Cloning a coin is not hard. Maintaining it, giving it value, creating a community and finding an actual pupose for your coin on the other hand are tough (i guess). Wouldn't it be better to use an existing project? Or if you really want your niche to have it's own "coin", maybe an ETH token will work aswell? Those contracts are readily available, setting up an ETH token costs (quite literally) a couple bucks, and you don't need to worry about pools, explorers and miners...
Just a last thing to think about: the current crypto ecosystem is completely flooded with crapcoins/tokens. It might be a good idear to find out if anybody is actually interested in such a project before you push the next coin/token online... Personally, things like ICO, IPO,... give me the shivers. It has a negative connotation in my mind.
Thanks. Thought as much. I'm in the #cryptoart scene and the reasons for having your own eth clone utility coin would be to
1) Not reinvent the wheel. We already have a coin with smart contracts and all that stuff and that is good enough for me. The contracts should be extremely comaptible.
2) At the moment it is all built around eth NFTs and smart contracts. Unfortunately the eth gas price has literally killed the market. $90 to execute a smart contract to sell a bit of art worth $40. $50 to mint a piece of art. It is just not worth it and as eth goes up so will the costs, so not having to deal with 99.99999% of the eth transactions will keep it cheaper and quicker.
The only downside would be having to get on an exchange or go the "local bitcoin" route for distributing it to the masses. It wouldn't be a privacy coin so KYC is not an issue. There wouldn't be any IPO/ICOs as most of those are just scams.
Neo was the other one I looked at. Quite well supported but not as popular.