1. Decide if an ICO is suitable for your business
ICO’s are not suitable for any business. It is not a tool to quickly raise money and bypass the long and costly process of registering a public offering with the regulators. While that used to be the case during the formative days of ICO’s, it is no longer true. Like everything else in the crypto world, the ICO ethos is taking shape and informal standards are being adopted by the industry. The main question every startup considering an ICO should ask itself is whether the digital token can be integrated into their business model in a meaningful way. If the only use for your coin is to trade on an exchange, it guarantees that the price will crash soon after the ICO takes place.
2. Create a product
This crucial step is often ignored by hustlers trying to raise capital as quickly as possible, but ignore it at your own risk. Building an actual product is far and beyond the most important part of an ICO.
3. Create a token
This might be the simplest part of the ICO process. Creating a token, at its core, means creating an asset that your business needs to survive. Tokens can represent any tradable good: digital coins, loyalty points, gold certificates, IOU’s, in-game items, etc. Tokens are similar to shares of a company sold to investors in an IPO transaction.
Before creating anything, decide how much you want to raise, how many blockchain or Ethereum tokens you will issue, how many you will retain for the team and decide in advance in what scenario you will issue additional tokens.
4. Get legal opinion
Whenever you’re dealing with other people’s money, you want to be legally covered. The objective here is to ensure that your token is not seen as a security and make it clear that there is no effort to deceive. Where the ICO really begins is in the pre-sale and legal planning process. To avoid trouble with the SEC, you will need a formal legal opinion and a legal description of the token offering and what investors actually get for it.
5. Create community and buzz
This is probably the second most important step in the ICO process. Your token sale will not get anywhere unless enough investors know about it. It is a sad but true fact that the majority of token sales are driven by initial hype.
The biggest barrier of ICO’s is creating trust — trust in whether the team behind it has the chops to execute on their idea. One of the best ways to establish trust is through tried and tested influencer marketing. Find the right crypto influencers for your business, incentivize them properly, and grow your audience exponentially. Platforms like
GuerrillaBuzz will offer you advice on how to establish your coin in various communities like telegram, quora, media, reddit, forums and ICO calendars.
7. Get your token out on exchanges
Once you’ve created your coin, whitepaper, and marketing strategy, you need to reach out to ICO exchanges to carry your coin. Exchanges enable people to buy and sell your token on the open market, so getting it accepted on the strongest and most established exchanges is critical. The actual process of listing a coin on an exchange varies significantly by the site.
