My team and I recently pursued an ICO after months of development, launched a new blockchain and built a beta. We did not do a pre-sale, we did not open to early investors although some did express interest and in the end just tried to delay our plan rather than add value.

so we launched the ICO / blockchain and beta on 15th feb and the response was extremely poor. We did not meet are modest target and we decided to refund anyone that participated in the ICO.

Unlike other ICO's that use an ERC20 token on top of Ethereum we launched a new blockchain and new coin forked of the Ethereum codebase. We inherited all the great features of Ethereum so we could launch and start with a great platform to build upon.

We watched as others moved in to space, rushing everything from their website to their crowdsale while we decided to focus and build a better quality offering and it was strange because other projects with much weaker teams, much weaker value proposition seem to raise a lot of ETH. Yet our team, with much stronger proposition, a blockchain, mineable coin & working beta got little interest compare to much weaker projects.

Regardless of the ICO target not being met, we as a team delivered on what we set out to deliver with zero funding, Just the collaborative efforts of 5-6 people.

The whole experience for us has been great, we have all learned new things and the experience of building a blockchain project bringing it to market and going through an ICO. We have not give up or walked away, we shared the experience with the community, refunded the ICO contributions and now increase the team size by another 6.

We now are pursing traditional funding while our increased team members that are skilled and experienced in Digital Marketing & Blockchain, one coming from a well known successful project have started our Initial Bounty Offering campaign (IBO) where we aim to distribute the coins that were originanlly up for sale at our ICO.

We had many approaches on the run up to our ICO and during our ICO from people and companies offering to market our ICO. they were making statements like guarenting x number of discussion pages on bitcoin talk. X number of followers on telegram/social media etc.

Also there was discussions with potential advisers but they all stopped when they requested bitcoin/eth upfront from the team that was made from volunteers. If we had the funds we would have loved to work with some of them but we had no pre-funding.

My view on ICOs today while they initially were seen as a great way for the masses to get involved and to side step traditional funding your analysis is correct.

With the influx of VC funds, high net worth individuals and institutional buyers/pools they are getting in prior to ICOs in private pre-sales or pre-ICO funding rounds initially seeding the team with capital needed to run a great awareness campaign which will attract a lot more people at the ICO stage.

As we had no pre-funding of any kind when we launched our ICO we only had our team, friends and family to get the word out. We grew our social channels and reached out to potential strategic partners but this was not enough to generate an engaged and active community. Which showed in the results of the ICO.

You can read out last post on this here https://medium.com/atlas-announcement/the-future-of-atlas-d3792026ca1f