I’m Writing a roundup post for Hackernoon.

If you are a blockchain project founder (and feel that you can give an interesting and in-depth answer) and want to be featured with a link from hackernoon.com just contact me:

1. email:ks.shilov@gmail.com
2. telegram: ksshilov

The idea:

Make a roundup with quotes from blockchain project founders, and ask them: What will be the major factor of user growth for blockchain technology in 2020?

Just a little bit of info on what would be great to see in your answer:

— ICO was a major growth factor in 2017; we’ve all seen a lot of users who wanted to build a fortune fast. And FOMO was the major driving force.

— A huge amount of tokens and new trading instruments were the major growth factor in 2018.

— A little period of IEO and long-term DEFI popularity was the major factor of 2019.

— What will 2020 bring??? (This part should be answered by question above)

The previous roundups published on hackernoon:

• https://hackernoon.com/if-you-were-starting-from-scratch-in-2019-with-no-budget-what-would-you-do-to-gain-traffic-for-9196472e9d5e
• https://hackernoon.com/if-you-were-to-start-your-blockchain-startup-from-scratch-in-2020-what-would-you-do-differently-wjp32du

For the past two years I have managed howtotoken.com (an educational website regarding all things blockchain) as well as a content marketing agency for blockchain startups.

Alongside my partners, we raised this business to seven figures per year (without any external investments), and we had the great privilege to work with more than 500 happy customers from different parts of the world: the US, Asia, Europe, Russia.

This was a great experience that helped us go in-depth with blockchain technology and train our international sales forces. It’s funny, but all the sales we are still making is with only a small team of three people from Russia.

As we know, the hype with the blockchain was really huge. But the sad fact is that 90% of blockchain products didn’t find their market fit. During this period we didn’t hurry and tried to find real applications for blockchain technology. And it seems that we’ve found it.

In 2020, I’m launching a new company called Outreacher24.com. It will be a marketplace to find and manage your B2B outreach team with the support of AI, blockchain, and a real human workforce. If you are a small business that is struggling to build your B2B sales, this solution is for you, and I’ll be more than happy to talk about it with you.

The technologies that will be implemented with Outreacher24 are:

1. Nature Language Processing (part of AI) for generating high converted cold email outreach sequences. We tested it on our >150K prospect database and found out how to train and improve neural networks for email generation without humans.
2. International blockchain payments: In the outreach process you can’t remove humans at all. And we’ve built our own solution to source, hire, and manage cross-border mass payments to our workers instantly. This helps us to manage a team of more than 150 remote outreachers from around the world. Each of which helps us to reach out to 150,000 prospects per month while keeping a really high focus on each interaction.

All of this helps us to keep outreach prices very low — that is a really important factor for SMB.

Outreacher24.com is now live (we are in beta).

The first niche that we will focus on is the digital marketing agencies from around the globe. We have a firm understanding of this market and can bring a lot of value to founders. If you are thinking about a scalable outreach process to grow your sales, please join us by filling out the form below: outreacher24.com, and I will personally answer you and we could have a chat.

Or just contact me via:

Email: ks.shilov@gmail.com

Telegram: @ksshilov

Thank you for reading and for being with us. I hope you have a productive end of the ear.

IEO по прежнему являются одним из эффективных инструментов финансирования проектов на крипторынке. Сотни бирж предлагают проведение IEO, и для основателей стартапов достаточно сложно понять, какие предложения являются выгодными, а какие нет. Нужно учитывать все больше факторов, и отсутствие прозрачности делает все лишь хуже.

Но есть один особенный фактор, который точно влияет на успешность сбора средств — то сообщество инвесторов, которое вы собрали перед стартом IEO.

В этой статье я хотел бы разобрать цифры из маркетингового плана одного из самых обсуждаемых IEO недавнего времени — Roobee. Все факты для этой статьи взяты из публичных источников и ее содержимое не является рекомендацией к инвестированию.

Если вы являетесь основателем блокчейн-стартапа и вам нужен совет по организации IEO, вступайте в наш телеграм-чат (там уже состоит более 150 фаундеров из разных стран) ссылка на группу.

Разделы для упрощенной навигации:

1. PR
2. Контент-маркетинг
3. Управление сообществом
4. Трекеры и биржи

О проекте:

Roobee.info, roobee.io — инвестиционная платформа нового поколения, использующая AI и предоставляющая прозрачную статистику по каждой операции клиента. Минимальный депозит — $10.

У проекта есть два сайта — один зарегистрирован в ноябре 2017, второй зарегистрирован в мае 2019. Информация на Википедии гласит, что проект был основан в 2017 году.

PR

Проект ведет очень активную PR деятельность. Если мы посмотрим только на прямые упоминания, мы найдем в Гугле несколько тысяч ссылок.

Пресс-релизы и новости по проекту публикуются на всех крупных сайтах о крипте и бизнесе:

• Bloomberg.com
• Reuters.com
• Cointelegraph.com
• Forbes.com
• Themerkle.com
• Entrepreneur.com
• Businesswire.com
• Marketwatch.com
• Hackernoon.com
• Cryptodaily.co.uk
• Newsbtc.com
• Blog.naver.com (блогосервис одного из крупных корейских поисковиков)
• 8btc.com (китайский новостной портал по биткойну)
• Investing.com
• …

Но самое важное, это содержание статей — потому что на такие закупки в топовых изданиях нужно потратить целое состояние. Статьи должны быть максимально толковые и понятные.

Вот список статей:

• “Roobee, инвестиционный блокчейн-сервис, моментально закрыл первый IEO раунд, получив миллион долларов от топ-холдера”
• “Инвестиционный блокчейн-стартап Roobee поднял 4,5 миллиона долларов на pre-seed”
• “Как международная инвестиционная платформа подняла серьёзные инвестиции на падающем рынке”
• “10 прорывных технологических компаний, за которыми нужно следить в 2019”
• “Блокчейн, A.I., и меняющийся технологический ландшафт”
• “Топ 5 самых многообещающих финтех стартапов: от Roobee до Forter”
• “С помощью 200-миллионной инвестиционной блокчейн-платформы, Roobee запускает сервис с минимальным порогом в $10”
• “Roobee IEO: новая компания даёт жару инвестиционной индустрии”
• “Любимая инвестиционная платформа криптокитов, Roobee, проводит IEO”

Можно заметить, что большинство заголовков сконцентрировано на финансовом успехе проекта: сколько денег они собрали на закрытых раундах и кто инвестировал.

В публикациях в топовых изданиях нет информации об использовании их токена, обзоров технологии или историй о том, как децентрализация изменит мир.

Команда попыталась привлечь внимание именно инвесторов (у которых, как мы знаем, нет особо времени читать новости, да и огромное количество скамов с 2017 по наши дни не добавляют доверия к новым проектам). Статьи были написаны о тех фактах, которые важны для принятия инвестиционного решения: это про то, сколько и где Roobee взяла денег.

Можете ли вы повторить это? У Roobee был очень интересный инфоповод, далее цитата из Bloomberg: “Биткойн-кит из топ 250 холдеров, владелец 7,000 BTC, отправил миллион долларов (200 BTC) на кошелек Roobee с сообщением “Я верю в Roobee”.

Это легко проверить, это вселяет уверенность в инвесторов, и такое происходит очень редко. Если вы сможете сделать что-то подобное на закрытом раунде, то ваш PR пойдёт как по маслу: любые новостные издания с удовольствием разместят подобный заголовок.

Но что же делать, если криптокиты не инвестируют в вас свои миллионы? Все равно, ваша PR-кампания должна основываться на чем-то солидном.

Сравним такие тематики:

• Подписанное соглашение с венчурным фордом
• Деньги, вложенные известным бизнес-ангелом
• Инвестиции от криптосообщества (которые могут быть отслежены через блокчейн)
• Фото с Виталиком :)

С:

• Мы разработали очередную блокчейн-платформу, которая перевернёт такой-то рынок
• Наша децентрализованная технология изменит мир
• Наш СЕО встретился с ещё одним министром такой-то страны

Чему вы больше поверите?

Абсолютно точно, внимание инвесторов и успешно собранные раунды влияют на общественное мнение куда сильнее, чем демка вашего продукта. Давайте будем честны по поводу нынешнего статуса блокчейн-технологий — вы можете просто форкнуть любой публичный блокчейн и заявить сообществу, что у вас есть MVP или даже рабочий продукт — так что MVP ничего не стоит.

Я даже возьму на себя ответственность заявить, что Roobee получила кучу публикаций просто так — потому что это был интересный инфоповод, нужный новостным порталам. Давайте теперь оценим бюджет на случай, если мы нанимаем PR-агентство или платим контрибьюторам за публикацию статей.

Оценка бюджета:

Распространение пресс-релизов:

• Вы можете использовать для этого различные сервисы, такие как bitcoinprbuzz или prNewswire.
• Бюджет для пресс-релизов: от $2,000 до $15,000

Редактура:

• 2 варианта:
• Вы можете нанять PR-агентство, которое будет продвигать ваш проект в топовые издания. Цена обычно начинается с $5,000 в месяц. Минимальный срок, когда нужно начинать продвижение — 6–8 месяцев перед IEO. За эту сумму вы получите 1–2 качественные публикации в месяц.
• ИЛИ
• Вы можете нанять контрибьюторов самостоятельно и платить им напрямую. Цена за топовых лидеров мнений начинается с $2,000 за статью (это самый минимум). Когда лидеры мнений слышат слово “крипта”, у них сразу появляется ощущение, что можно увеличить ценник в 2–3 раза, просто из-за тематики, на которую они будут писать.

Суммарная оценка бюджета:

• От $42,000 до $120,000 на шестимесячную PR-кампанию ($7K — $20K в месяц)

Контент-маркетинг

Под контент-маркетингом я подразумеваю написание и публикацию статей, релевантных вашему рынку и проблемам, решаемым вашим продуктом. Цель всей этой деятельности — увеличение доверия к вашему проекту.

