How to Come Up with a Killer ICO White Paper

Now, there are at least 12 ICOs passing every day.

According to Fundera,

• Last year, a total of 3,782 ICOs opened, with March being the top month in ICO openings (528).
• Total ICO funds grew 13% last year and completed ICOs collectively raised the budget of over $7 billion.
• The average ICO, as a result, managed to raise at least $11.5 million.

Yet, according to Fundera, 46% of ICOs that opened last year have lost their investors, one of the reasons being the failure to deliver what’s been promised in their ICO whitepapers.

Why Is an ICO Whitepaper Important?

A whitepaper is the business plan for your ICO project. It exists to keep all the information about your project and the technology that you’re introducing in one place, broken down into chapters to help the investors make a well-informed decision.

ICO whitepapers also exist to help ICO project managers simplify the relationships with investors. They don’t have to meet all the investors in person, and simply share the whitepaper with them.

Apart from that, there are three main reasons why whitepapers are essential both for the project and the investors:

• Representation of the ICO and its objectives. An ICO whitepaper is built around solving a certain problem, and the majority of its volume is dedicated to providing experts with the information about a certain problem and how a given ICO project can solve it.
• Step-by-Step Roadmap. The task of an ICO whitepaper is to provide investors with a clear description of project implementation. In other words, an ICO whitepaper is a presentation of your business. But while an ICO whitepaper is not a legal document in its nature, its task is still to provide investors with legal information about the ICO venture apart from other related details.
• Introducing the Team behind the Project. A good ICO whitepaper always contains information about the executive team, which will implement the project. Investors can usually find every team member’s contact information in the whitepaper as the confirmation of their credibility.

ICO whitepapers aren’t going anywhere and still remain the primary marketing tool for ICO projects. But since this segment of the market becomes more and more competitive, what are the requirements for an ICO whitepaper to get noticed by the investors?

Let’s take a look.

1. Don’t Make it Plain-Looking

Generally speaking, an ICO whitepaper is a piece of research, which can be quite lengthy (36 pages on average). So, if you want to come up with a killer ICO whitepaper, you need to design it in a way that will draw the attention of the investors immediately.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t go the way that Filecoin went with their ICO whitepaper. While the document is organized quite plainly, it still helped Filecoin attract the attention of investors and get $257 million in investments.

However, you can go a different route and introduce a better structure to the text and a better overall design to your ICO whitepaper.

For inspiration, you can check out WePower’s ICO whitepaper, which is a perfect example of adding a bit more color and flexibility to the structure of a piece of research. You can still have a detailed and very technical piece of research, but the perception will be different if it’s designed in a more visually engaging way.

2. Add Visuals

Talking about visually engaging, let’s discuss adding visuals to your whitepaper as a way to both make it more informative for the investors and make it stand out.

If you take a look at WePower’s whitepaper, mentioned above, you can see that they visualized every piece of content that can possibly be visualized in a whitepaper – the charts and the graphs, as well as the team’s line-up.

There are certain rules about adding visuals to a whitepaper. They are, undoubtedly, important to support the research, however, they should be carefully edited not to distort the perception of the whitepaper that you’re looking for.

With visuals in an ICO whitepaper, keep in mind that they should be created for your audience, aid your audience while reading the whitepaper, and make sure that your audience gets a clear picture of the problem stated by the whitepaper.

3. Watch the Tone and Style

The main feature that ICO whitepaper should have is consistency, not only in research but in tone and style as well.

An ICO whitepaper should use the formal style of writing. It is almost academic, but it should also still be kept the way that makes the text clear for the investors of any level.

What investors are looking for in an ICO whitepaper is its comprehensive coverage of the problem and the roadmap to its solution with as many technical details as possible.

Not all the investors are technologically savvy to understand complex terms. Thus, stuffing your whitepaper with complicated terminology without providing proper explanations can scare away some investors.

Thus, the tone and style of your ICO white paper should be authoritative, but in an educational way, to help investors grasp as many details as possible.

Over to You

The main idea behind an ICO white paper is the value it can deliver to the investors.

Thus, when writing your ICO white paper, do it with your target audience in mind (just as with any other marketing material).

With your audience in mind, design the white paper the way that will make them better digest the information, learn more about the problem, the solution, the token, the attributions, protocols, and other details important to make the informed decision.

Hopefully, these tips will be helpful to the ICOs, who want their white papers to get noticed and stand out among other competitors in the field.

Author Bio:

Dorian Martin is a digital marketing specialist, content writer, and a contributor at GrabMyEssay and Studicus. He is also a senior editor at TrustMyPaper. Dorian enjoys writing about digital marketing and technological innovations, as well as the latest trends in blockchain technology.