Need advice on ICO for startup project for "offline" product

Hello,

I'm pretty new in this ICO stuff so please consider that when answering in this topic.

We have physical product which is consumer oriented and it works in a way where user is paying per hour to use our product. Due to early stage of development(prototype is in production) and NDA signed between parties involved we can't reveal what product is at this point but will so as soon as possible.

So let's say that product is not a question here and pretend that majority of people finds in very useful and same majority would use it as well.
In simple words product is attractive for investors.

So next step is raising proper funds to expand production and launch product globally.

At this point we are exploring ICO beside classic way of raising funds(VC, Kickstarter, etc...)

So this is where we need your advise how to pull this off.

From our research we kinda understand that we can do this "through" Etherium or platfroms like Waves, etc... Since we have business plan and Whitepaper ready I guess we can start considering next step in the process.

If we got this correct we create our own cryptocurrency and issue x amount of coins which we will offer in our ICO under conditions specified in the Whitepaper.

At this point we're still confused what is Smart-contract and where does tokens come in the game? Maybe better question here is is there any "technical" template/blueprint?

I'm trying to figure all this out and since there is really a lot of content online I suggested to my team we ask here and maybe somebody will help us by filter all informations in this topic so it makes more sense to what we need.

Any help by sharing your knowledge or experience is appreciated.