Considerations For Future Crowdsales SAFE Network projects

Marketing
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As we all know the SAFE Network will be a natural expanding universe, which will enable devs to turn ideas into stuff that really matters to the world.

Sorry that I say this but I feel like the SAFE Network and the first third party SAFE app (SAFEx) are really under valued. I also have to be honest, why I think that it is this way. I think it’s primarily marketing. I will admit that we don’t really got easy setups to do crowdfunding right now. At the moment when you want to do a crowdsale you use a bitcoin 2.0 platform like Counterparty, Omni or even Coinprism to create your token and start selling. Even worse your crowd got to understand how to work with a wallet, privatekey and how to manage it all. This is not easy especially not for the newbies. Let’s just say that it’s a complete mess to do a crowdsales before the SAFE Network. When the SAFE Network is up and running, it’ll get easier to do a crowdsales. Because by that time you’ll just create a structured data on SAFEx and hopefully be able to except your token in the SAFEx wallet. Things will just be done quicker and easier.

So how do you increase the chance that your crowdsale, gets more exposure and interested people on board?

I’m not at all experienced with these things, but what seems logic to me is:

  • Approach all the pro crypto magazine out there (let them write articles about your project or do it yourself and send it to them) (SAFEcoinmagazine, bitcoinmagazine, Coindesk etc)
  • Above I’m saying pro crypto, but ofcourse you can also approach techy sites to do an article sites like Techcrunch, Arstechnica etc. Just have a list
  • Approach all the pro crypto podcasts or shows out there and let them know about your project.
  • Let people signup to be notified about your crowdsales
    Preferably you want to do this weeks or months before you launch your crowdsale.

Social media might also help a little bit to promote your product

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Please make a good video explaining exactly what your product does, it might be handy to also do some Google hangouts with your crew and say what your all up to.

Let there be light or led there be light

Let there be light is what GOD does, GOD suddenly let something appear. @dallyshalla did the same, he dropped a nuke on this community, but I got to admit he gave a few hints at Lifespeople and the SAFE crossroads. @dallyshalla is a code God so he can do something like that. :stuck_out_tongue:

Led there be light is the slow process in which ordinary humans introduce a product to the world and through warning signs indicate what is coming. You know when your driving on a road and a speedbump is ahead, this is like that.

Tips for crowdfunding
Not that I’m a pro with all this and that I know what I’m talking about, but when you do a crowdsales somethings might help.

  • Have all the people you approach weeks before talking about your crowdsales being LIVE
  • Have a gradually decreasing incentive mechanism (first week 25%, second week 15% etc)
  • Have a refferallinks, so that people participating can get others on board and get some extra coins in return for their work
  • Have a share on social media button of all SM platforms
  • Have somebody to answer questions when they surface
  • Try to work/partner with all the exchanges out there if possible

Please don’t get me wrong I’m not saying the SAFE Network or SAFEx started out wrong. I’m just saying that our community is very small right now (other crypto communities included) so we should use all media outlets that we got at the moment, to channel our crowdsale.

For those interested, if you really want to read about launching your project check this:

I’m not promoting slock.it here, but check out there site you see

@whiteoutmashups sorry that I speak my mind before your crowdsale.

You and @dallyshalla are the first hero’s marching on this journey and a lot of love, respect and good luck to you bro’s :stuck_out_tongue:

P.s.
If you got limited time on your hand, maybe you want to look at the numb3r5. And only approach podcast wit a lot of listeners and websites with a lot of followers. I’m sure somebody else on this forum got more protips. Who knows this is a place to start giving eachother the job to do articles/promote crowdsales etc…

@Seneca would it be possible that if a author wrote about an article on decorum that you can inform them about the updates from within the forum? Maybe if you have something like Cyber.fund’s radar on decorum which alerts people about new SAFE Network projects it might also help, ofcourse the user would have to opt in for this feature.

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That’s not quite true. Yes, that’s how it was with MAID for reasons we already know, but with other (non-Omni) platforms you don’t really need to know much - you just need to have a wallet with bitcoin in it.

For example LetsTalkBitcoin runs vending service which works like Shapeshift. You send bitcoin to the crowdsourcing address, it spits back the token and 10 mins later it’s in your wallet. That’s it and this service has been available for a while (http://tokenrank.tokenly.com/ - in case anyone wants to see how that looks like; I have no financial interest in LTB, to be clear on that).

