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