talk about our path that we have gone through along this journey.

Conducting an ICO gave our company a larger vision and perspective on the AgTech. Not only we began to receive a big number of orders for our production, but also our name became widely recognized. ICO is a great example of advertisement, and this tool, indeed, served as a great booster to spread our idea we were carrying. Countries like Africa, Asia, UK and US are already interested in cooperation and have our products installed in their areas.

Unfortunately, ICO industry can boast not only with scam companies, but also scam specialists, who do not take responsibility for any outcomes, just aim for big stacks of money and create an image of being a professional instead of being one in reality. How could you possibly trust someone to build your project on words without actually seeing it or having them work with you personally? This is exactly why we have built a team that we trust and that is capable of performing on this market. Almost every necessity that occurs in our project is covered by our specialists.

The advantage that we can highlight lays in the legitimateness of our product (prototype) and possession of patents. People that do their research understand the direction our project is heading to, moreover, they understand the ambitions of the project and that it could not be related to any fraud activities. However, not all of the people react the same way: without a thorough analysis and adequate research, some people tend to panic and run as quickly as they can away from the project. It is scary to think how much do the projects suffer when they actually plan to create a real product!

Please, do your proper and quality research. Contact founders of the companies, ask them the questions you need and exchange your ideas with other official representatives of the community. By doing so, you not only receive valuable information, but also have a greater assurance in your funds and actions. This will help you to build an objective image of the situation and contribute to make your proper right decision.

Those, who believed in a potential of our project since day one still have the same opinion about us. What we are dealing with currently is related with a development of business. This strategy has way more benefits rather than spending time on blackmailers.
Nevertheless, the work at AgroTechFarm will not stop, no matter how bad those specialists want it. There is a dream, a vision and a desire to build it. With this and help of our community that is growing day-by-day, we will be able to put in work and produce great results.

To sum sum up some of the biggest highlights of the article:
- Estimate precisely the amount of work, analyze thoroughly what you can do yourself (the website itself - it should be under control)
- All groups in social media and other resources - only you and trusted people can have a control over this segment
- Advertising services - research, research and, once again, research. Study each and one of them in detail until you ran out of any doubt
- Meet your advisors if possible. Get to know their career and what they have achieved. Try to get some feedback from those, who already worked with them.

Thank you,
ATF Team.

Learn more about us here: https://goo.gl/nSzPof