And it’s all done through a browser plugin which takes 20 seconds to install (and the same address can be accessed from a mobile wallet using the same pass phrase (the more skilled can access it from anywhere since one can obtain the pass phrase if he or she wants to).

If you don’t want to spend much then you can sell tokens without any middleman, there are also good solutions that are free and user friendly.

These places aren’t (just) good-hearted people who sit around and wait till someone “lets them” to write about something.

The ideas aren’t useless, but you’re talking about things that require expenditures (i.e. marketing).
Who’s supposed to do that and how much does that cost? Would you bother with that list of to-do items for less than $5K per month? I wouldn’t.
Add another $1-$5 thousand bucks per month in various fees because most of those quality sites aren’t volunteers.

So you can say I’ll do it myself, save $5-$10 K and invest that in development, or else go all in, spend $10K up front and market an “investment” the way you suggest (which often borders on potentially illegal or scammy). I prefer the way Safex did it (the part that IMO sucks is they chose Omni,but it’s how they decided).

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Marketing is always a tricky thing. Of course the amount of money you raise is important. But if you raise a bunch of money from newbies who don’t know very much, then while you are trying to create a product, you will also have to field questions about why the coin is going down when will the product be finished. You will also get speculators. Your forum will be full of people with possibly dumb questions that you will have to answer. And the price of your coin will yo-yo up and down.

I don’t want to invest in marketers I want to invest in integrity and spectacular coding and problem solving.

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Also, be ready for scammers to try to attach themselves to the SAFE network to make an extra buck. I believe in dallyshalla and whiteoutmashups but I am very easy to fool. Sooner or later the scams will come.

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All good points. I was very annoyed at myself for missing the whole safex crowdsale by not being on this forum at the time. Mranderson very kindly showed me some love and sold me some reasonably priced coin, but I would have loved to have been a bigger part of it and supported the development from the start. :cry:

If anyone ever needs their money quickly for whatever reason and wants to sell off any of their position in safex I’ll take it off their hands, just pm me :slightly_smiling:

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Indeed, I’d comment on the launch of Safex to give some more insight from my perspective;

Publication about safex had been taking place on safe net forums since September 2014 so there has been a lot of awareness built among us here. I knew that you should give it a few months before the sale to prep everyone: I didn’t have that luxury because I wouldn’t make it I’d have to take a regular coding job if it took another month to launch the sale.

Next, the articles and magazines were very much impressed with the project, and glad to support a real project from the MaidSafe space. I didn’t expect that exactly, yet nonetheless it was happening, being approached to be featured on xyz.com, etc and Of course MaidSafe has paved a road of epic.

Without a real budget things like making videos and graphics are tougher to get done, I had promised the fellow who made the video that if the sale reached 50k+ I’d pay him 500 dollars for making that video, otherwise I paid what I offered: $60.00 and it was done the night before. It would cost the same to take a week to build it, however timing.

Other than the video cost nothing else cost much, codes were dont by me, and Olga advised on colors and made graphics, probably worth another $500.00 in time - I had drawn a sketch on paper for each graphic with safex, and she (the graphic artist) made them into digital graphics from those drawings.

Hosted on a node.js powered server from digital ocean to handle the traffic required the 40 dollars a month version which I turned back to the less expensive one after the sale. This could have had more time, for Mobile optimization etc,

Last but not least, need to deliver on the project, I could stand to raise just 30,000 which was my initial target, and after surveying 30 people I realized I’d very likely reach that goal. And with that I’m at the editor preparing the Safex app, to: 1. Make a cryptocurrency for the user 2. Play a song that was exchange for cryptocurrency 3. Trade an item for cryptocurrency So far on a roll; and will present about it in Santa Cruz in March (software will be on github before then).

Next is getting listed on an exchange: Bittrex was the most fleeting part of it because I did not know the criteria of getting listed on an exchange, and I still don’t really know what finally triggered us getting listed; however it took a lot of people’s messages at the developers of that exchange; It helps to get listed there because then coinmarketcap.com will accept the coin;

For the tasks ahead: It is clear that crowdfunding with your own issued tokens has to be possible with being able to exchange them among others without a thirdparty; and then likely coinmarketcap would recognize the price from safex we’ll see about that.

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Thank you all for your feedback.

Thanks @dallyshalla for sharing your experience. I hope others can learn from your cash saving strategy.

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