How to Recruit Right Advisor for Your ICO

Successful ICO requires much more than just having a great project idea and beautiful website. Right now there are dozens of new ICOs every week, competition is fierce and you need to find the way to tell the world how you are different and better.

And there are people out there who could help to solve this tasks. They called “advisors,” and every blockchain startup team wants to recruit the best of them. Let’s talk about why can this help and how to attract them.

Why having advisors is very important

Despite an ICO is a relatively new fundraising tool, there are already some established do’s you should follow. One of them, for example, is having good White Paper describing the project, its market opportunity, team, and technology. Another must-have are advisors.

Usually, advisors for ICO projects are experts in cryptocurrencies and blockchain field, who are well-known within the community. Such people possess experience and have their own follower base. Their opinion is valued by the community.

This means that if such person is interested in your project and can recommend it, it will increase the number of people who want to buy your tokens. It is as simple as that. Moreover, advisors can do what they actually supposed to — give an advice. This could be very useful and helps make the whole project better.

Understand who are you looking for

Not every expert in the crypto niche could be a good advisor for your project. Before starting contacting advisors it is better to sit and think about how ideal advisor for your project should look like.

Likely you want to recruit a strong professional, who can provide valuable recommendations, have good reputation and own network of contacts which you could benefit from. And you probably do not want people who are ready to become advisers to any project whose team offers them some cash for recommendations, and do not interested in the product itself and do not want to make it better.

Advisors of the second type are toxic and you should avoid them. People in the crypto community are not stupid, they will notice that you have such an advisor (who also “advisor” in 100 more other projects) and understand that the main purpose of this is cheap PR. It is like a red flag for potential ICO investors, so pay attention to whom you are recruiting as advisors.

Turn down all proposals of promotion for cash instead of project tokens. You are looking for partners, who will be interested in your project growth and prosperity, not in getting quick cash for nothing.

How to get in touch and what to offer

After you decided what kind of advisors you are looking for and came up with a Google spreadsheet with names, it is time to decide, how to get in touch.

The best option here is to connect in-person somewhere at the conference. However, this method could be too costly for startups on a tiny budget when you need to recruit more than one or two advisors.

Fortunately, online communication can deliver good results at no extra costs. Most of the advisors you could be potentially interested in are on LinkedIn. So go ahead and drop them an InMail. We were surprised, but people often reply, and do it fast — such a contrast with using InMail as a tool for recruiting, say, a programmer!

To increase your pitch conversion, you should use a right text. It should not be long, just mention key advantages of your project and clearly outline your expectations and terms of collaboration.

Also if you have already signed up some great advisors, do not forget to mention this fact. This will be good social proof to the ones who are interested but did not make final decision yet.

By doing so we were able to recruit such great advisors as Reuben Godfrey, Simon Cocking, Michael E. Bryant, Vitor Lourenco and Jon Van Der Vos. So it really works!

How to Recruit Right Advisor for Your ICO was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.