Если ваш блог уже собирает трафик, можно использовать его для публикаций, иначе же нужно публиковать статьи на сторонних ресурсах с чуть меньшей, но лояльной аудиторией. Обычно это дешевле, и ваши материалы будут действительно читаться.

Материалы для контент-маркетинга должны быть подготовлены заранее, до начала вашей PR-кампании. Если все сделано верно, публикации дадут следующий эффект:

• Инвесторы натыкаются на ваши пресс-релизы или новости о вашем проекте
• Они заходят в поисковик и ищут более подробную информацию о том, чем вы занимаетесь
• В лучшем случае они находят кучу статей о каждом нюансе вашего проекта, отвечающие на самые важные вопросы:
• Ваша бизнес модель?
• Состав команды и их опыт?
• Есть ли у вас уже юзеры?
• Как ваш продукт изменит индустрию (сравнивая с уже существующими проектами X, Y и Z)?
• …

Никто не поверит тому, что написано на вашем сайте. Так что инвесторы попытаются найти статью на каком-нибудь независимом и более надежном ресурсе (таком как hackernoon :)) с большим количеством комментариев — скамовые проекты вряд ли будут заморачиваться контент-маркетингом, так что наличие статей уже является плюсом проекту. Это самая базовая проверка — и занимаясь контент-маркетингом, вы ее пройдете.

В случае с Roobee, давайте посмотрим, как они делали свой контент-маркетинг. В разборе я просто буду следовать своей же схеме, описанной выше.

Идем в Google и набираем “What is Roobee” — и вот что мы видим:

Wikipedia идет второй ссылкой — это отлично.

Дальше я могу набрать что-то вроде: “how does roobee work”:

По проекту есть много информации на сторонних сайтах, не только в их собственном блоге, и я могу почитать все это и сформировать свое собственное мнение о проекте. Чем больше разных ресурсов, тем лучше.

Резюмируя, вот статьи, которые были опубликованы о Roobee:

• Информация о команде (на сайте со ссылками на linkedin)
• Большое количество фото сооснователей с крипто инфлюенсерами вроде Виталика, МакАфи и другими :) (видимо, это стратегия до сих пор работает — забавно)
• Интервью с основателем, в котором он объясняет все детали (в Forbes)
• “Пять трендов краудфандинговой индустрии, за которыми нужно смотреть в 2019”
• “Децентрализация рынков: в погоне за мечтой?”
• Объяснение технической составляющей от команды разработчиков Roobee

Ресурсы, на которых были размещены эти статьи:

• Wikipedia.org
• Financemagnates.com
• Seekingalpha.com
• Hackernoon.com
• Born2invest.com
• Medium.com (собственный блог компании на медиуме)
• ….

Итог: мы нашли огромное количество технических статей, отвечающих на все вопросы и рассказывающих о самом проекте: технологии, бизнес-модели и так далее.

Бюджеты в этой области могут сильно отличаться. Вы можете заказать статью у копирайтера из Индии, который не знает о блокчейне ниче, и написать статью “в SEO стиле”. Или вы можете работать с компанией, у которой есть своя четкая структура из редакторов и писателей, которые специализируются на блокчейне и могут подобрать правильный вариант освещения для вашего проекта.

Кстати, если вам нужна такая команде, просто напишите мне в телеграм: @kshilov (мы работаем на рынке с 2017 и уже опубликовали более 400 статей для наших заказчиков, блокчейн-проектов).

Оценка бюджета:

• От $6000 до $15000 на период 6 месяцев (4 статьи в месяц, опубликованные в надёжных ресурсах). В случае работы с титулованным PR-агентством, можно смело умножать эту цифру на три, так как у них огромные наценки.

Управление сообществом

Что по поводу взаимодействия с сообществом? Большинство маркетинговых агентств, специализирующихся на продвижении ICO/IEO, называют это одной из самых важных задач в ходе PR-кампании. И в действительности, это очень важно — но нужно отличать развитие сообщества от покупки ботов в телеграме и написания фейковых отзывов на bitcointalk — это абсолютно точно не работает в 2019 и вы просто потратите свой бюджет, получив в результате дутые метрики. Кроме того, коммьюнити видит, когда их обманывают.

Один из сооснователей Roobee является владельцем телеграм-канала “$10 долларов Баффета” с более чем 150,000 подписчиков. Это очень большая цифра для телеграма, и присутствие такого человека в команде повышает шансы проекта на успех. Если вы сможете заполучить такого адвайзора, вы сэкономите довольно приличный бюджет на построение коммьюнити.

Теперь давайте глянем чаты и каналы Roobee: @roobee_invest и @roobee_chat (группа в Wechat не продвигалась, несмотря на то, что в китайских медиа публиковалась куча статей и пресс-релизов. Это может указывать на то, что большинство инвесторов было из России или англоязычных стран, которые используют в основном телеграм)

Мы используем этот сервис чтобы проверить метрики: https://telemetr.me/

Это поможет нам понять, как команда закупала рекламу и использовали ли они ботов. Просто вставьте ссылки в телеметр и вы получите список всех постов со ссылками на каналы Roobee. Вот некоторые из каналов-доноров:

• @blockchain_eye
• @bitco_novosti
• @tontelegramnews
• @exmo_official (канал биржи Exmo, где проект проводил IEO)
• @bajiiota
• @mir_crypto
• @buff_10 (канал их сооснователя)
• …

Этот список может быть полезен для поиска каналов для закупок вашей собственной рекламы, просто проанализируйте эти каналы соответствующими инструментами, чтобы оценить их показатели и понять, не используют ли они ботов.

Одна из лучших метрик, чтобы оценить качество канала это просмотры постов — если канал закупает ботов или просмотры, вы увидите что-то похожее на следующую картинку (это канал одного из самых известных русских коммьюнити-менеджеров с более чем 20 тысячами подписчиков):

Видите странное поведение? Огромное количество просмотров в первый день, и почти полное отсутствие активности в последующие дни. Это верный признак того, что канал закупает просмотры.

Вот как выглядят органические просмотры. Это статистика канала @tontelegramnews

Мы видим, что группа roobee_chat насчитывает примерно 5 тысяч участников, не очень большая цифра, если сравнивать с чатами других проектов. Это значит, что скорее всего аудитория тут живая, и команда не тратила бюджеты на накрутку подписчиков — еще одно доказательство того, что покупка ботов и просмотров бесполезна.

Мы видим то же самое на bitcointalk — тут нет сотен страниц обсуждений. Это также значит, что сообщения написаны реальными юзерами, и тут не было фейковой активности для накрутки цифр.

Вывод:

Мы видим что группы в мессенджерах и на bitcointalk служат только для дополнительной поддержки IEO. Вы не должны рассматривать их как самый главный канал для продвижения. И нет абсолютно никакого смысла покупать ботов и продвигать вашу тему на bitcointalk — все криптокоммьюнити уже понимает, что является реальным, а что нет. Быть пойманным на покупке ботов куда хуже, чем иметь мало юзеров/комментов.

Реклама в телеграме относительно дешевая — нужно лишь только потратить немного времени на написание хорошего поста и выстроить доверительные отношения с владельцами каналов. Для проверки каналов можно использовать такие инструменты, как:

• https://telemetr.me
• http://tgstat.ru

Хорошей новостью для основателей проектов является то, что те времена, когда реклама в топовых крипто каналах стоила 1–2 BTC, прошли.

Вот приблизительная цена на платный пост в телеграме:

• Непопулярные каналы попросят $100–200 за пост (тут можно иногда поторговаться)
• Более-менее читаемые каналы возьмут $500-$700
• Топовые каналы продают рекламу по $1,000-$4,000 за пост

Оценка бюджета:

Если вы покупаете рекламу самостоятельно:

• $3,000 — $10,000 на 6 месяцев (потребуется 6–10 постов, кроме того, большая часть трафика на ваш телеграм должна приходить из других источников)

Если вы нанимаете агентство:

• Закладывайте ещё $2,000-$3,000 за управление и поддержку ваших телеграм каналов.

Трекеры и биржи

Если вы уже достигли значительных успехов, выполнив пункты 1–3 — последний пункт будет самым лёгким для вас. Трекеры заинтересованы в добавлении серьёзных проектов и вам будет довольно просто договориться с ними, если ваш проект будет уже известен.

Что касается бирж и их предложений о проведении IEO — все биржи также заинтересованы в листинге солидных проектов, потому что они зарабатывают на комиссиях с торгов. Биржи ищут ликвидные токены для увеличения своей выручки, это не является секретом.

Таким образом, одним из важнейших критериев в выборе проекта для проведения IEO будет качество собранного вокруг этого проекта коммьюнити — потому что это единственный параметр, который указывает на то, что у этого токена будет какой-то торговый объём (а больший торговый объём значит большую выручку для бирж).

Не стоит ожидать каких-то невероятных результатов от маркетинговой активности самой биржи (кроме тех случаев, когда вы листитесь на Бинансе) — во всех остальных случаях это будет продвижение только в их внутренних каналах: телеграм, новостные рассылки, твиттер, сайт и т.д. Для инвесторов, такое продвижение ничего не значит без ваших собственных активностей. Вы ничего не соберёте, надеясь только на биржу.

Примерный бюджет:

• Проведение IEO на биржах: от 4 до 10 BTC
• Добавление на трекеры: до $3,000

Подводя итоги

Хорошие новости для основателей проектов состоят в том, что эра хайпа окончена, и цены на криптомаркетинг стали значительно ниже. Они уже не такие бешеные, как были всего год назад. Если вы контролируете процесс, и работаете с надежными партнерами, это не будет стоить вам целого состояния.

Для маркетинга есть две опции:

Первый вариант: Полный аутсорс на топовое агентство. Самый затратный вариант.

Второй вариант: Вы потратите некоторое количество времени на самостоятельный сбор команды из надежных партнёров для каждого маркетингового канала. Вы потратите меньше денег, если последуете этим путём, но тут тоже могут быть свои подводные камни, и это займёт больше времени.

