How to Create a Successful IDO with Starter
Fresh from our launch on Polygon, we run through our top tips on launching a successful IDO…
If you’re looking to launch on Polygon or any of our other supported blockchains, and think you’re onto a winner with your project, heed this advice and watch it grow.
But scammers beware, you won’t fool a strong, well-organized community. Starter gives its users the tools to pick out the genuinely promising projects from the crowd, so if you really want to be successful, build a robust project from the ground up…
Here are our top tips:
Good Token Economics
It may seem obvious but every IDO lives and dies by token economics. You could have a fantastic, revolutionary idea, with brilliant marketing material, and a ready-made market — but if the tokenomics aren’t designed to create demand your project won’t get off the ground.
Like any new business, you need to ensure your plans for growth and expansion are properly funded, but you cannot rely on your community to give you 100% of those funds.
Trying to raise too much through a public IDO is a big no-no. This will raise massive red flags and ultimately look like a money grab. As a general rule of thumb public IDOs should not exceed $250,000 USD. And in a bear market, this can be far less.
Your market cap at launch should be designed to be low initially to generate interest and upside potential. Your listing price should also be less more than your IDO price, but not by too much — otherwise you incentivise a dump on listing.
The most successful IDOs ensure token scarcity, there is a careful balance to be struck between how many tokens you sell in IDO and therefore how many people you allow to take part— scarcity will make investors want to hold onto what they’ve got, and will mean people are left out from the IDO.
If you get this balance correct, then you will generate enough funding during IDO and ensure a large number of people still want to buy in at listing — causing the token price to rocket. ‘Green Candles on listing’ should create a buzz around your project, and trigger FOMO in the wider market encouraging others to support your project and buy-in.
Smart Marketing
Tokenomics alone won't ensure a successful IDO and listing, FOMO and demand need to be actively driven through your marketing channels.
If there is a lot of positive hype around a project, most of the time it will live up to it, at least for the IDO itself. But this doesn’t mean whoever shouts the loudest wins the floor — you have to be present on the right platforms, hitting the right audience with consistent, well-thought-out brand messaging.
A fantastic example of this is one of our more recent IDOs — Cake Monster, which has a fantastic and well-thought-out brand identity and marketing message: cake.monster and went on to do a 21x within 24 hours of listing.
At the surface level, this means being on the key crypto platforms: Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, 4chan, Medium etc. It means having great content ready to go: a professional deck, articles, videos…
Engaging influencers and using guerilla marketing stunts to make a big splash are alternative ways we’ve seen projects go from zero to hero in the blink of an eye in recent times.
But when done well, these methods and their execution are always well thought out. Anyone can make great content, the real key is getting it in front of the right people, and tailoring it to those individuals. In short, understanding your audience (your investor) is everything.
The audience is different for every project, to a certain degree your success depends on it being unique, tapping into a certain group, with a certain identity.
An audience may be ready-built into your project (if the market is an obvious niche or demographic), or it may be harder to discern, but everything else should start from this core audience — your branding, who you associate with, the partnerships you make, your logo, tone of voice, and the platforms you choose to be active on, and so on… Once you understand your audience you can reach them effectively.
Genuine Community Building
Once you begin to reach your audience with marketing material, further engaging them and creating a true, deeper sense of community is vital.
Your community will back you to the hilt, they provide free word-of-mouth marketing and are ultimately nailed on to support the project.
There’s a whole lot of noise out there, and a whole world of content to compete with. “Community” is a word that’s thrown around a lot, but genuine community building is rarer to find.
You need to ask yourself what your community has in common and engineer the right conditions to bring them together to interact, whether that’s through gamification, rewards, AMAs… nurturing a sense of the collective is the key to this.
Still, if your community identity is strong and you have a group of hardcore, engaged fans with no buying power, that’s not going to get you far. This is why using a free ‘Airdrop’ to build a community is not advised. It may get your Telegram and Twitter follower numbers up, but many of the so-called ‘Airdrop Hunters’ do not have a large amount of disposable income, which is the main reason why they look for free ‘Airdrops’ to take part in.
You need quality investors to get going, and finding this group and keeping them engaged is the secret sauce behind every successful business, be it crypto related or not.
Post-Listing Strategy
If you think you’re going to put in the work to secure a successful IDO, and once it has finished ride off into the sunset and watch your project go from strength to strength all by itself, then you’re in the wrong business.
You need to be planning for life after the IDO now. The world of crypto moves at a rapid pace, and the period of time soon after the IDO is an all-important window. All eyes are watching to see if your project continues its momentous rise, or gets added to the huge list of promising endeavours that never amounted to anything.
It’s amazing how quickly people turn against the flavour of the month, so to avoid the latter group, your foot needs to be firmly on the gas pedal.
For the most chance of success, your product/dapp/mainnet needs to be live as your IDO finishes, or very soon after.
Post-launch your project needs to show traction all the time, if it begins to slip in the early days, recovery is highly unlikely. You can be unfortunate with timing, but you also make your own luck with good planning. Everything you put in place pre-launch will back you up: your marketing strategy, your product plan, and your community will help you make the constant demonstrations of strength necessary to stay afloat and thrive.
Way before your IDO, in your initial product planning you need to ask yourself the hard questions that will pay dividends later: Is there a real, viable market for this project? Is there a genuine utility for this token? Do I have the funds to support a launch even if I don’t raise a lot during IDO?
Only if the answers to these questions are honestly “yes” will there be a dependable incentive for investors to hold onto the coin, and in turn, you can be confident mass-dumping will be avoided.
A staking program with decent rewards will also help encourage retention after your launch, but there is no substitute for solid planning so best to have this all in place ahead of time.
Begin with the end in sight and plan for every eventuality, and then plan some more! Make sure you have the resources in place and ready to go, team members, agencies, funds, developers. Above all, identify your people and stay faithful to them, listen to them, and never try to pull the wool over their eyes. At the end of the day, they hold the keys to your success.
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