Implementing blockchain technology into your daily business model or hosting an Initial Coin Offering is no easy feat. It takes an extreme amount of research and preparation. There’s a lot at stake, including your valuable time and the public’s faith in your business. If you’re going to embark on a blockchain venture, you need to know what you’re doing.

It’s more than just knowing what your objective is, though. There are right ways and wrong ways to take steps, and steps must be taken in the right order. Can your crowdfunding be simultaneous with making your tokens live? Definitely not. Can you start marketing before you have even hired a blockchain engineer because you were too excited about your idea to wait? That is unwise. When building a blockchain venture, a roadmap is critical.

It helps prove your legitimacy

There are hundreds of ICOs out there, but several of them are scams (enough that Facebook and Google Adwords have enacted an outright ban on anything crypto-related). There are a few clues that investors and customers can look for that hint at an ICO being fraudulent, such as lack of a white paper or a team with insufficient experience. Another, of course, is not having a viable plan.

TechCrunch says:

“Typically, ICO projects list their funding and development goals on a clear timeline for investors to see. The lack of a clear roadmap could indicate that the developing team has no-long term plan for the project, and as such is likely to be motivated solely by short-term financial gain. Paired with large premiere reserved for the developing team, this could be a strong indicator that an ICO is not to be trusted with your money.”

ICOs are a venture capital risk, after all, which means people are investing in a concept with no guarantee of ROI. It’s all based on faith in a project. To assure your potential investors’ that their faith is not misplaced, it’s pragmatic to give them a timeline of when you plan to accomplish things.

It should be noted that timelines can indeed be faked. But they are still necessary, so think of it this way: not all ICOs with roadmaps are legitimate, but all ICOs without roadmaps are not.

It’s beneficial for everyone

Crypto timelines are important for investors, customers, and yourself. Investors need reassurance that you’re up to the task, otherwise their money could be wasted. Customers, naturally, would like to know when your blockchain solution will actually start being of use to them and how it came to fruition. You need a roadmap because without it, you could get lost and end up as one of the 46 percent of ICOs that fail.

You can see Fr8 Network’s timeline on our website. Our project started in May 2017. By July, we had our Proof of Initial Thesis, which demonstrates our ideas to disrupt the entire trucking industry. August is when we onramped our first carrier customers and did the same with shipper customers the next month. Our white paper, partnership announcements, consortium launch, MVP launch, and other milestones followed in the next few months. Everything is carefully and meticulously planned because — not only does allocating proper time for things increase our chances of success — our investors and customers deserve full transparency.

Our timeline also projects where we plan to go in the future. This part is a bit more flexible because we have the rest of 2018 to see through first, but we hope that as early as 2019 Fr8 Network’s platform can be applied to ocean freight as well as land.

What should your timeline look like?

Not every timeline looks the same, so plan according to your company’s needs. Do you already have a team in place with the necessary technical skills? Are you in an industry that can adopt blockchain easily, or will the crypto novices in your field take more convincing? How much patience do you have to guarantee thoroughness (over-excitement might spell doom for blockchain ventures)?

Bitcoin Chaser provides a useful loose-guideline for an ICO/blockchain plan. The first few months entail polishing your idea, gathering a talented team, writing a white paper and initial code, and hosting your ICO after a wide-spread PR campaign. The execution stage, logically, will be long-term. Building a blockchain venture has a lot of components, and everything needs to be done right, so a proper timeline is crucial for everyone involved.