Crowdholding is a co-creation platform startup that is registered in the UK. We are aiming to allow both startups and the crowd to mutual prosper through co-creation and blockchain technology.

On Sunday the 17th of September, Crowdholding concluded their pre-sale ICO, after 32 days, Crowdholding raised 514 Ethereum tokens, decimating our target of 200. We would firstly like to thank everyone who helped us achieve this target.

This article will be a case study on how we went about implementing our pre-sale and what we have learnt to improve on for our ICO, which will launch on the 1st of November.

Crowdholding

Crowdholding was first conceived back in January 2016 between the three co-founders of the startup, from then on the startup has grown its product and size of its team. A working Beta was created back March 2017 and we have over 1200 users on the platform. Crowdholding moved towards a Initial coin offering as it was an opportunity to show the power of the crowd, receive feedback to improve user experience and keep control of our concept.

Breakdown

Our ICO starts on the 1st of November where 44% of the 631 million tokens will be on sale to the public, during the pre-sale 0.8% of all the tokens created were available for purchase. We set a goal of raising 200 Ethereum, and we were more than successful as we managed to raise over 500 in that period. The breakdown of the other token percentages can be found in the white paper here.

Reason for our success

There are a few reasons for our success during the pre-sale that will be implemented during the ICO.

Strong organic marketing — Most of our marketing power was not spent on ads or paying for articles, but rather through content marketing, growth hacking and connecting with people who would be interested in our ideology. We made sure that we had all forms of communication. Social media channels and we were constantly pushing out new content.

Strong customer service — We made sure that any curious visitor to the website were greeted with a someone from Crowdholding. If they had any doubts, questions or comments we were there to receive them and to reply back. This grows a strong relationship, and shows that we are here to advise and help.

Use of Bounties — We made sure to use the public who would be interested in our concept / cryptocurrencies. Crowdholding used our own platform to structure bounties. Once this was created, the general public started to share and post to increase the visibility of Crowdholding.

Improve through feedback — During the whole pre-sale we were constantly improving our website, whitepaper and presentations from feedback from the crowd. We cannot have an ideology praising the power of the crowd, if we do not utilize it as well. We value the crowd’s power so much we had bounty systems for feedback on our website and our whitepaper.

Tracking what was successful and what wasn’t — ICO’s are still a new concept in investment and with any new investment idea, it can be difficult to market. We consistently looked at what channels worked and what channels were not as effective, which channels need more focus and which channels are growing so much, that they are sustaining themselves.

What we learnt

There were also some concepts we learnt and will add to make our ICO more successful:

ICO’s are a global phenomenon and although China has recently banned ICO’s there is still a lot of different nations who are interested in ICO’s. We were a little late in getting translations and we will have more translations when the ICO comes around with research to back those markets.

Connecting / networking — Because we were so focused on marketing and making sure we are connecting with people who visited our website, we didn’t have too many chances to get our ideology into events and network with cryptocurrency / blockchain enthusiasts face to face. We are now focusing on growing our team and networking so when it comes around to the 1st of November we will have a wider network to connect.

We cannot wait for our ICO on the 1st of November, if you want to read more about our pre-sale and our concept, click here to read more.