ICOs and MVPs
Last week we looked at Brand. This week I want to talk about why it’s now more important than ever that an ICO has an MVP.
News Flash! To be in business, you need a product. It’s no longer acceptable for an ICO project to have no more than a White Paper and expect to raise millions. Those days are long gone. Any ICO/TGE now must have a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which has some key functionality – it doesn’t have to look great, but it has to work, and you ideally want to see some real users interacting with it. Take, for example, the approach that Auditchain™ are taking with their project – they are not only going to have a fully functional MVP of their Decentralized Continuous Audit & Reporting Protocol Ecosystem™ built and ready before they open their TGE (Token Generation Event), but they are also going to USE their own MVP to run their Sale with Streaming Financial Statements. That’s awesome and really leads the way for more developed, authentic, ICO projects in future.
Marketing Strategies for ICOs need to change to incorporate the need to market the Product, as much (if not more) than the Token, and to incorporate the effort to attract real users. Projects that you see taking this approach are to be studied further and applauded. It’s business basics for those of us that have been in the game for years, but for some the ICO is their first business, and their expectations are skewed.
Steer clear of ICOs that are just driving traffic to their Token Sale, and look for those marketing their platform and seeking to pick up users for demos etc. What comes with that is the communities they grow around them are then also users, and so bigger advocates of the project and a stronger foundation for success.
