All startups will go to ICO
The world is changing very quickly. Just yesterday, in order to attract funding to a startup, it was necessary to knock down the thresholds of venture funds, send thousands of letters with presentations to various investors, make hundreds of pitches and still listen to unsubstantiated refusals time after time.
But today, a new era is coming to replace the old order, bringing new technologies and opportunities. Already today, the need for investment funds is no longer apparent, and this is evident to many market participants. If earlier ICO was carried out only by blockchain projects, today they are launched by factories and simple farmers. The ICO has replaced the entire venture capital market and everyone benefits from this, well, except for the venture investors themselves, they just lost their dominant position.
Under the cut a personal story about why we decided to go for an ICO.
We launched SmartProgress back in 2012 ( article on Habré ) and for 5 years of the project’s development a dialogue with investors in Russia was structured like this:
After all the unsuccessful attempts to find investment in Russia, by the end of 2014 we won a StartupChile grant from the Chilean government in the amount of $ 35,000.
In 2015, I flew to Chile to complete an acceleration program for six months. During this time, thanks to the grant, we were able to launch a new direction on SmartProgress - the Mentoring platform. And thus raised the income of the project 3 times.
The condition for receiving the grant was such that we had to spend the entire grant during the time of the accelerator. Therefore, after returning home, we could again rely solely on our own funds, so I made another small attempt to communicate with Russian investors, but as was to be expected, in the eyes of investors neither the grant nor our case for a threefold increase in revenue for half a year carried any value .
Fortunately, by this time SmartProgress was already fully self-sufficient, and the income it brought made it possible to engage in the project without attracting additional funding. At the beginning of 2017, the project’s audience was 150,000 users, and the project’s profit was $ 3000 / month.
In May 2017, I came across an article about how one Russian farmer released his cryptocurrency and raised $ 500,000 to expand the farm. From this moment on, the world has ceased to be the same for me. I realized that this is our chance to attract investment in SmartProgress and bring it to a whole new level! After all, if a grant of $ 35,000 increased the project's income by 3 times, how many times would an investment of $ 100,000 or even $ 500,000 increase it?
First of all, it was necessary to come up with an offer for investors. After all, the token itself does not give investors any benefit. For this, it was necessary to understand the motivation of investors buying tokens. And their motivation is simple - they want to buy tokens for one sole purpose, to sell it for a lot of money. Some projects complicate tokenization of the project too much, someone declares that it will be possible to buy their products at cheaper prices for tokens, someone that tokens will allow to take part in the project itself. It is possible that some investors may be interested. But 99% of investors are interested in speculation. They want to constantly see the growth of the token quotes.
How to ensure the growth of the price of tokens? The Law of supply and demand comes to our aid.
We announce that after the release of tokens and their distribution among all investors, we begin their immediate redemption from the exchange at the market price. Most of the projects going on the ICO have nothing but ideas and White Paper, so they can offer investors only expectations. We have a competitive advantage, we have a profit and a successful case for increasing income with a cash infusion.
It will work as follows: every month we will send 10% of our profit for the previous month to the redemption of tokens. The more profit will become, the more we will buy back tokens. All purchased tokens will be destroyed. Thus, on the stock exchange, on the one hand, the demand for tokens will constantly increase due to their redemption. On the other hand, their supply will constantly decrease. If in the current month the offer on the stock exchange is not enough, then the amount of the repurchase will be transferred and sums up with the amount of the next month.
As soon as we decided to conduct an ICO for SmartProgress, I created a new goal on SmartProgress: To conduct ICO for SmartProgress and began to carry out the preparatory work. By the way, I still keep the goal and regularly keep a diary, describing all my actions and publishing reports on them.
All the preparatory work took 4 months. There really was a lot of work to do: to understand all the intricacies of cryptocurrency, blockchain, tokens release, write White Paper, develop a website and much more. On the preparation itself, we wrote a separate article , because it will be pretty voluminous.
In preparation for the ICO, we developed a roadmap for the future development of the project. There were 3 stages:
First of all, we will make a full technological update of the project, because in 5 years, the entire stack of web development, and in order to keep up with the times, you need to make this step. This will help to speed up the work of the site and set a powerful foundation for the future development and scaling of the project.
Also, we are planning to create new mobile applications, because the old ones have not been updated for many years and have practically become useless.
In 2015, with the grant money, we developed the SmartProgress Mentoring platform. She became very popular and in demand. Thanks to her, we raised the income of the project 3 times. And now she is ready to become an independent project. We receive a lot of offers from various coaching centers for using this platform for their needs, but unfortunately the tandem with SmartProgress imposes great restrictions on its third-party use. Therefore, when collecting this amount, we will allocate the Mentoring platform as an independent project, which in our opinion will give it a great development.
Upon reaching this mark, we plan to begin Western expansion.
If we talk about the Russian market, in which SmartProgress operates, then it only appears, it is created by SmartProgress. Before SmartProgress, similar projects simply did not exist. In the English-speaking market there are already several services for setting and achieving goals:
43things.com - 3 million users
coach.me - 1 million users
stickk.com - 500 thousand users
This means that in the English segment of the Internet, there is an established demand for this product. And SmartProgress has great chances to take a significant share of the western market.
The start of sales of tokens is scheduled for October 22 at 14:00 UTC. In the first 24 hours, tokens will be sold with a 20% bonus. ICO will last 30 days until November 22.
Leave an email on our website to receive news and do not miss the start of sales.
If you have any questions about ICO, you can write to us in a group of telegrams .