Плохие новости состоят в том, что инвесторы сейчас неактивны (это совершенно несравнимо с тем, что было пару лет назад). Этому есть простое объяснение:

• 2–3 года назад можно было просто закинуть деньги во все проекты на рынке и получить 2–10х прибыль за 1–3 месяца, просто за счет повсеместного хайпа.
• Сейчас другая ситуация, и инвесторы стали более избирательны в своих вложениях. Все достойные проекты подписывают соглашения с фондами и пулами, и для ритейл-инвестора, аналитика и коммуникация с командами проектов может стать полноценной работой.

Кроме того, в наши дни, не стоит гордиться тем, что у вас уже есть MVP или работающий продукт, они ничего не значат. Если у вас есть какой-то целевой продукт и вы ищете долгосрочных инвесторов, вам будет проще получить венчурное финансирование.

Будем откровенны, для криптоинвесторов, самая важная метрика это: сможем ли мы увеличить свои вложения в Х раз, когда компания залистится на бирже, или нет. Инвестор может проверить это довольно легко — если у компании уже есть инвесторы из криптосообщества на закрытом раунде и если у вас есть соглашение с надежной биржей: шансы на то, что вы продадите свои токены в течение первых 3 дней и увеличите свой капитал в Х раз, довольно высоки (просто гляньте статистику IEO, вы можете заметить, что цена всех токенов идет вниз вскоре после IEO).

Таким образом, весь план может выглядеть вот так:

Шаг 1:

Нужно начать со сбора средств в оффлайне — найдите инвестора или партнера из фонда, который согласится инвестировать в вашу компанию. Или вы также можете подписать соглашение с пулами или китами, которые могут профинансировать вас.

Это будет то, о чем вы будете рассказывать во время своей PR-кампании.

Шаг 2:

Одновременно с первым шагом, начинайте разрабатывать свой продукт и создавать маркетинговые материалы (в венчуре, если у вас нет готового продукта с четкой целью, значит ваш проект ничего не стоит — но в криптосфере никому до этого нет дела :) ).

Шаг 3:

Когда вы завершили шаг 1 и шаг 2 — в сети уже должно быть много информации о вашем проекте. И самое важное из этого должно быть то, что вы подняли первые инвестиции через закрытый раунд, так что если вы уже подписали соглашение о старте PR-кампании и заказали публикации в топовых изданиях, самое главное, о чем вы должны писать, это ваш финансовый успех.

Шаг 4:

Как только у вас появились первые инвесторы после предыдущих шагов, активно работайте с ними — выстраивайте общение (просто обычное IR) и завлекайте активных ритейл-инвесторов в телеграм. Главной метрикой этого шага должно быть количество инвестиционных соглашений — сколько “виртуальных” инвестиций вы собрали.

Шаг 5:

Как только у вас есть все метрики по вашим потенциальным инвестициям, и вы набрали коммьюнити, идите к биржам и начинайте добавляться в трекеры (если они не добавили вас сами до сих пор). Шансы того, что большинство бирж возьмут вас и даже дадут скидку на листинг, должны быть существенно выше на этом этапе.

Если вы выбрали второй вариант выше, или вам просто нужен надежный партнер по контент маркетингу и контакты надежных исполнителей для всех ваших активностей, просто напишите мне в телеграм: ksshilov

Также присоединяйтесь к нашему чату основателей проектов для интересных дискуссий: ссылка на группу.

IEOs are still one of the working instruments of crowdfunding in the crypto market. There are hundreds of exchanges that offer IEO services, and for startup founders it’s hard to understand what offers are comprehensive and which ones are not. The criteria for selecting the best IEO offerings are becoming more complex, and the lack of transparency doesn’t help.

But there is one factor that certainly affects the success of an IEO — the community of investors around your project that you built before holding your IEO.

In this article, I want to crunch the marketing numbers of one of the most discussed IEOs in the recent past — Roobee. All of the facts within this article are sourced from public outlets and nothing stated here should be recognized as financial or investment advice. The author is not affiliated with the Roobee project.

If you are a blockchain founder and need advice on IEOs, join our group chat on Telegram (with more than 150 blockchain founders from all around the world): join link

Here are the sections for easier navigation:

• PR
• Content marketing
• Community management
• Trackers and exchanges

About the project:

Roobee.info and roobee.io are the next-generation investment platforms that use AI and transparent statistics. The minimum investment amount through the platform is $10.

The project has two websites; the first one was registered in November 2017, and the second was registered in May 2019. Bear in mind that Wikipedia states that the project was founded in 2017.

I. PR

The project has really strong PR activity. When looking at direct mentions only, there are thousands of mentions of the project on Google:

Press-releases and news about the project were published on all major crypto and business sites:

• Bloomberg.com
• Reuters.com
• Cointelegraph.com
• Forbes.com
• Themerkle.com
• Entrepreneur.com
• Businesswire.com
• Marketwatch.com
• Hackernoon.com
• Cryptodaily.co.uk
• Newsbtc.com
• Blog.naver.com (A major Korean search engine blog service)
• 8btc.com (Chinese Bitcoin news source)
• Investing.com
• …

But the most important thing here is what the articles were about — because you can spend a fortune by just buying publications in top-tier outlets, and you need extremely comprehensive topics in order to even be featured there.

Here is a brief list of the major topic titles:

• “Roobee Blockchain-Based Investment Service Closes Instantly the First IEO Private Round with $1 Million Invested by a Top”
• “Blockchain-based Investment Startup Roobee Raises US$4.5M in Pre-Seed Round”
• “How An International Investment Platform Secured Substantial Investment In A Falling Market”
• “10 Disruptive Technology Companies To Watch In 2019”
• “Blockchain, A.I., and the Shifting Landscape of Technology”
• “Top 5 Most Promising FinTech Startups: From Roobee to Forter”
• “”Backed by a 200 Million Investor Blockchain-powered Investment Platform, Roobee Is Launching Service with $10 Investment Threshold”
• “Roobee IEO: A New Company Shaking Up the Investment Industry”
• “The Investment Platform Favored by Crypto Whales, Roobee Announces IEO”

We can see that most of the topics are highly focused on the financial data surrounding the project: how much money it raised in a private sale, who invested, etc.

There are no topics on top-tier publications regarding token utility, technology overviews, or tales about how decentralization will change our world.

The team tried to get the attention of investors (whom, as we know, have little time to spend reading news. Add to that all of the scams that have happened since 2017, and it makes it even more difficult for investors to know who to trust). The topics were written about facts that are important to making an investment decision; it’s all about how much, and from whom, Roobee raised money.

How can you achieve this in your project?

In the case of Roobee, there was a very reassuring fact at the forefront. Here is a quote from Bloomberg:

“Bitcoin whale from among the top 250 Bitcoin holders, whose wallet currently holds 7000 BTC. The $1 million (200 BTC) transaction was sent by him via transit wallet to the Roobee’s wallet with the message ‘In Roobee I Trust’. “

It’s a really strong achievement and easy validated — it also doesn’t happen often. If you could achieve this in a private sale then your PR will certainly be a cakewalk, as most publications will be happy to write about this newsworthy accomplishment.

But what do you do if you don’t have a $1 million investment from a crypto whale? You still need to build your PR campaign around “solid” facts.

Compare these topics:

• Written agreement with VC fund
• Money raised from known angel investors
• Investments from crypto community (that can be validated on blockchain)
• Photo with Vitalik :)

To:

• We have developed one more blockchain platform that will disrupt X market
• Our decentralized technology will change the world
• Our CEO had a meeting with one more minister from X country

Which would you trust more?

For sure, the attention of investors and the agreement on raising funds is much stronger than your MVP. Let’s be honest about the current status of blockchain technology — you can just fork any open-source blockchain and tell the community that you have an MVP or even a working product, but in reality, it’s really worth nothing.

I would venture so far as to say that Roobee received a lot of PR for free — just because the news story possibilities were so prevalent. Let’s try to estimate the budget if we need to hire a PR firm or pay contributors to publish articles.

Budget estimation:

Press release distribution:

• You can use the services for this, such as bitcoinprbuzz or prNewswire.
• Budget for press-releases: from $2,000 to $15,000

Editorials:

Two options:

• You can hire a PR agency that will pitch your project to top-tier publications. The price here typically starts from $5,000 per month. Six to eight months before an IEO is the minimum amount of time you’ll need to arrange this. You will receive one or two tier-1 articles per month.
• You can recruit contributors by yourself and pay them directly. The price for top-tier contributors starts from $2,000 per article (it’s the minimum). When the contributors hear about crypto-content they feel that they can increase their prices two or three times higher simply because of the topic they will be writing about.

Total budget estimation:

From $42,000 to $120,000 for a six-month PR campaign ($7K-$20K per month)

II. Content marketing

Here I am referring to “content marketing” as writing and publishing content relevant to the market and the problems your product is solving. It’s mostly about building trust.

If you have traffic on your own blog then it’s a good place to publish. Other ways include using tier-2 publications with established audiences. In most cases, it’s much cheaper to use tier-2 than tier-1 publications, as they often have loyal, tight knit communities.

These types of materials should be ready before you start your PR campaign. After which your publications will hopefully have the following effects on the market:

• Investors see your press-release or news about your project
• They go to Google and search for something to read about your product

In the best situation they will find a ton of articles about each aspect of your project that will answer the most important questions:

• What’s your business model?
• Who is on your team and what’s their background?
• Are people already using your product?
• How will your solution change an industry (compared to the existing X, Y, and Z products)?
• …

Your website will not be the most trusted source in this case. So if they find an article on a trusted source (like Hackernoon :) ) with a lot of comments, it’s already a good sign that there is a greater chance the project is not a scam. This is called “community vetting” — you definitely want to be vetted by your community.

In Roobee’s case, let’s see what they did on their content marketing side. I will just follow the pattern described above.

Go to Google and type “What is Roobee”. Here’s what I see:

Wikipedia as a second link — a good sign.

Then I could type something like “how does roobee work”…

There is info on the Internet (not only on my own blog) that I can start to research to build my opinion about the project. The more varying sources, the better.

