With 25,000 users in the first 5 weeks of launching, Belacam.com is probably a top-5 crypto social media site in terms of growth and adoption. It’s a crypto-based Instagram competitor where users get paid each time they get a ‘like’ on their photos. Here’s how we were able to do all of this without an ICO.

We built a crypto project that works.

There are few crypto projects out there that are both

a) past their Alpha / Beta testing

b) fulfilling a real-world need.

We tested Belacam for over 15 months to watch how users interact with our site. We spent a lot of time analyzing this data and re-configuring the site for efficiency. At first, only 50% of photos posted to Belacam could expect to earn anything. Now, the middle-of-the-road, average photo earns 2 likes (between $.05 — $.10). On the high end of the extreme, we’ve seen photos that have earned $30 or more.

Now that Belacam works well, it’s easy to organically attract new users. Most of our new users come from word-of-mouth, which is free. In fact, so far our Belacam marketing expenses equal around $.05 per user.

For some, not running an ICO is a draw-in factor in itself.

When we polled our users on what they love most about Bela, 27% reported that it was our 5-year, ICO-free history. There’s an increasingly large and vocal sector of the crypto community that rejects ICOs and ICO-based project. This group is upset with the toxicity that ICOs have brought to the space. As tokens raised millions, exchange listing fees skyrocketed because a wealthy few could afford to pay more. This left little coins that didn’t have deep pockets, like Bela, behind in the race.

Times are changing, though. The SEC and other regulatory bodies look more closely at ICOs than they do at fair-launched coins. We would think that Bela, having been mined as a Proof-of-Work coin for 4 years first, would be less of a legal target in that sense. As the SEC further cracks down on ICO tokens, we expect coins that never ran an ICO to be increasingly attractive assets, as they are now few and far between.

We did still secure funding, just in a more reasonable way.

Building a site with so many moving parts, like Belacam, certainly costs money. We received a $150,000 investment from Mark Galant (the founder of Forex.com / GAIN Capital) for 10% of the company. We were able to secure funding through two ways:

We had traction first. We built a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and tested it with 3,500 users to first prove that Belacam would work. We didn’t ask for an obscene amount of money. $150,000 is what we needed for a 5–6 month runway. Projects that seek millions won’t get what they’re asking for unless they have already built something that has been de-risked and has incredible real traction.

Having never run an ICO means we run our crypto startup more like a traditional startup. With 25,000 users and real revenue behind our back, we are looking to raise another round of traditional funding that will extend our runway further.

Still, in a lot of ways, being ICO-free is one of our strengths. It’s a principle that our community respects, and we encourage other crypto projects to take the non-ICO path as well.