Toby Hoenisch ran TenX's ICO, which sold out in seven minutes and raised $80 million. He accepted 20-25 cryptocurrencies, caught fraud losses to a few hundred dollars, and grew the community from 4,000 token holders to 50,000 after the sale.
Questions this video answers
Seven minutes.
About $80 million.
A few hundred dollars (total).
Approximately 20–25 cryptocurrencies.
About 4,000 token holders during the sale; later close to 50,000.
Chapters
The question is if how good the token sale went. I think just the fact that we sold out in seven minutes means it went very well. We did have some challenges right in the middle, but nothing major in terms of nothing really went wrong. Just like we didn't expect it to go like that. Crazy. You can actually check it out on our YouTube channel. We have a vlog of the entire day from the morning, like midnight to the token sale. I think there is maybe two interesting things. One is particularly about our business because what we do is we allow users to spend any cryptocurrency in the real world. So we decided to not only accept Ether or Bitcoin, but we think. I think we had like 20, 25 different cryptocurrencies that we accepted during the token sale. And that was a challenge in itself. So for practical reasons, it would have been way easier to just pick one. Yeah, I think that's one of the things. And the other one is probably still happening. It was really strong during the time when we did the token sale. It's just combating all the fraud and scam. So we had an entire team dedicated just to make sure that our users and token holders are safe. And I think that's. That's probably one of the biggest successes we had. We had in total, maybe a few hundred dollars were lost compared to the $80 million that were raised, which for me is really an achievement. I think we did marketing. We did not spend much money on marketing because the way the crypto community works is still like, we just interact, we're just there. So the most important thing for our token sale, just to be there, to have a channel where people can reach us from Twitter to like, we were super active on Slack and then keeping those under control, that there is nothing, like there's no people getting scammed on our own social media channels. Our product is doing great. I think one of the challenges we have right now is really scaling it. It's like we're doubling the active carts every few weeks, which means we have to scale the back end, we have to scale the processes. So things are going really, really good. I think one of the biggest things we had previously on the panel as well is like, what you're actually doing with a token sale is building a community, a community money. And you have to really think about how do you serve that community, Is it your product, is it something else? And then how do you engage that, that community? How do you get them to interact with you? This is something which we actively did, but it completely surpassed my own expectations and how much we can actually learn from that community that we have now. So during the token sale, we had 4,000 token holders that came in and now it's, I think close to 50,000 different people. And they are pretty much all vested in 10x. They follow everything we do, they give us feedback, they test. They're like our early beta users. And that's where you really get the benefit if you really leverage that. I would try for that question, focus more on why these token sales exist in the first place. And it's pretty much a disruption of venture capital because it allows. You don't have those middlemen anymore that need to be asked first. Where you had only accredited investors in traditional venture capital, now you. You can just have anyone invest anywhere for anything, and it opens up the market. Like, I think this year alone we had more money raised in token sales than VCs did in the same time frame. So, I mean, the other side is happening too. So it's happening on all levels. While the banks coming in for them, I think it's much easier. It's just profit. It's like there is a need. There is people who want to invest and they're catering to that need.