To summarize, here are the topics that were published in the case of Roobee:

• Information regarding the team (on a website with links to LinkedIn)
• A lot of photos of the co-founder with crypto influencers such as Vitalik, McAfee, and others. (it seems like this strategy still works, haha)
• Interview with a founder where he explains all the details (on Forbes)
• “Five Trends of Crowdfunding Industry to Watch in 2019”
• “The decentralization of markets: Chasing the dream?”
• Technical summary from the Roobee development team

Publications that were used to publish this content:

• Wikipedia.org
• Financemagnates.com
• Seekingalpha.com
• Hackernoon.com
• Born2invest.com
• Medium.com (Company’s own blog on medium)
• ….

Conclusion: We found a lot of “technical” articles that answer questions and talk more about the project itself: technology, business model, etc.

The budget can really differ here. You can buy an article from a writer from India who knows nothing about blockchain and will write an “SEO style” article. Or you can work with a team who has an array of editors and writers at their disposal who specialize in blockchain and will work hard to find the right angle for your project.

BTW: If you need a team like that, reach out to me on Telegram: @ksshilov (We have been involved in the market since 2017 and have published more than 400 topics for our customers: blockchain projects.)

Budget estimation:

• From $6,000 to $15,000 for a six-month period (4 topics per month published on trusted sources). In the case of working with a 5-star PR agency, you should multiply this number by 3, as they will have huge markups compared to other agencies.

III. Community management

What about community management? The fact that most ICO/IEO marketing companies are talking about it as one of the major activities is crucial. And of course, it is very important, but you should differ community management strategies from buying bots on Telegram and building “fake” comments on Bitcointalk; it is 100% not working in 2019 and you’ll just spend your budget to receive “vanilla” metrics. Also, the community knows when you fake it.

In the case of Roobee, one of the co-founders is the owner of the “$10 Buffet” Telegram channel with more than 150,000 followers. This is a hard achievement and a good sign that their chances of success will be high. If you can recruit such an “advisor” to your team, it will save you a lot on your community management budget.

Let’s analyze Roobee’s channels and groups. @roobee_invest and @roobee_chat (the Wechat group is not promoted, although there were a lot of press releases and articles on Chinese media. This could be a hint that the majority of investors are from Russia or English-speaking countries that mostly use Telegram).

We will use this service to gauge their metrics: https://telemetr.me/ It will help us discover how the team purchased ads and whether or not they used bots.

Just put the links into Telemetr and we can find all the posts with backlinks to Roobee groups. Some of them include:

• @blockchain_eye
• @bitco_novosti
• @tontelegramnews
• @exmo_official (Channel of Exmo exchange where the project launched an IEO)
• @bajiiota
• @mir_crypto
• @buff_10 (Owned channel)
• …

The above list can be helpful in terms of searching channels for your own ads; just analyze these channels with tools to see the metrics of channels that have bots.

One good metric to measure the health of a channel is to post views — if the channels buy bots or views, you can see an example in the next image (it’s a channel from one of the famous Russian community managers with more than 20K followers):

See the strange behavior? The huge amount of views on the first day, and then basically zero views over the next few days. It’s a strong sign that the channel bought views.

Here is how organic views (with real followers) are charted. These are the statistics for channel @tontelegramnews:

We can see that roobee_chat’s Telegram group has about 5K members, not a particularly large number when compared to other PR channels. This means that there is a high chance that the audience is real and the team didn’t spend their budget buying subscribers — even more proof that buying bots and views is useless.

We also see the same thing on Bitcointalk — there are not 100x pages of discussions. The messages are all real, and there was no purchased activity to help bolster their numbers.

Conclusion:

We can see that groups on messengers and Bitcointalk are there to support activity on your IEO. These shouldn’t be viewed as the major channel for your promotion, and there is certainly no reason to buy bots and push your thread on Bitcointalk — all communities already understand what’s real and what is not. Getting caught buying bots is far worse than having a low number of users/comments.

Ads on Telegram are relatively cheap — you just need to spend some time writing good content and building relationships with the admins. For expedited channel research, you can use tools like:

• https://telemetr.me
• http://tgstat.ru

It’s good news for founders that the times of buying ads on top crypto channels for 2 BTC is over.

Here is an estimation for Telegram’s paid posts:

• Tier-3 groups will ask for $100-$200 per post (sometimes negotiable)
• Tier-2 groups will cost you $500-$700
• The top groups start from $1,000-$4,000 per post

Budget estimation:

You buy the ads yourself:

• $3,000 — $10,000 for a six-month period (you will need 6–10 posts, most of the traffic to your Telegram should also come from other channels as well).

You hire an agency:

• You will add an additional $2,000-$3,000 for management and support on your Telegram groups.

IV. Trackers and Exchanges

If you made great headway on steps I to III, this last one should be even easier than the others. Trackers are interested in listing “solid” projects and it will be easy to communicate with trackers in this case if your project is legitimate.

Regarding exchanges and their IEO packages, all exchanges are interested in listing “solid” projects because exchanges make money on trading commissions. They search for liquid tokens to increase their overall revenue, which should come as no surprise.

So one of their major criteria in selecting a project for an IEO will be the quality of the community of investors that you build around your project, because it’s the only parameter that can guarantee that there will be trading volumes (and trading volumes mean more revenue for them).

You shouldn’t expect a large return from an exchange’s marketing activities (only if you’re not listed on Binance’s exchange). In all other cases, it will typically only be promotions via their channels: Telegram, newsletters, Twitter, website, etc. For investors, it’s not a sure-fire sign of a project to invest in without other PR activities. You will not raise funds from this activity alone.

Budget estimation:

• IEO packages from exchanges: from 4 BTC to 10 BTC
• Trackers listings: up to $3,000 total

Conclusion

The good news for founders is that the hype era is over and the prices for marketing services have gone down. It’s not nearly as crazy as it was even just a year ago. If you control the process and are working with trusted partners, it will not cost a fortune.

There are always two options:

• Option 1: Full services from the top agencies; the most expensive variant.
• Option 2: You spend some time building a team of trusted partners for each activity by yourself. You won’t spend as much using this method, but it could be tricky and more time consuming.

The bad news is that investors are inactive now (it’s not even close to what was two years ago). The explanation is simple:

• Three years ago you would just pour your crypto into any project on the market and in a month receive 2 to 10x returns; it was all based on hype.
• Now that is not the reality, and investors are more picky with their investments. All worthwhile projects have agreements with funds and pools, and if you are a retail investor, analytics, and communication with project teams will become your full-time job.

Also, nowadays, you shouldn’t be proud that you already have an MVP or a working product; they mean nothing. It will be easier to go to a VC if you already have a product-market fit and are looking for long-term investors.

Let’s be honest here. For crypto investors, the most important metric is this: can we do X with the investment when the company will be listed on an exchange or not? An investor can validate this pretty easily — if the company already has private-round investors from the crypto space and you have an agreement with a reputable exchange, chances are good that you will sell your token within the first three days after the IEO and make X amount of money. (Just see the IEO statistics, you can see that the prices of all tokens go down just after their IEO.)

So a plan could look like this:

Step 1:

You need to start with fundraising in the real world. Find an investor or partner from a fund who will agree to invest in your company. Or you can also make an agreement with pools or whales who will be ready to invest.

This will be the main angle to focus on during your PR stage.

Step 2:

Simultaneously with Step 1, start building your product and create content marketing materials. (In the real world, if you don’t have a product-market fit then your product costs nothing, but were in crypto world, so who cares!).

Step 3:

When you have completed Step 1 and Step 2, there is a lot of info about your product on the web. And the most important point is that you have raised funds through a private sale or have an agreement to start your PR activity on with top-tier publications — the most important angle to talk about is your financial success…

Step 4:

Once you’ve received your first investors from the previous steps, actively work with them; build relationships and manage active retail investors via Telegram.

The core metric of this step should be investment agreements — how much “virtual” investment do you have?

Step 5:

Once you have all metrics regarding your potential investments and you’ve built the community, go to the exchanges and start listing yourself on trackers (if they have not listed you themselves yet). The chances that the exchanges will accept you and give you a listing discount should potentially be high on this stage.

If you select Option 2 from above, or if you just need a trusted content marketing partner and the contacts of trusted contractors for all your activities, feel free to reach out to me on Telegram: @ksshilov — I have more than enough experience to help you along your path.

Also, feel free to join our project owners’ chat for enlightening discussions: join link

Everyone has their favorite programming language, just as everyone has their favorite shoes or favorite food. I want us to take a programming journey together. We’ll discuss Turing completeness, evaluate its usefulness in regard to smart contracts, look at alternatives, and hopefully we’ll come to the same conclusion together at the end. Spoiler alert: the conclusion is that giving Solidity a monopoly on smart contracts is a terrible, foolish idea.

So let’s jump right in. (Real quick: TC = Turing Complete and NTC = Not Turing Complete)

Turing Completeness, the briefest explanation

If you don’t know what TC is, I’m going to give you a brief explanation to keep you up to date. If you’ve heard of it before, but don’t quite remember exactly what it is, this will refresh your memory. Let’s jump into it!

Alan Turing was a mathematician (among many other things) who created a theoretical machine called the Turing Machine. This mythical machine has access to an infinite amount of RAM and runs using a finite program that determines when it should write, read, and move within its memory. Its programming also dictates under what conditions it should terminate and what it should do next. Programming languages that fit these conditions are known as TC languages.

A quick breakdown of what a TC machine can and can’t do is in order, so let’s look at some examples.

Is complete:

• Has the ability to implement any computable function.
• Always includes a function that won’t terminate by itself.
• Includes a function that, theoretically, could use an infinite amount of memory.

Isn’t complete:

• Doesn’t support loops, recursions, or other goto variants that tend not to terminate on their own.

