Caution: “This is a test. I hope that you will learn where so many others have failed!”

by Benjamin Yong

Getting a whitepaper is a test. It’s a test to see if your company is truly ready to raise funds from the public. I might even say, it’s the best test before your company considers a real Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the future. Yet as a white paper writer, I’ve seen countless companies struggle to prepare the necessary details required to create the paper in the first place. As such, here is a list of some of the most common mistakes that most companies make while preparing their whitepapers for their Initial Coin Offering (ICO):

Lacking Purpose

The purpose of a white paper is to attract investors to invest money into your ICO. As such it’s not sufficient to just provide your company profile and past financial records of the company. You would need to sell the concept of your business and how you can justify creating an entire ecosystem around your coins or tokens for your customer base. This is the basis of selling value despite the fact that some investors maybe cryptocurrency speculators. Your company would still need a functioning token ecosystem that users will adopt and pay for in order for investors to see the promised returns.

In short, you’d need to state your business case and show, with confidence, how you can help investors profit should they invest in you.

Preparation Is Half Of The Battle

Preparing your business case requires facts. Statistics to back-up the trends of growth you are riding on, or the market opportunity that your company is capitalising on, details such as these are key to building investor confidence. Yet many companies fail to understand that such numbers can’t be “made-up” as the repercussions can go from public ridicule to a potential lawsuit.

Speaking about building investor confidence, the details of your company’s plan, usage of the funds raised, the token ecosystem, and strong financial records proving growth in revenue and potential are some of the main things you’d need to prepare. Once again, you’re not in the business of running a sham, you’re raising funds to expand your business.

So figure out the facts and figures necessary or face the risk of your ICO failing before it even launches.

The Nitty Gritty

It’s great to be thorough with the whitepaper. Yet you mustn’t lose focus on the purpose of the whitepaper and be distracted by your quest to seek perfection. Nitpicking on minor details on the whitepaper such as minor spacing or design inconsistencies can lead to unnecessary time wasted on multiple minor revisions. Resulting in delayed delivery times or even worse, additional revision costs.

Best to focus on the clarity and strength of the message first before settling any small inconsistencies.

About Time

Understand that a white paper is a collaborative effort. While the words come from a writer it also needs a designer to make it more visually appealing, the majority of white papers will need charts, diagrams and other graphics to help the reader get a better understanding and to prevent the document being an impenetrable wall of text. This all takes time if you want a professional standard white paper and let’s not forget it should also be checked by a legal team to make sure there are no inaccuracies or misleading terms.

Nobody is perfect. The team working on the white paper will not know your company as well as you do and that means that some things may need to be tweaked or corrected along the way, it is best to do this in rounds rather than picking things out one-by-one. As the writer is writing about your business they will need you to provide the correct information, failure to do this, or to change your plans during the process will require the writer to rewrite sections or perhaps the entire document wasting a lot of your time and money.

Legally Binding

Your whitepaper is a legally binding document that can be used in a court of law, it is not just an extension of your marketing materials. This means that the legal team will have to ensure that specific wordings are used to protect you from misrepresentation or any legal inaccuracies that could be used against your company. As such, it is best to consult a legal team while in the process of creating a whitepaper to look through the documentation. There have been cases where companies which did not consult decent lawyers faced lawsuits while raising their ICOs. The consequences could be catastrophic as it could mean the failure of the ICO or even worse, permanent damage to the reputation of your company’s brand and image.

It is best to consult a legal team to help vet through the whitepaper to protect your company.

My Advice

I hope that you will learn where others have failed. As a writer, I take pride in writing your whitepaper and in helping you position your company and concept in the best light possible to help you get investors. As part of Celebrus, we ensure that you receive the best guidance and consultancy every step of the way towards your ICO. Not only because it is our duty, but our solemn pride to help push the blockchain revolution forward and towards mass acceptance and global adoption.