The document provides best practices and lessons learned from ICOs. Successful ICOs focus on community involvement, not offering discounts or bounties, developing extensive smart contract technology beyond just the crowdsale, and protecting the crowdsale page. Key ingredients for a successful ICO and blockchain business include having a strong community, working prototype, marketing power, and legal support. The document also introduces Santiment.net, a blockchain data analytics platform that had a successful ICO, and provides contact information for its founder Maksim Balashevich.

1. ICO: Best practices
Maksim Balashevich
Founder & CEO, Santiment
Oct 2, 2017

2. The ICO results. Good
- Marketing
- Community involvement
- No discounts, bounties
- Tech
- The extensive use of smart contract (beyond just crowdsale)
- Peer reviews
- Crowdsale page protection
- General approach
- White-listing

3. The ICO results. Bad
- White-listing. Second tier
- Sleep deprivation :)

4. The ICO results. Ugly
- Scammers. Nothing serious, yet unpleasant
- Web names
- Slack
- Twitter
- Reddit

5. ICO success. Three main ingredients
- Strong community
- Working prototype/product
- Marketing power
- VC support

6. - Building protocol/platform?
- Path to the decentralisation
- Value redistribution
- Clear legal path to the future
- Utility
- Security
- Intensive work with lawyers
Blockchain Business success. Main ingredients

7. About Santiment.net
- First “big data” platform tracking insights on cryptocurrencies
- Successful ICO on July 4th
- First experiment of collaboration with Cofound.it
- Uses both tech and community engagement
Contact information
- http://santiment.net
- https://medium.com/santiment
- https://twitter.com/santimentfeed

8. About Maksim Balashevich
- Founder & CEO of Santiment.net
- Media commentator. Has been featured in Forbes and other financial publications
- Sentiment analysis and Crowd psychology expert
- Meditator and Yoga instructor
Contact information
- maksim.b@santiment.net
- http://maksimbala.com