Don't get mauled.
Launching an ICO is a tricky beast.
You're subject to the ebbs and flow of your chosen fundraising token - and there's a very high chance that token will be Ethereum (ETH). And unlike your traditional investing rounds, IPOs, or private equity sales - you're selling a piece of your token economy for an asset that can sometimes gain or drop 20% on the daily.
Ethereum has dropped an incredible 46% in the last 3 weeks - from 469 USD to 250 USD.
A recent compilation from Ethereum start-up Santiment reveals that ICOs have spent and sold-off 110,000 Ether in the past 30 days - https://sanbase-low.santiment.net/assets/erc20.
And while it's easy for retail investors to simply shrug off and HODL (although not recommended) - your capital raise in ETH can dictate whether or not you have enough cashflow to:
Get an exchange listing
Pay developers to build your platform
Pay influencers to promote your token
Hire community managers on your Telegram, Reddit, Slack channels
If you don't have a person on your team with an active trading strategy to manage your Ether capital, you risk upsetting hundreds or thousands of investors who are watching their intrinsic ETH value fall/rise while your token might not even have a market to buy/sell on.
That's why it is more important than ever to understand the markets. ICOs which cashed out in the highs of early January 2018 are going to last much longer development-wise than those panic selling their ICO raise during the lowest point of the year, 80% from the highs.
And your investors are going to thank you for selling their tokens at higher price levels - after all, token raises are really just essentially meant to raise capital while allowing non-institutional investors to participate in initial offerings.
One of our partners at Kinetic Cuts specializes in 'buying low' and 'selling high'. With a focus on technical analysis, the analysts at The Chart Guys - http://thechartguys.com - are creating daily videos reviewing micro and macro trends in Ethereum and Bitcoin prices.
They have consistently and accurately called the bottoms and tops of daily and weekly moves - meaning if you have followed them for a year, you would have had very strong evidence that the top was in for Bitcoin at 20k and you would have been able to follow the multitude of bounces that it went from 5700-5900 range to 8000-11000.
TheChartGuys’ fantastic beginning tutorial on how to trade cryptocurrency.
So whether you're an ICO sitting on a mountain of Ether, or an ICO about to raise a large share of Ether - yes, price matters! Have someone delegated to managing your financials and make sure your investors feel confident about your holdings and cashflow. The cryptocurrency space is all about transparency and open source collaboration - if your token and project is all that, you should be able to produce cashflow statements and public key addresses that verify the source of your funds!
As a cryptocurrency-focused business creating animated explainer videos and live action corporate videos, we have generated approximately 20% of our funds this year via Cryptocurrency payments - as well as taking token equity in exchange for project discounts on a handful of ICOs.
Our personal strategy is to cash out 90% of our Cryptocurrency payments (BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC) immediately upon reception and keep the rest in cold wallets. We'll check back in 3 years.
With our token equity, we do not plan on selling until our partners have achieved critical components of their roadmap on the way to releasing a final product - generally this would be in the time frame of 1-2 years. If everything is going great, we may even HODL ourselves!
When a few of our current running ICOs close, we will be posting a public wallet address so you can see Kinetic Cuts' current ERC-20 token holdings. You can see a few of these projects on our page at https://kineticcuts.com/videoforico/