Slovenian event Forum 100% start:up
We visited the Forum 100% start:up 2018 conference in Ljubljana’s Tehnološki park today to learn the secrets to a successful ICO from some of Slovenia’s top ICO success stories.
Forum 100% start:up following a presentation by Matjaž Slak from the blockchain accelerator Cofound.it, co-founders of Origintrail ($22.5M), InsurePal ($18M), Sportify ($5M) and UNICO ($190k) were answering questions in a presentation hosted by Simon Sovič, (co-founder of Cherr.io and Tovarna podjemov).
On Slovenian event Forum 100% start:up, Matjaž Slak explained that there was no magic formula to ICO success besides a lot of careful planing and hard work. They receive applications from many potential ICOs daily (over 500 so far). Unfortunately most of them are not ready for a public launch. Taht is due to shortcomings in their idea, team, whitepaper or community. He explained that the key to a successful ICO is a large and engaged community. The bigger the founding goals are the larger and more engaged the community needs to be. At best, around 10-20% of the community members end up purchasing tokens. So that’s a useful number to keep in mind if you’re planing on launching your own ICO in the future.
Matjaž poured a lot of cold water on the start-up enthusiasts in the audience. It was time for the four successful ICOs to take center stage. They returned some hope to the blockchain hopefuls in attendance. They answered questions from Simon Sovič, who himself is no stranger to ICOs with his project Cherr.io.
It was clear that everyone is still in the early stages of their project. They were now mostly focused on delivering on their promises in the Whitepaper. So there wasn’t much news on that front. Most questions revolved around the technical, legal and practical issues around crowdfunding a startup.
Approaches to their ICOs were quite different from the four guests. However they all expressed concerns around the ever changing and unstable regulatory environment. According to Matt Peterman from InsurePal, the country that offers the most stable and clear future for crypto companies will win the right to call themselves the silicon valley of crypto. For now there is no clear winner.
In terms of funds required for a successful ICO, a figure of around €500k was quoted with most of it going towards building a community, i.e. marketing and the second biggest cost being legal advice. Bigger ICO projects can spend multiple of that amount just on marketing. So you must be prepared to invest quite heavily if you have big plans for your ICO.
With a seemingly endless stream of ICOs constantly popping up all around us, it might seem like it has to be the easiest way to raise funds for your start-up idea, however it appears that the reality on the ground is in fact very different. And with the constantly changing regulatory environment, it’s possible that the best days for ICOs might very well be behind us.