Getting tied up in an ICO (2/2)

Chronicles of an ICO extension

It might sound overly sentimental, but I do believe that customer relations is one of the crucial components of a successful business venture. When you have your ICO and you are selling a “utility” token, people who buy it are essentially your first customers. Why? Because you don’t want them to be your investors in case SEC or MAS or some other regulator comes over and looks over your shoulder. Unless you are fully compliant and are selling to registered investors only, of course — but who is?

Okay, here you are running the ICO, up to this moment you were doing okay and now you have made an unpopular decision and you have to break it to the public. Here is how the Ties project handled that in their telegram group.

Fasten your seatbelts, the show is about to begin. The time stamps are in GMT.

October 12.

Exhibit A. Hinting on a sequel.

Mark the words “private mode” and “today we took this decision”. Something you don’t really want to hear from an ICO.

Exibit B. Let the mortal combat begin.

Some community members start asking about refunds. No hostility.

Exhibit C. Let’s pour some gasoline.

Exhibit D. Community members are being reasonable.

Exhibit E. Nothing personal, we just need more money.

Wow. Until the cap is reached? Normally when an ICO says that it means “if we hit the cap earlier we’ll wind up the sale”, not “we are going to keep asking for money until we get the maximum amount possible”.

Exhibit F. Really. Why?

Exibit E. Akimbo facepalm.

Exhibit F. Refunds? Please?

Exhibit G. “No criminality”.

Exhibit H. Sancta simplicitas.

In Exhibit H you can see Ties support actually saying “Because we really want the $33.6mln, not the piddling 6.8 or whatever, that’s why”.

There is also some unwary passer-by who had been randomly scooped up from some other location and forcefully added to the ICO telegram group. It happened several times. Seeing people popping into the group and swearing at being added to it is quite entertaining. I think this process deserves a special medical term — telegrammgruppenbelästigung.

Exhibit J. Catch-22 in progress.

Exhibit K. I want my refund! — Please gives respect to each other. Thank you.

Exhibit L. Here, you said it again.

Exhibit M. Refunds? No problemo.

The CEO says refunds is not a problem. No further details.

Exhibit N. We did not change any conditions.

Yes, you did.

5:56 Message from one of the co-founders. Sorry, I will have to quote it here in its entirety:

Natalia | Ties.Network:
Dear all, we apologize for the confusion, but it’s not the “private” sale after the public sale. Everyone is confused by this word, and we’re taking it back. What we meant is that we wanted to give a chance to funds to make their decision, and if they invest in ties.network, it’s gonna be all public and transparent. We have been negotiating with a few and they all ask for more time — to do due diligence, all possible checks and confirm with their clients. So we’d like to give them this time. We closed the crowdsale because we believed it’s right for the community — to stop contributions as we promised on Oct 12 — to make it fare for everyone, and let only funds and accredited investors take their time to buy serious amount of tokens. They believe in our technology, and this is very important for us. They want to help us to make this technology happen. Why not give it a chance? Whatever we raise, we will develop the project, and we have the minimum to start thanks to all of you guys. But if we have the support of the funds we can do a lot more and on a global scale. I hope you understand this.

I also understand you’re worried that the token will travel to exchanges later than you expected because of our decision. We are doing our best to deliver as we promised — to have it listed within 30 days starting from today. So you’re not losing much.

But if you invested in ties because you also believe that our database can become the next Oracle and add scalability to every blockchain project, please try to understand that we do the token sale not for the reason of selling the token as soon as possible on exchanges but for the reason of actually making the technology happen.

If you believe we did the wrong thing and we should let the community buy more tokens during these 2 weeks too, let us know. We will open the crowd sale again. What do you say?

The community started demanding refunds again.

Exhibit M. It’s because you wanted it.

Exhibit N. It’s paused. It’s extended.

Exhibit O. Why does he keep saying this?

“Till the cap is reached”. Again. A lot of negativity behind this point.

Exhibit P. If the community insists…

Exhibit Q. T for transparency.

Have always been public? Well, technically it’s true. But... Kindly refer to part one for details.

October 13.

12 am Moscow time the team had live Q&A session on Zoom with Natalia Tokar and Dmitry Kochin. Refunds were discussed. Everything was going quiet.

Exhibit R. Actually, this dude has always been like that.

Later that night the official “we did nothing wrong” position from part 1 of this post was published by Natalia Tokar.

Exhibit S. Here we go again.

Exhibit T. Now, this is what you call customer support.

Exhibit U. Or maybe not.

Exhibit R. Exactly.

Exhibit S. The support guy kept repeating that message.

Exhibit T. “In his spare time, he runs a performance marketing company and invests in startups and companies around the globe.”

Exhibit T. This guy posted a very long and very patronising message (he seems to be naturally predisposed to this kind of messages) which basically can be boiled down to shaming the most vocal community members and singing praise to the project and the team. Among other things he said “some of you guys might have read my short article on “Transparency and Trust in Cryptoland” — let me quote sth.:” — and he did quote two whole paragraphs of himself. Naturally, someone looked the article up and found that among pompous self-aggrandisement it contained a 16-minute presentation video of the Ties. Surprisingly, the other 50% of his articles are completely dedicated to SONM.

Exhibit U. My, are we touchy.

Exhibit V. :)

I had a great time compiling this. Here is the link to part one.

Disclaimer: I am not a Ties investor, not a member of their team and I have no connection to the project. I had a brief history with SONM after their ICO (and there is a post about it), but I was not on the team there.

This is all I have time for now. I hope this helps. Make sure you have read and understood the disclaimer at the bottom. If you come across any factual mistakes or faulty grammar you are welcome to point them out in your comments. To get updates or PM me you can always follow me on Twitter.

Virtually nobody seemed to get that IBO and IEO hint. It’s a tip jar, okay? Do you want me to put the “please donate” picture of Jimmy Wells here?

BTC: 13KoSmPCvKNcWMyXANEShyGW7iUjX7mdRA
ETH: 0x4CE74183c002Ea7555Ca4877Ab8f273F10cFBFB6

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