According to the Tiobe Index, nearly all modern, popular programming languages are TC by default (or have the ability to be TC when needed). The languages that are purposefully NTC are extremely domain-specific languages such as BicoinScript and Coq (an interactive theorem program that mechanically checks proofs). These languages lack recursion, intentionally, either as a security feature or because they can function without recursion and the developers decided that creating a TC environment was overkill.

Basically, an NTC language is more specialized, while a TC language is a multi-purpose tool that can handle diverse situations. At first you might think, “Well, we should use TC languages for everything, right?” After all, it is flexible, but just as a multitool is a great thing to keep on your belt because it’s handy in many situations, you would probably prefer having the proper tools when repairing something like your car.

To roll with the above analogy, TC languages can be applied more broadly, while NTC languages have specific uses. I don’t know about you, but personally I consider smart contracts to be a specific use case. “But,” you may be thinking, “there are so many different types of smart contracts, and the majority are written in Solidity with no problems.”

Good point, dear reader. I’m glad you brought that up.

Smart Contracts, Solidity, and Turing Completeness

I find that it is always best to turn to the experts in regard to complicated questions, which is what led me to a paper from the Computer Science Institute at the University of Applied Science Ruhr West, in Germany. This paper, aptly titled “Do Smart Contract Languages Need to be Turing Complete?” brings to light a lot of very interesting statistics concerning the journey you and I are on together.

But before we dive too deeply into those stats, let’s quickly examine some of the common flaws that exist because Solidity is a TC language. We have the security flaws that allowed the DAO hack to happen (recursive call exploit), the possibility of attacking poorly implemented smart contracts (reentrancy attacks), and the fact that fees cannot be accurately predicted thanks to recursion (and the Halting Problem). These things only exist because Solidity is a TC language, but it is certainly worth suffering these flaws since we gain so much from TC languages, right?

Right?!

Unfortunately, the folks over at the University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West in Germany tell us a different story. They downloaded 53,575 smart contracts and analyzed the type of coding within each of them. They explain in their paper that “the performed analysis identified the flow control mechanisms used by the extracted smart contracts and assigned each smart contract to a corresponding computability class in order to check for the percentage of smart contracts that actually need a Turing complete smart contract for their implementation and by this answer the raised research question.”

The results were as follows:

• 35.3% — use “for-loops and primitive recursive functions and the problems related to the halting problem associated with this type of function.”
• A further breakdown within that 35.3% includes:
• 24.8% “verified contracts use for-loops”
• 3.6% are “contracts that use recursion”
• 6.9% of all analyzed smart contracts made use of a control flow mechanism that usually demands a Turing complete programming language.

There are two ways we can look at this data. Strictly speaking, the last 6.9% (about 3,697 out of 53,575) are the only category that technically require a TC language to function. Even if we are super liberal with our generalizations and assume the whole 35% needs a TC language, is that any better? Heck, I’d go so far as to say that even if half of them required TC it wouldn’t be worth the trade off. So why is Solidity TC?

Solidity’s creation was heavily influenced by JS, C++, Python, and PowerShell, all of which TC languages themselves. To say that Solidity was created as a TC language through 100% intention might be a bit of a stretch. After all, why would you intentionally introduce flaws into your programming language when the benefits aren’t even being utilized? Philip Daian, a PHD student at Cornell, wrote in a rather interesting blog article after the DAO hack that “this was actually not only a flaw or exploit in the DAO contract itself: technically the EVM was operating as intended, but Solidity was introducing security flaws into contracts that were not only missed by the community, but missed by the designers of the language themselves.”

We have other options… right?

Monopolies are bad and stifle growth. Period. We fight against, we support government actions that disband them, yet for some reason we are willing to accept them when it comes to smart contracts? With this in mind, there are two possible futures that I see unfolding in front of us.

Future one, we use our experience with Solidity and grow from it. We expand on Solidity, expand with other languages, like Vyper (an NTC language designed to be used next to Solidity), and continue to ignore the obvious flaws that a TC language brings to the smart contract world.

Future two, we diversify our portfolios. Look, I said earlier that I’m not going to tell anyone to give up their favorite programming language, I lied. The problem in the smart contract community right now is that everyone insists on using Solidity, and I’m just hoping that it’s out of necessity and not desire.

Let’s talk about serious contenders in regard to programming languages in the smart contract world. Let’s talk about Waves’ RIDE.

There are a few reasons why I consider Waves to be a serious contender in this fight, one of the major ones being that Waves showed up, built a system, and has been running it since 2016. Too often you see speculative articles about “this new company” that is going to “revolutionize the space”. When Waves entered the ring, they came in swinging, and they have a showcase of products to show for it.

They’ve got their own blockchain, wallet, and secure browser extension to manage dApp connections, DEX, and now RIDE, their own purpose-designed programming language to build dApps. The reason I bring this up is because Waves is a strong company doing serious things, and this makes their Solidity alternative a significant contender for dApp developers. Honestly, the main problem I have with this company is that the landing page of their website is nauseating, it just… keeps moving.

RIDE is a purposefully NON Turing Complete language that is designed for developers to build smart contracts in a no-nonsense environment. RIDE takes a two-prong approach to this: first, their language provides the basic scripting functionality necessary to create dApps (while at the same time reducing security related errors). Secondly, because the language does not support any recursion or complex loops, it can be easily tested for security flaws.

But the lack of recursion doesn’t just benefit security testing, it also comes into account when calculating gas fees for executing smart contracts on the Waves blockchain. Because it is possible to calculate how long the program should take to run and how complex it will be, prices can be estimated and fees are never charged without executing the dApp (I’m looking at you, Ethereum).

You may be thinking that because RIDE is purposefully NTC, that it can’t handle the majority of smart contracts being written for the EVM. Remember that study from earlier though, the one with the German Computer Scientists? Less than 7% of tested smart contracts used a loop and needed TC to run.

The real question (the whole purpose of this journey) is: why are we using Solidity, a TC language, when less than 7% of dApps written in Solidity are using its TC features?

That 7% of dApps that require TC smart contracts could theoretically, according to the paper “Self-Reproducing Coins as Universal Turing Machine,” be served by implementing TC features across many different transactions. In their study, they were able to construct a simple TC machine by using a small, specific set of language features that utilized the UTXO (unspent transaction output) model. These transactions were heavily restricted by both input and output transaction states, for safety, and both unbounded and infinite loops were intentionally impossible to trigger in their case. In the same way, RIDE as an NTC programming language can be used to write TC smart contracts without the issues that an underlying TC programming language can bring.

Issues that we are seeing with Ethereum and which are only going to get worse unless they change something major, and since we can see their roadmap for the next few years we know that none of these crucial changes are in the works. They will eventually move to POS instead of POW, and they have Vyper which you can opt to write in if you want increased security. But the bottom line is that TC was a selling point. Heck, Vitalik Buterin even admits in the Ethereum white paper that:

“Turing-incompleteness is not even that big a limitation; out of all the contract examples we have conceived internally, so far only one required a loop, and even that loop could be removed by making 26 repetitions of a one-line piece of code. Given the serious implications of Turing-completeness, and the limited benefit, why not simply have a Turing-incomplete language? In reality, however, Turing-incompleteness is far from a neat solution to the problem.”

As we have reached the end of our journey together, I ask you this, “What is more important to you as a developer: the ability to write clear, concise code that is automatically resistant to hacks and malicious intent OR the ability to write code in a TC language that is more “neat”?

Ethereum and Solidity undeniably opened the doors to a new world with smart contracts and dApps, but it is long past time we diversify our programming skill sets and break up this monopoly before it takes too strong of a hold. For a developer, switching to an NTC alternative is not such a big leap. In order to make it even easier for you, I’m planning to run you through the entire process and show you specific examples of code in one of my next posts. Stick around because the shift is happening and you have seats in the front row!

Should Smart Contracts be Non-Turing Complete? was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ownership investing, or “equity” as it’s better known as, is purchasing investments such as stocks, real estate, collectibles, or whole businesses for the purpose of making you a partial owner of the underlying company or asset. And when the value of your investment goes up, you share that increase with all of the other owners.

There are no guarantees that there will be earnings, let alone how much they’ll be, but thanks to security laws, you are protected as an investor and if it goes down you’ll be sharing the loss as well, giving you a good risk-reward balance. That’s the “making money with money” instrument that privileged investors are using to make sure they stay rich.

That’s right. Not becoming rich; remaining rich. Because an investor should bring proof of having an annual income exceeding $200,000 or having a net worth exceeding $1 million in order to become “accredited” and have access to these deals. Is that you? If so, then you must already own equity in some pretty successful companies. If not then keep reading because, thanks to the blockchain technology, the following investments became available to any and all types of investors:

• Blue Hill Foundation makes it possible for you to become a co-owner in a real mining operation for as little as €247 (~$280)
• Brickblock makes you one of the owners of a €2 million property in Germany
• 7Pass shares its cannabis business profits with you
• And WestCan Energy makes you a direct owner of their oil and gas acquisitions

These are investment opportunities that for years stayed closed to mainstream investors. In this article we’re going to find out how these companies and many others could open up a traditional sector to global investors and what the catch is. (Spoiler alert: there isn’t one!) If you’re looking for in-depth descriptions on how you can invest in any of the listed companies, we’ll be covering them all later in this article.

Sharing economy: become a co-owner

We already started this conversation talking about ownership and risk management by sharing the earnings and losses with the other owners. This is not just a way of saying that ownership investment makes you a rightful co-owner. As an individual, you will share ownership in an asset with another individual just like you. The investment amount may be different, however, and this translates into a percentage (you own a percentage of the underlying asset or business), but the rights of each owner are the same according to an ownership agreement.

The relationship between co-owners may vary, and the financial and legal obligations vary from one case to another. For example, in regard to real estate , the legal concept of co-owner is defined by the Joint Tenancy or Tenancy In Common. Similarly, co-owners of a bank account or a brokerage account are bound by strict procedures and legal constraints. When that account is closed, all co-owners must be involved.

Can a blockchain impose ownership constraints programmatically?