But today, a new era is coming to replace the old order, bringing new technologies and opportunities. Already today, the need for investment funds is no longer apparent, and this is evident to many market participants. If earlier ICO was carried out only by blockchain projects, today they are launched by factories and simple farmers. The ICO has replaced the entire venture capital market and everyone benefits from this, well, except for the venture investors themselves, they just lost their dominant position.
Under the cut a personal story about why we decided to go for an ICO.
Search for investors
We launched SmartProgress back in 2012 ( article on Habré ) and for 5 years of the project’s development a dialogue with investors in Russia was structured like this:
After all the unsuccessful attempts to find investment in Russia, by the end of 2014 we won a StartupChile grant from the Chilean government in the amount of $ 35,000.
In 2015, I flew to Chile to complete an acceleration program for six months. During this time, thanks to the grant, we were able to launch a new direction on SmartProgress - the Mentoring platform. And thus raised the income of the project 3 times.
The condition for receiving the grant was such that we had to spend the entire grant during the time of the accelerator. Therefore, after returning home, we could again rely solely on our own funds, so I made another small attempt to communicate with Russian investors, but as was to be expected, in the eyes of investors neither the grant nor our case for a threefold increase in revenue for half a year carried any value .
Fortunately, by this time SmartProgress was already fully self-sufficient, and the income it brought made it possible to engage in the project without attracting additional funding. At the beginning of 2017, the project’s audience was 150,000 users, and the project’s profit was $ 3000 / month.
In May 2017, I came across an article about how one Russian farmer released his cryptocurrency and raised $ 500,000 to expand the farm. From this moment on, the world has ceased to be the same for me. I realized that this is our chance to attract investment in SmartProgress and bring it to a whole new level! After all, if a grant of $ 35,000 increased the project's income by 3 times, how many times would an investment of $ 100,000 or even $ 500,000 increase it?
Benefit for cryptoinvestors
First of all, it was necessary to come up with an offer for investors. After all, the token itself does not give investors any benefit. For this, it was necessary to understand the motivation of investors buying tokens. And their motivation is simple - they want to buy tokens for one sole purpose, to sell it for a lot of money. Some projects complicate tokenization of the project too much, someone declares that it will be possible to buy their products at cheaper prices for tokens, someone that tokens will allow to take part in the project itself. It is possible that some investors may be interested. But 99% of investors are interested in speculation. They want to constantly see the growth of the token quotes.
How to ensure the growth of the price of tokens? The Law of supply and demand comes to our aid.
We announce that after the release of tokens and their distribution among all investors, we begin their immediate redemption from the exchange at the market price. Most of the projects going on the ICO have nothing but ideas and White Paper, so they can offer investors only expectations. We have a competitive advantage, we have a profit and a successful case for increasing income with a cash infusion.
It will work as follows: every month we will send 10% of our profit for the previous month to the redemption of tokens. The more profit will become, the more we will buy back tokens. All purchased tokens will be destroyed. Thus, on the stock exchange, on the one hand, the demand for tokens will constantly increase due to their redemption. On the other hand, their supply will constantly decrease. If in the current month the offer on the stock exchange is not enough, then the amount of the repurchase will be transferred and sums up with the amount of the next month.
Such a scenario will inevitably raise the price of the token up and this growth will be endless.
Training
As soon as we decided to conduct an ICO for SmartProgress, I created a new goal on SmartProgress: To conduct ICO for SmartProgress and began to carry out the preparatory work. By the way, I still keep the goal and regularly keep a diary, describing all my actions and publishing reports on them.
All the preparatory work took 4 months. There really was a lot of work to do: to understand all the intricacies of cryptocurrency, blockchain, tokens release, write White Paper, develop a website and much more. On the preparation itself, we wrote a separate article , because it will be pretty voluminous.
What will the money go
In preparation for the ICO, we developed a roadmap for the future development of the project. There were 3 stages:
$ 100,000
First of all, we will make a full technological update of the project, because in 5 years, the entire stack of web development, and in order to keep up with the times, you need to make this step. This will help to speed up the work of the site and set a powerful foundation for the future development and scaling of the project.
Also, we are planning to create new mobile applications, because the old ones have not been updated for many years and have practically become useless.
$ 250,000
In 2015, with the grant money, we developed the SmartProgress Mentoring platform. She became very popular and in demand. Thanks to her, we raised the income of the project 3 times. And now she is ready to become an independent project. We receive a lot of offers from various coaching centers for using this platform for their needs, but unfortunately the tandem with SmartProgress imposes great restrictions on its third-party use. Therefore, when collecting this amount, we will allocate the Mentoring platform as an independent project, which in our opinion will give it a great development.
$ 500,000
Upon reaching this mark, we plan to begin Western expansion.
If we talk about the Russian market, in which SmartProgress operates, then it only appears, it is created by SmartProgress. Before SmartProgress, similar projects simply did not exist. In the English-speaking market there are already several services for setting and achieving goals:
43things.com - 3 million users
coach.me - 1 million users
stickk.com - 500 thousand users
This means that in the English segment of the Internet, there is an established demand for this product. And SmartProgress has great chances to take a significant share of the western market.
How to buy SmartProgress tokens?
The start of sales of tokens is scheduled for October 22 at 14:00 UTC. In the first 24 hours, tokens will be sold with a 20% bonus. ICO will last 30 days until November 22.
Leave an email on our website to receive news and do not miss the start of sales.
If you have any questions about ICO, you can write to us in a group of telegrams .
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