22 Ways to Kill Your Own ICO

List of things you should NOT do, unless you want to fail your ICO.

1. Doing ICO in hope of quick buck and not because you have an exiting business idea you want to execute.
2. Starting your ICO if you have less than $50'000.
3. Spending all your funds on product development and forgetting about marketing.
4. Establishing your ICO company in a country with strict laws and heavy ICO regulation.
5. Thinking that you can pay for everything with your tokens.
6. Not having smart contract, or not publishing it.
7. Not having any practical use for your tokens.
8. Ordering your smart contract development from marauding ICO agency and end up paying 40 BTC for it.
9. Doing your ICO anonymously.
10. Thinking that your idea or your team is special or unique and investors will start throwing money at you the moment you launch your ICO sale.
11. Placing all your marketing hopes on word of mouth.
12. Paying huge amount for useless promotion on ICO listing sites.
13. Thinking that your ICO will become recognized by placing it on ICO Bench and paying bunch of fake experts for high ratings.
14. Not focusing on your Telegram group and Bitcointalk announcement.
15. Using Telegram channel instead of group and favoring other one-way communication channels where your community can’t discuss openly about your project.
16. Not answering to questions or feedback from your community.
17. Accepting only private investors and not having public sale.
18. Scaring investors away with complicated KYC and AML procedures and by collecting their private information and copies of delicate documents.
19. Excluding investors from USA, China, South Korea, Singapore and other countries and thus loosing half of the contributions.
20. Hiding the amount of funds you have received from investors.
21. Not hiring skilled ICO advisors or not listening what they tell you.
22. Hiding any vital information about your ICO.

Even thought most of these points are quite obvious, I have seen all of them being done by at least one ICO.