Imitating Traditional Startup Funding Steps as a Blockchain Project

by Will Chen, Founder and CEO of Nodis

To learn more about what Nodis is designed to do, please check out our article on the purpose of Nodis.

In the current ICO market, the usual crowd funding stage often follows the trend of private sale -> pre-ICO sale -> ICO. Throughout the process, many projects spend tens of thousands of dollars (maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars) trying to raise more money. While I don’t want to judge on the necessity of needing millions of dollars in a MVP-absent early stage project, I do wonder…

…if they already have all that money, why don’t they just spend them on development to launch the product already?

So much money and effort are being spent to just market an ICO. As an experienced product manager, it makes little sense to me that more money is spent on marketing the fundraising campaign than on the actual product development. Let alone the hundreds of hours in manpower planning/executing ICO strategies. All the while the product is still years away from release (most don’t even have an MVP when trying to raise millions of dollars).

After thinking through those questions, as a team, we have made up our mind to go through the token sale funding process similar to a traditional startup capital raising process. With that idea in mind, we reviewed on how startups usually raise funds. It often goes like this…

With that traditional fundraising path in mind, we modified our roadmap to the following:

Private funding ->

Develop an MVP ->

Series A Token Sale (2019)->

Complete the product ->

Aquire initial traction in the market place with actual customers ->

Series B Token Sale (2020) ->

Growth & Scale

Purpose of Series A Token Sale

Like traditional seed funding, Series A is when we show our MVP so the investors can get a glimpse of what Nodis can do for our customers. The soft cap ($358K USD) will give us the minimum to last 1 year. The hard cap ($880K USD) will give us more resources for product development and hiring more marketing/sales people.

Post-Series A is when we go full throttle in product development and gain initial customer traction/revenue.

Then we move on to Series B.

NOTE THAT to reward the Series A investors for taking a leap of faith with us, Series A token price is 15% discount off the Series B price. We will offer the tokens in both public sale and private sale. Private sale will have bigger discount and is for investors that can buy in bulk (e.g. $5K+ USD).

Purpose of Series B Token Sale

In Series B, we will show our launched final product. We are looking to have at least a few early adopters customers. That’s when the world can really see what Nodis has actually done and the potential of our solution. Series B funding is aimed to give us enough to last another 4 years.

The total funding of Series A and B will give us 5 years of budget to work with. We will match our capital burn rate according to the amount raised so that we will not be sitting on funds and let them go to waste. The money will go towards development, operations, marketing, and sales.

NOTE THAT Series B will be a public private sale. This means that for a short period of time, NODIS tokens will be sold with bonus but the minimum to buy-in will be much higher than Series A. It will be an off-contract transaction as there is no way to predict the market price now.

In Conclusion

We believe in our idea and how it can help small businesses to be competitive. Our main focus is to build the product and to bring the vision to life. Everything else we do is just to support that goal, which include our token sale events. We want to spend most of our money on development and the rest on marketing. Needless to say, our marketing budget is small when compared to the other listed ICO projects.

We have less than $1.5K USD to do ICO marketing and that’s after squeezing out our own saving. To put that in perspective, publishing 1 press release article on a top site like CoinTelegraph would cost at least $1K USD.

Some people maybe scared that our project won’t get enough attention and negatively affects the token price. We believe in the opposite. Just look at those unicorn tech companies (Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, etc). They focused on the customer, the product, and a niche market in the beginning. Through proof-of-concept, product validation, acquiring niche users, and other traditional tech business strategies, they became household names. Nodis aims to follow that path.

NODIS tokens are designed with the utility to support small business marketing and exchange for vouchers. As the platform grows with more businesses on board, the listing of product/service vouchers will become more attractive. We want to give users the opportunity to use those tokens to support and buy from their local businesses.

Nodis aims at impacting 50%+ of the job market in North America. Join our movement to help small local businesses to thrive and keep people employed!

To learn more about Nodis, you can click visit the following links:

Website

Whitepaper

Telegram

Instagram

Twitter

GitHub

If you would like some free NODIS tokens, you can all participate in our airdrop campaign HERE!

Thank you all for reading and hope to see you soon in one of our channels!