Currently, most of the ownership rights are gained by signing an ownership agreement; a paper document. There’s nothing wrong with it, but in today’s digital environment is this artifact of the past still efficient? We are claiming to live in a global world, but when it comes to co-ownership deals, all of the involved parties need to find themselves in the same room in order to participate. Otherwise, in order to be part of the deal they have to bring a mediator; a financial institution serving as a deal underwriter. Of course, as a middleman they will take their commission in the meantime. From an investor standpoint, every cent matters, so a lengthy and expensive investing process can be a dealbreaker.

But we know that the blockchain can be used to self-execute contractual clauses to perform credible transactions without the need of a third party, in our case the financial institution. On top of that, the blockchain can also be used as a record of the transactions among the participants, becoming the ultimate proof of ownership. Involving the blockchain in the process adds higher security and lowers costs. Plus, it can “digitally split” the ownership of a single asset into as many fractions (tokens) as needed.

Partial ownership has been a long-standing concept in the form of stocks for publicly-traded companies. Stocks already allow consumers the chance to acquire fractional ownership in companies. The novelty that the blockchain brings is an immediate and convenient way to distribute the ownership of these complex assets, giving entrepreneurs and inventors more financial opportunities than ever before. Because a digital token is more accessible and liquid than a paper contract, it opens up the opportunity to attract funding to a wider range of entrepreneurs, which could fuel a technological revolution.

Are tokens used as funding tools even legal?

It all started when two Florida-based corporate defendants offered real estate contracts for tracts of land with citrus groves. Buyers would become owners of the lands but, as most of them were not farmers and did not have any agricultural expertise, they had the option to lend it back to the defendants who could harvest, pool, market the citrus, and share the profits. Good deal, right? Anyway, this action was deemed illegal by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). They found that the “buy-lend-share” contract was actually an investment contract and should be registered as a security.

Right after this scandal, the SEC developed a test that can be used to determine whether or a certain transaction is an investment contract. This test is still used today and is known as the “Howey Test”. This is essentially what the Howey Test asks:

• Is it an investment of money?
• Is the investment in a common enterprise?
• Is there an expectation of profit from the work of the promoters or the third party?

Sounds a lot like the “ownership token” we were talking about previously, right? The token is an investment contract that represents the legal ownership of an asset, like a business. Ownership that can be verified within the blockchain. It successfully passes the Howey Test. That’s why it is called a security token, and if all the regulations are properly met, then these tokens have immensely powerful use cases.

“It’s inevitable that security tokens will transform equity just as bitcoin has transformed currency, because they afford the owner a direct, liquid economic interest and the expedited delivery of proceeds. Every type of ownership can be tokenized, which is a massive multi-trillion dollar addressable market,” as stated by Carlos Domingo, the founder of SPICE Venture Capital.

How can you become an owner via the blockchain?

Business owners are usually running a security token offering (STO) when they can distribute the token in question. Investors would be able to trade these fractional shares like they would any cryptocurrency; accumulating, holding, and selling it as they see fit. The ultimate goal is to hold the tokens until the real asset becomes publicly traded, like stocks, an event that could produce an immediate increase in their value. Where can an individual investor find such opportunities?

The first and most surprising one comes from the “Blue Hill Foundation”, which is responsible for the pre-sale of BHF-Tokens. These will be exchanged for BHM Tokens, which hold the rights to (0.00000004%) co-ownership of the “Blue Hill Mine”, a large-scale mining operation that is forecasted to have one of the largest copper reserves in Asia (located in Mongolia). BHF-Tokens are available for all types of individual investors. They are not regulated, they follow the FINMA and the SEC terms and conditions, and they will be exchanged for the fully regulated BHM-Tokens (1-to-1) during the B.H.Mining-STO. BHM-Tokens will be listed on the exchanges for $0.45, but today BHF-Tokens can be purchased at a preferential price.

By the end of the process, you will be a partial owner of the “Blue Hill Mine”, which is in the form of digital, asset-backed programmable ownership. “Blue Hill Mining” aims to create sustainable growth using part of the profits generated from the sale of raw materials to the market, as well as their future “Blue Hill Platform”, a peer-to-peer platform for trading mineral resources. The next important step, for now, is regulatory approval from one of the authorities (European Regulation, FINMA, SEC) of the B.H.Mining-STO. But even in the very unlikely case where regulatory compliance is not granted, the investors will be indemnified from the sale of the “Blue Hill Mine” to the stock market.

For those interested in real estate, Brickblock is developing a smart contract platform for selling and investing tokenized assets, such as real estate. Investors can buy Proof-of-Asset (PoA) tokens with other cryptocurrency, which entitles its owners to the profits of the underlying asset. It can be seen as a connection between the mortar assets (real estate) and crypto funds powered by smart contracts. By cutting out the middlemen, Brickblock reduces the cost of investing for a more streamlined process. Keep in mind, the process has not yet been finalized and the tokens can’t be converted into fiat; a feature that is scheduled to be made available in the final quarter of 2019.

With the cannabis industry currently booming, the team at 7Pass is focused on how cannabis positive effects are delivered to people and provide capital for selected entrepreneurs to start and grow their own businesses in the field. That opens up the opportunity for you as an individual to invest in a spectrum of emerging companies in the cannabis sector. Through the tokenization of their shares, 7Pass offers a security token, the 7Pass token, which makes you a shareholder in their company and gives you direct access to the investment returns. Despite their promise to identify and build cannabis market leaders, there is a long road ahead of them in terms of legislative dissonance, nascent financial infrastructure, and companies with little or no operating history.

Similar to the B.H.Foundation, WestCan Energy opens up a traditional sector to individual investors, and the company is set to acquire and develop high-quality, undervalued oil and gas assets. Then, by using standard field development techniques, they can operate the fields to maximize oil recovery. Their operation is funded through an asset-backed security token backed by the market value of the acquired oil and gas assets. This token gives owners direct rights to the underlying oil and gas commodity value. But because security tokens are subject to regulation in the United States, Canada, and other jurisdictions, this opportunity remains available only for the accredited investors in those regions.

Who’s going to benefit on this opportunities?

Security tokens are becoming the preferred mode of crowdfunding, opening new investment opportunities to individual investors. They are regulated and secure like IPOs, but they are also coming at a cheaper price for both entrepreneurs and investors. The removal of the middleman comes with financial advantages. However, financial institutions are set to meet more functions than deal underwriting. They are also in charge of solicitation of investor interest, insurance of high levels of security, and compliance regulation. That’s, without their involvement, security tokens as investment come with a greater risk.

Regardless of the critics, the blockchain is opening up “programmable ownership” to a wide variety of people. Before stating that the investment market won’t be able to successfully replace traditional financial institutions, we need to wait and watch if these fears have any basis or not. Sitting on the sidelines can make you miss the best opportunities only early adopters usually get. But, by the end of the day, the decision is always yours!

Programmable Ownership: What Security Tokens mean for Individuals was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Modern businesses have to be more competitive than ever before if they want to succeed. The Internet has forever changed the way business is being conducted, and those companies that refuse to adapt to these changes will be left behind. It’s always obvious to look back to the past and see what technologies were essential for businesses to succeed, but looking to the future can be a bit more tricky.

Could the Blockchain become an essential part of business management tools?

What’s certain is that the blockchain is here to stay, and its permanence only increases when large companies add the blockchain to their roster of technologies. Facebook, for instance, recently announced launching its own cryptocurrency, Libra, in conjunction with 25+ other huge companies (Lyft, Visa, Paypal, etc).

Libra will offer a conglomerate of features on a blockchain, similar to the Chinese company WeChat, which already has over a billion downloads. The bottom line is that the blockchain is becoming essential for every business, so let’s take a look at how you can implement it into yours right now.

Essential Tools for Businesses in 2019 and Beyond

You don’t have time to sift through every single tool, list, and recommendation to see what works best for you. You’re busy, we get it. With this in mind, we humbly present a quick list of the six most essential tools to help grow your business and we will be comparing a traditional option to its blockchain counterpart.

We’ve chosen to use Sessia for our blockchain counterpart examples, because it combines essential tools with ease of use for free.

Online Payments

You can’t conduct business without accepting payments. Sure, it would be great if you could accept cash for every purchase to lower fees, but with the growth of online sales it would be silly to ignore that vector. Studies show that the younger generations are more welcoming of cryptocurrencies, which may be the key to future online sales.

SessiaPay is like Paypal on Blockchain. SessiaPay interlinks itself with its wallet and accepts cryptocurrencies as a payment for client orders within its marketplace.

It is free for businesses to use and can accept international payments, ETH, and KICKs (their native cryptocurrency).

E-commerce Website

Unless you are comfortable designing websites, creating your own e-commerce website will be far from easy. The alternatives to coding your own platform are solutions like Shopify that make launching your online store a relative breeze.

Where some users may struggle, however, is in figuring out how to connect everything together: website, sales funnels, mobile access, and how to reward their customers.

On the Blockchain side, Sessia Online Store Builder can relieve a lot of the headache. Like in Shopify, even inexperienced users can create a free e-store via a browser or on mobile. Building via Mobile goes one step ahead and combines with the SessiaMarket, giving you the ability to choose between three levels of cashback commission rewards for your customers.

Cashback/Reward Systems

Traditional cashback reward systems have proved to be a hit with the customers in marketplaces but, the reality is that your information is being sold without you being appropriately rewarded.

The Blockchain has the ability to help rectify this malaise and usher us towards greater data privacy and security.

For a simpler, consolidated, and immutable experience where everyone is rewarded fairly, Blockchain products such as Pei and Loyyal offer solutions by building on top of the already existing reward systems. The loyalty program gives its users a way to earn rewards with any purchase that is made through a referral (like your friend posting a receipt from a store, you clicking on it, and subsequently making a purchase).

Rewards are given both ways: the referrer gets a cashback incentive while the referee earns a kickback.

