A few weeks ago, we brought you an interview with Martin Herman, the co-founder of a Slovak blockchain project that is going to change the betting industry. Today, guys from Bethereum share their insights on how to successfully run you own project in blockchain.
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Long gone are the days when any project, if bundled with a few cool buzzwords and some marginal use of the blockchain, could expect to gain massive funding through their token sale. Contributors and blockchain enthusiasts have sobered up and nowadays the market is much more selective about new projects. We’ve identified five key points that every blockchain project needs to have covered if it is meant to succeed.
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to have a semi-working version of what you promise to deliver after your token sale. This often means that you need to put some serious time and resources into developing an app, a website or some other type of service that is tangible and can be tried out by interested parties. Developing an MVP not only shows that you are for real, but also allows you to test out your product and modify its development accordingly.
Too many blockchain projects invest their tokens into a rudimentary bounty hunt and see their social media numbers grow in response, thinking mistakenly that this is enough in terms of community-building efforts. It is not. Bounty hunters, for all their eagerness and energy, are rarely committed to a project in the long-term. You need to put serious effort into community building, be it on Reddit, Telegram or creating a public channel on your project’s Slack. Communities develop organically only when there is consistent effort on part of the project’s marketing team to actively respond, communicate and announce news to your fans and followers.
A project can only be as good as the team behind it. This means that you need to build a solid and balanced team of professionals, industry veterans and include a few big names from the blockchain community. In the case of Bethereum, we took time to find highly skilled IT professionals, but we also managed to poach some big names from the blockchain community, as well as hiring several very experienced business figures who served in an advisory role. A solid blockchain project needs to cover all three categories, otherwise it will have shortcomings that will prevent it from succeeding.
You need to realize that blockchain project funding is a zero sum game. There is a limited amount of money contributors are willing to put into new projects, and unless you have a completely unique idea, you will be competing with dozens of similar projects for the same money. One way in which you can get a big advantage over your rivals is by presenting your project as being easily scalable. Remember, contributors are only looking for the most promising projects, and they need to be assured of your ability to scale to ever-increasing demand. Never underestimate the value of a solid scaling model for your blockchain project.
The ritualized dance of developing new blockchain projects inevitably leads to the issue of getting good reviews and ratings. Getting high scores from premiere reviewing websites can make or break a project. This should be sought only when you are completely sure of handling the first four points, because otherwise you risk getting a low score that will create a permanent blemish on the marketability of your project. Remember, patience is key in communicating with these websites, and establishing rapport early on can immensely help your final score.
We hope you find our rough guide to blockchain startups useful, and on an ending note, we want to announce that Bethereum’s team will expand as our project is coming into its realization phase. If you think you have what it takes to work in our rewarding and highly successful environment, let us know by contacting us with a CV, cover letter and a short introductory email at jobs@bethereum.com.
Jan Slobodnik is a content writer at Bethereum. You can find his pieces on Medium.
