Hey guys,
I'm Fran, CEO at Internxt. We started Internxt ~2 years ago. It's been quite some time, but here's the story of one of the few crypto projects that made it past these 2 insane years, having raised next to nothing.
Our chances of succeeding were close to 0, nobody thought we'd make it, competing with all these other crypto projects that raised $30M, $50M, $100M, $200M... Yet, here we are
How come we raised so little? I was alone at Internxt (
https://internxt.com/), and funded the marketing of the ICO with what I had saved from working for a few years at cloud company Hostinger. I was 20 back then and didnt have much to fund the company and crowdsale, so I pretty much had to do everything by myself, and nobody really knew about our ICO.
Our crypto story, super summarized! We did our ICO right before all the crypto hype took place, and raised around 1000 ETH (not much). Although we didn't raise much, we managed to release our product; a mass-market oriented decentralized cloud storage service, known as X Cloud. We forked Storj (we didn't have much, so that was the best shot), we improved it and changed pretty much everything radically, launched its alpha, beta and finally its stable version a couple months ago. It's been doing great, and we expect big things from it this year! You can follow our roadmap here
https://trello.com/b/kjKAuUNw/internxt-2019 We've got an awesome community, and an already big & growing amount of users making use of X Cloud. You don't need $10M to start a successful company. In fact, many successful companies have grown without raising a single dime (eg MailChimp). All you need is the right team behind the project. And that's really it. Sure, money can help. But that's about it.
Crypto space. We often see crypto projects that raised anything above $1M (we raised like $300k), and which have not managed to launch their product, or which have launched it with no success. Why's that? Well, the fact that crypto has made it so easy to raise money, has given anyone the opportunity to start a crypto project. This attracted loads of morons, who spent most money on themselves or in dumb corporate investments (eg a $100k cryptopia listing, a $300k hitbitc listing, fake volume boosting, a Messi sponsorship etc). Additionally, since it was so easy to raise money, and thus there isn't a very high pool of smart individuals in the crypto space, not only the execution of the project was poor, but also the idea behind it. There are many examples. Take the SIRIN Blockchain phone. Honestly, who on Earth needs a crazy expensive blockchain phone?
So yup, that's our experience these 2 years in the crypto space. Much nonsense that died or will die out, and a small concentration of smart people with good ideas. Having said that, I do love crypto, and I really do think that there'll be a few companies that will make it big. We'll see what's up these next few years.