CRM Systems

After you start to accrue a decent customer base, it is important to know how to manage them appropriately. Some of the best CRM systems pull tons of seemingly disconnected data and combines it to create opportunities for businesses to increase sales. HubSpot CRM, Salesforce CRM, and Freshsales are all companies that do this in traditional markets. Sessia has a similar feature to incorporate CRM data within their business app. Businesses can find detailed statistics on everything from sales to turnover rates, order quantities, customer purchase history, periods of activity versus inactivity, and much more.

HubSpot CRM and its competitors are wonderful, but they also fall short because they can be costly and don’t reward the customer directly. In addition, they tend to rely on a customer’s use of many different platforms (social media, email, website browsings, etc.).

Everything a business needs can be found under the “Reports” section, and all of this data can be used to create a full picture of a specific customer’s experience, in turn, helping create a better experience for that customer to further encourage them to make purchases.

Logistics Management

Any business that ships anything, whether it be something as large as a piece of furniture or something as small as earrings, has to deal with logistics management. Companies like Etsy, Ebay, and Amazon already have a complex process in place to handle their daily thousands of orders. Amazon goes even further, outsourcing its shipping service, known as Fulfilment.

While many small businesses manage their logistics by hand, printing their own shipping labels and manually tracking each one to ensure it reaches its final destination, they now have these third-party alternatives.

Anyway, it comes with fees and the responsibility of the business owner to check yet another inbox for customer messages multiple times a day. That’s where blockchain can remove the hustle and costs.

As seen in SessiaLogistics, as a business, you can integrate API logistics data from outside sources. So, when a customer reaches out you’ll be able to easily see their order history, logistics details, and even check out their CRM reports to see if you’ve had problems with them in the past.

Simplicity is the Key to Success

When it comes to your business, the less you have to worry about the more successful you can be. When you aren’t wasting your time checking 15 different inboxes and applications, responding to messages on five different platforms, and wondering if your sales growth is hitting the mark, you can finally focus on improving your product.

An all-in-one integrated solution not only that it saves you time but now it exposes your business to a new audience which is growing as fast as the cryptocurrency market. Using blockchain-based tools helps you expand your knowledge on this revolutionary technology.

After all, the more you invest in the future, the more you can ultimately improve your business.

Conceptualizing a Marketplace Ecosystem Using Only Blockchain Products was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The industry of pharmaceuticals is one of the largest in the world — its global revenue was $1.2 trillion in 2018 and it continues to grow, since the growing human population is finding new ways to increase the quantity of their consumption by supplementing their diet with processed nutrients extracted from food sources. By 2023, the global revenue of medicine, vitamins, and supplements is projected to reach $7.35 billion.

But the problem is that it is pretty much an unregulated market. When someone buys a pill, there’s a high chance that it could be a fake. Sadly, statistics say that there are tons of fake and ineffective products on the market, sold, and given to unsuspecting people.

We can remember the recent scandal in China when thousands of faulty vaccines, produced by Changchun Changsheng, were given to children, which even caused deaths in some cases.

Officials say that in total, up to 500,000 of Changchun Changsheng’s DTaP vaccines may not have met the proper standards. Another case happened recently when a private hospital was closed dozen; dozens of patients were given fake HPV vaccines. This, too, happened in China.

But this problem isn’t unique to China, it’s widespread on a global scale. Doctors say that fake drugs kill more than 250,000 children a year. They are everywhere, and something must be done about it. But we already know the solution; a blockchain-based solution, such as, say MidasCaps, Paragon, or a VeChain.

But first, we have to dive deeper into the problem.

Origin of the problem

The fake drugs market is an enormous one — it’s worth more than $30 billion! The vitamin and supplement market is just a portion of that worth, but it sends 23,000 people to the emergency room every year. Medical marijuana, another minority (for now) in this market, was found to contain mold and diverse bacteria that may cause harm to those who inhale it — and nobody even checks this!

At this moment, there’s no proper way to tell a genuine product apart from a fake one. Perhaps a “Certificate of Origin” could have helped, but in the current environment that can be faked, too.

The majority of these bad products come from countries such as India, China, or those in Africa. These developing countries exhibit poor quality control, and the absence of a strong legal system that punishes the manufacture of fake products attracts many criminals and other bad actors to the medicine-related industries.

According to a report by the World Health Organization, 1 in every 10 medical products found in circulation in low- and middle-income countries are either fake or of poor quality.

When cartels and companies producing these bad products get caught, they face no severe consequences, only fines or minor sentences. Without counting the human factor, everyone in the supply chain can be bribed. It became a game with small losses and big wins for the fraudulent manufacturers.

No Human — No Problem

The obvious solution that should be used, that has already shown its effectiveness in handling the food supply chain, is the blockchain. Major companies like Walmart track their food via the blockchain, and it’s almost revolutionary — every container has its own tracking number, and its route from the manufacturer to a store can be checked in seconds.

Fake food, obviously, can’t have a genuine number in the blockchain.

So why can’t we implement this same technology when we’re dealing with various health-related products? Well, we actually can! The blockchain market can already offer us a lot of solutions for all the above-mentioned industries — tracking supply chains and issuing certificates of origin!

In this article we’ll look at MidasCaps, Paragon, and VeChain, all blockchain projects that are developing unique solutions to prevent the delivery of fake pharmaceutical products to stores.

MidasCaps concentrates on implementing decentralized certificates of origin together with manufacturing their own product — capsules with supplements. The idea is simple and beautiful — every capsule comes with a predetermined number of MDC tokens, the new tokens get minted along with the production of capsules.

To find the code containing the proof, it’s necessary to break the capsule and then redeem the code for their tokens. The only way to falsify a capsule is either using a capsule with no code, using one that is visibly fake, or using a copied code from a genuine one.

Luckily, the product is so cheap that there’s no economic incentive to do it.

Their tokens will be used to pay for participating in various sporting activities, supplements, equipment, and gym subscriptions on their platform.

Or they can be used to buy other capsules as a form of bonus points system. Anyway, the main feature here that evokes our interest is the certificate, and it works perfectly.

Paragon provides a solution exclusively for the marijuana supply chain. It offers a CRM for buyers and sellers, coupled with a set of tools, and built to facilitate the life of the cannabis industry and to provide extra safety for end users.

Every plant, batch, strain or product can be tracked, and every operation is written onto the blockchain ledger. If someone tries to sell a bad product and the truth comes out, this manufacturer’s reputation will be ruined forever.

Recently, given the SEC accusations for selling unregistered security tokens, Paragon didn’t stop the development and they eventually came to an agreement with the regulator. Now they have a functional platform with real cannabis manufacturers, and it will aid the industry to grow further.

VeChain is a generic supply chain project developed in China. As stated earlier, the majority of fake drugs are manufactured in China. VeChain, together with DNV GL, was selected to develop a local drug and vaccine traceability solution.

It was already successfully implemented in Shanghai where an IoT device will capture and record on the blockchain all the relevant data about vaccines manufacturing and transportation.

Each vaccine receives an individual ID number that can be scanned to retrieve the entire history of that vaccine. Even if it’s a private chain, it’s a very useful one, and it can save many lives.

While their are several other Provenance solutions based on Blockchain technologies, I picked these three out to use them as examples for explaining.

Conclusion

As we can see, the current state of healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and the supplement industry can be categorized as terrible. The global market is flooded with fake medical products, and it’s even worse in developing countries where those fake products are manufactured. It’s a great problem for humanity, because we are talking about matters of life and even death.

There’ll always be ways to trick the system and maintain fraudulent status quo, but it will be a lot harder if the blockchain would be implemented globally in the industry. These provenance Blockchain projects, along with many others, set the route for all manufacturers, and this route leads us to a better future, where people don’t eat ink instead of vitamins and don’t get injected with a faulty liquid when they need a vaccine to live.

The Fake Drugs Market is Over $30 Billion. Are Your Supplements and Vitamins Real? was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What does the IEO launch process look like?

It’s been awhile since the ICO hype ended, and the market has since transformed to accommodate a new fundraising strategy, the Initial Exchange Offering (IEO). The step away from ICOs and into IEOs was pretty evident. After more than 90% of ICO projects were scams someone needed to start regulating crowdfunding, and exchanges took this upon themselves. For now, many exchanges are actively launching their IEO launchpads and the new wave of crowdfunding is getting its first steps.

Is IEO the next step in the decentralized crowdfunding ecosystem or just another hype and a new way for exchanges to earn massive amounts of revenue on marketing? We’ll see. (There is already initial negative feedback about launching IEOs on tier-2 exchanges, like this).

An IEO is a new way of raising funds — and founders need to research this opportunity for their projects to be readily prepared if IEOs succeed as a fundraising strategy.

In this article I will lay out a plan for those who wish to launch an IEO. This plan is based on my own experience of working in the market since early 2017. It is also based on information from colleagues in crypto marketing agencies and projects who’ve already launched IEOs for their clients.

Approaches to launching an IEO

There are two major strategies to launch an IEO:

Approach 1 — Listing on the Top Exchanges

You’ve been working on your project and are trying to make it attractive to the community. Your goal here is to launch an IEO on the top exchanges like Binance, Okex, Huobi — this will automatically demonstrate to the community that your project is trustworthy.

At this state you will have already needed to have some funds to cover operating and marketing costs for your product, which is why the IEO is just an option for additional funding, not the first funding step.

Here is a useful post from Binanace CEO Changpeng Zhao about how to be listed on Binance. It is important to note that you can’t pay to be listed on this exchange: Binance Listing Tips

The most useful points from the article above shows Binance’s approach to reviewing projects:

“…[We] focus on user adoption. If you have a large number of users, your product has value. That’s the easiest to measure…”

Approach 2 — Bootstrap (Tier-2 exchanges)

The other strategy is that you take your MVP and idea and try to raise starter funds through an IEO. You’ll then use these funds to execute your product creation and implement your marketing strategy.

Let’s be realistic — this way is harder to raise funds, because crypto investors on the market have already learned from the ICO hype and their current fear of losing money is too strong. The situation is such that investors don’t trust anybody.

In this situation, Tier-1 exchanges are closed to you. Instead, you should work with Tier-2 exchanges who are willing to accept money to launch an IEO.

