ICO is all about to be liked by your potential investor. So, first think about how to stand on his point of view. Clarifications, terms and FAQs are very important to be done correctly.
Even if you gather an excellent team, to solve technical and legal issues, I recommend recruiting specialists. Taxes, withdrawal to fiat money, responsibility to investors - all this should be thought through to the smallest detail. Carefully and responsibly use the terms: shares, share in the company, investment, profit distribution. About what legal risks exist, is described in this article.
To collect the first user opinions, use the bitcoin-forum BitcoinTalk.org. At this stage, your project may end. The basis for crypto invests is tokens. And if in your project tokens are used unnecessarily, then you will fairly be sent to seek investments elsewhere.
From ICO, in spite of the excitement, they still expect the development of blocking technologies.
If you do not spend money on external consultants, then you pay your time instead. No one person can invest thousands of hours into a project (~20 people: technical specialists, content specialists, editors, PR-specialists, SMM-specialists, community managers, designers, programmers, targetologists).
The market is overheated, you can hardly collect two dozen people.
Learn which projects have recently been effectively conducted by ICO. Projects compete for the money of investors, so your competitors for this money are any ICO-projects. They are all different, many have much to learn.
Interesting fact: founders or co-founders of all of the listed above companies are Russian guys.
Whitepaper - is the main document of the project.
Thoughtfully, your document will be read, maybe ten people, but they can create problems for you. Crypto-enthusiasts have weight in the community, they are read by thousands of people. If you are conducting a large-scale advertising campaign, but you have something to criticize, crypto-enthusiasts are more likely to do it. A large and complex Whitepaper is not read by a mass investor but immediately puts a fat plus on the project. If something in whitepaper can be illustrated - do it. Investors will run the text diagonally and focus on the pictures. If you write Whitepaper yourself, give it to proofread specialists: for $300 - $400 per hour they will correct the problem areas.
Surprisingly, only a few projects have a full-fledged "Questions and Answers" section.
As for the web site - usually now it is a one-page structure, it is very convenient for review. If you are planning a large-scale advertising campaign, think about hosting right away. At the moment of starting sales, thousands of users will be on your site at the same time. There are also DDoS-attacks, also protect against them (in advance of such an attack there is also massive spam by phishing links on all social channels like "the site is temporarily not working, go to a copy and register")
At this stage, you need to decide whether you will have pre-sale and pre-ICO.
Recommended to do both. This allows you to find bugs with the help of users, and also work out in social channels.
For Western users: need a Blog on the site.
If you can, then create copy themes in local branches (there are now 19 local language branches on the forum).
Put links from each channel to all the others.
Part of channels means communication, others - only informing. Follow the balance: give users the opportunity to ask questions and maintain official channels for ads and news.
There are different users: scammers can come who will publish phishing links. Moderate all channels, preferably around the clock.
During the ICO, this is especially recommended: a link from a user with a nickname like MainModerator, which will hang overnight in your channels, can significantly impair your reputation. Ideally, if you can maintain communications in all channels and in all languages. If you understand that you can not allocate as many resources, then limit yourself to two or three social channels.
Social media will be useful to you after the ICO. An interesting fact: one of the funds investing in crypto currencies considers a signal for sale that the team does not publish news for two months. In addition to legal and tax consequences, the worst thing that can happen to your ICO is scam. Reputation is very important.
Constantly ask yourself the question: can not cause accusations in the scaffold what I now write or will do.
Bounty - remuneration of users for PR-activities: signatures on forums, maintenance of topics in local language versions, translation Documents to the local language, publications in social networks, blogs and other. The terms of the bounty are published either in the main topic on BitcoinTalk, or in the auxiliary with the prefix [Bounty].
Better to separate topic, because otherwise, the main topic will be 90% of the bounty discussions.
Tracks study your project, and if it does not look like a scam, then place it on your list. Some sites can ask for money for placement or for a detailed review - about $1-3 thousand.
List of the main trackers:
Chinese trackers:
Each month there are new trackers, so the list can be doubled during the preparation of your ICO.
Use any traffic sources that you can work with. Your main task is to make the tokens sold on the first day (hour). To potential buyers came to your site or to your social channels, admired and entered the date of your ICO red marker in their diaries. What can I do for this?
Limit the maximum amount of attraction. This is a good sign for investors: you do not take away all possible money from the market, but attract as much as you need for development. The smaller the amount involved, the greater the chance of a multiple investment growth.
Give bonuses or discounts on time or first investors. In all articles, blogs and social channels, write about the high demand you use: publish data on the number of email subscribers, participants in social channels, analysts' forecasts about the high demand for your tokens.
There are not so many options: release on the Ethereum platform, on the Waves platform etc. Or own tokens.
Finally, this day has come. Round-the-clock duty specialist from each direction is very desirable. Even at the time of launch, your site can hack and replace wallets for transfer, as it happened with ICO Coindash on July 17th.
Watch the fund raising, warm up interest in social channels - create a final hype.
Use at this step everything that you have learned in the previous few months.