In theory exchanges need to be a trustworthy source for recruiting projects — and top exchanges like Binance truly are.

But in reality most of exchanges from tier-2 just accept money to list projects and there is a huge conflict of interest from the exchanges side. They aren’t validating the IEOs, instead just offering listing to those who have the money to pay the listing cost.

Another important point if you decide to go with the tier-2 approach — you should be ready to pay for a listing AND pay to market your IEO in the community to build trust.

The other trick here is that you are not limited to one exchange and, based on your budget, you can launch an IEO on several exchanges simultaneously — whether that is reasonable or not for your situation can only be decided by you.

No matter which approach you choose you will need to spend a lot of effort and time to build trust with the community and prove that you are not a scammer.

How do crypto investors estimate the value of projects?

Before describing our marketing plan let’s ask active crypto investors how they measure the trust of a project on the market.

There are still misconceptions on the market that in order to receive funds, all you need to do is buy subscribers for your telegram group and send some press-releases to top crypto media. The belief is that this will drive traffic to your beautiful landing page, which in turn leads to -> Profit.

But it’s not true and investors are not stupid — everyone understands which metrics are fabricated and which are real.

To better explain this, I asked many major ICO pool owners and some crypto traders about how they evaluate the crypto projects that they choose to invest in. They were all pretty much the same with their assessment. Let’s review some of the answers here.

Question: What is the most important thing you look at when you select an IEO to invest in, and which sources do you use to monitor the new projects?

“…The number of followers may be very misleading due to bounty campaigns. The same goes for articles. Some hype is genuine, but some hype is fake. We always dig into that when analyzing the hype of the projects. We are constantly monitoring, not only through secondary sources but also primary sources (like startup events, and through our network), so that we can know before anyone else which projects will be the future hypes. Timing is very important for us.” Jvperwitness, Crypto Whales Pool Owner

“…Idea / Team. VCs / Funds who are supporting the project. Hardcap. Initial Circulating Supply.

Seed and private round deals and whether or not huge bonuses / discounts were given

At the time we invest into IEOs (usually private rounds) we don’t really take into account the social aspects, huge community etc. We have seen number of ICOs / IEOs where huge following were there to get only free tokens and later just dump and forget about the project itself. There should be enough traction though and it should not be a ghost town, that’s enough…

We mostly search for the new projects through our VCs / Friends at places who know such projects well before everyone else. Following investment from Funds / VC groups, Pantera, Hash and likes.” Dexter from Crypto Capital

“..transparency and a very active intelligent community around the project. Can be few 100 people in the tg [telegram] but they have to be very smart and actively writing…” Chris, owner of icodog.io and creator of social mining.

“..The most important thing for me is an Exchange where the IEO is launched, and the hardcap. The amount of community members and social networks followers are not important. If the IEO is launched on the exchange like Binance, then any project recruited from Binance will raise the funds in seconds..” Andrey Podolyan, Asset Manager, Crypto Trader. CEO of cryptorg.net

“…followers on telegram is absolutely irrelevant imo [in my opinion]. You can anyway fake this numbers. Tier-1 exchange is something that is very important…As an investors group we get 100 pms everyday, [because of] this we know exactly what is in high demand…” Ken. DACH pool Team member

What should your IEO marketing plan look like?

Let’s go in-depth into what a marketing plan should look like. We will use the second approach — listing on tier-2 exchanges. Because, as I described above, there is not an evident way to launch your IEO on Binance without first receiving Binance’s permission.

Based on the information given these will be the next points in your plan:

Project packaging:

Idea, tokennomics, legal questions, and mvp of the project should be ready. You can do it by yourself or hire consultants to do it for you.

PR & Marketing:

You don’t need to buy followers (and shouldn’t, since it can build distrust with the community), but you need to undertake a traditional PR & Marketing plan to build trust among the community and pitch your project to a public audience.

Budget to pay for listing(s):

Exchanges will charge a high amount to get listed. Also, some exchanges will include marketing activities to their package — but in reality it’s not enough. Because all they offer is a newsletter sent to their database of registered users and a promo post on their social network feeds. Investors understand that you paid for these marketing activities and it’s not enough to build trust. So don’t rely on an exchange’s marketing package. You will need to complete your own marketing if you want to be successful.

Here are the steps you need to execute based on your budget:

IEO budget: From $100,000

With this budget, you can go to the major exchanges (top-10 here: https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/)

• BitForex
• Coineal
• BW

The cost for listing starts at 10 BTC — but you need to negotiate with the exchange’s team or your IEO agency to receive a discount. In most cases you can expect a 10–15% discount.

PR & Marketing:

After you have launched your website with all the documents available to the public, it is a good idea to add your project to all available crypto trackers (the major one: https://icobench.com). Most of the trackers will add you for free (with a PRO option for more coverage available).

Start with major trackers — tier-2 trackers should add you automatically once you are on tier-1 sites. You can hire someone on Upwork or just ask your agency to manage communications with trackers — you should expect the price to be between $900 — $1500.

The next step will be to feature your story on a Tier-1 publication. History has shown that your voice and article focus shouldn’t be about technology (interested investors will view it in-depth in your whitepaper), but more focused on expectations and possibilities: you have a contract with Microsoft or another major company, or you already have an agreement to be listed on major exchanges — this is the good news for potential investors.

With this budget you can expect to be featured on tier-1 crypto websites and publications. Here is the cost for sponsored articles on major crypto websites (these prices may change over time):

• Cointelegraph.com — from $4,500
• Coindesk.com — from $4,500
• Investing.com — from $2,700
• Entrepreneur.com — from $3,700
• Forbes.com — from $5,000

This is for a featured article about your project. You could also buy brand mentions from journalists who are writing in this industry, and it will typically be less expensive. You should expect prices for a brand mention to be up to $1,500 for tier-1 publications.

The other option is press-releases. You just need to find the right angle here (focus on expectations, not technology), and distribute your press-release to all crypto websites (it will help you to receive a lot of republishing from publications on steemit and other community hubs). Here are the prices:

• Ccn.com — from $350
• Newsbtc.com — from $800
• Bitcoin.com — from $1,000
• Forklog.com — from $2,500
• Coinspeaker.com -from $230

If you have a good PR manager in-house who can generate good news and pitch journalist, then it’s possible to receive publication for free.

The last step will be to write a solid, long-form article about your vision and how your technology will disrupt the market. The best place to publish such an article is on a website like hackernoon.com — then just distribute it to Reddit and Quora communities to start a conversation and receive feedback.

The price per article can vary greatly — and you need to find a good writer with a technical background and understanding of blockchain technology to get started.

In 2018 there was a standard industry proportion:

• 1 to 5 (if you need to collect $5 million on your ICO you need to invest $1 million in marketing)
• 10% of your marketing budget should go to PR

For IEO it’s pretty much the same.

IEO Budget: $30,000 — $100,000

With this budget you need to work with medium exchanges (top-20 here: https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/)

• P2PB2B
• Cointiger
• Exrates
• Bittrex
• Probit

The cost for listing starts at 2 BTC — but you need to negotiate with the exchange’s team or your IEO agency to receive a discount. In most cases you can expect a 10–15% discount.

PR & Marketing:

You should be more creative here — invest more in your content and try to find the right angle to get published on bigger networks for free. This won’t be easy, but if you are publishing interesting articles that aren’t just sales pitches you are more likely to get coverage.

I will try to keep an updated list of publication costs here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h1XPPyhA0vYvv71mrhMvytIvtPylCiwP0r-h6R5hV_U/edit?usp=sharing

The easiest way is to create a plan for publications selected from the list above.

IEO Budget: Less than $30,000 (Bootstrap or DIY approach)

This is the hardest approach for an IEO. You need to be extremely creative and manage a lot of things by yourself.

The highest costs will still go to pay for a listing on exchange — try to pitch the top-20 exchanges. There are a lot of scam in this market and fake trading volumes. I suggest that you don’t work with exchanges from below the top-20 list, since they typically can’t be trusted.

PR & Marketing:

You need to invest in creating long-form pieces which explain your idea and give clear expectations for those who may be buying into your IEO. Update your medium publications often, and be sure to interact with your community.

Working with investors is crucial for your business development — pitch funds and ICO pools to build trust with them.

Community management for ALL stages:

For all stages working with the community is of utmost importance. But you shouldn’t expect to raise all of your funds through crowdfunding alone (especially if you are not a project like EOS). The times when an average crypto investors could receive 10x ROI profit within several months are long past, and investors know this.

The average profit in the IEO market is somewhere between 1.5x-5x and it’s become harder to find good projects to invest in. The approach of just pumping and waiting for an ICO to have a huge ROI is no longer working and investor need to spend more time researching projects before pouring their money in. That’s why a lot of average (not professional), and purely crowdfunded operations are no longer surviving in the market.

The important investors that you should spend your time working with (priority from high to low) are as follows:

• Traditional VC funds
• Crypto Funds
• ICO pools
• Top crypto communities on telegram/discord/wechat
• Traders (you will need them for the post-IEO stage)
• Public (the last step when you already have an agreement from the investors above)

What to do after your IEO:

Everyone seems to think that an IEO is the most important event and that you can relax after it has been completed. But in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Investors will expect a plan for execution and clear steps on how you are going to go to market with your product. In fact, the ending of your IEO is just the start of a new, tougher stage in the success of your business. Now that you have the money, everyone is going to expect you to do what you promised, so get to work!

But the most important factor is to have traders engaged during this stage who will trade your coin/token on an exchange. If you didn’t invest a lot in building a community of day traders for your token — it may be your best option to invest some money to create a desirable market and facilitate authentic trading. Either way, if your coin/token isn’t trading actively on an exchange then you are basically dead in the water.

If you need any help with advancing your IEO, please contact me through telegram @ksshilov

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All materials are for informational purposes only. None of the material should be interpreted as investment advice.

IEO Marketing Guide: Optimal Strategies and the True Cost to Launch an IEO in 2019 was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.