On ways to attract investors, marketing of the ICO and future plans: CoinFox talked to the CEO of Sand Coin - Ruslan Pichugin.

How is the ICO process going on? What interesting moments in the course of this process are there?

The ICO is going well, we closed the soft cap quickly, and after we observed a good leap. After that event, the sales decreased slightly, but some sources of traffic, which we were targeting, started to give a result. For instance, now we have a large amount of Hispanic traffic (Argentina, Mexico) due to the announcement of my interview in Spanish. The Spanish investors are very friendly, they have their own telegram chat in which there is a decentralization – there is no even an administrator, in other words they are the regulators of themselves. And we posted an article about the football player from England who invests in Sand Coin. Now we are negotiating with him because the article is good, but we must target more, we must push more.

Some people think that our ICO has stalled due to decline in sales. But these people did not look closely at the other ICOs. According to my own observations the drop in sales is the absolutely normal situation.

Where does the main traffic come from? Who invests more - funds or private investors?

If we talk about countries, the most are Hispanic countries. Also we observed some traffic from USA and Europe but it is very fragmented. As well we have some Russian speaking investors, but they did not invest mostly, they just asked questions – they want to replicate this experience. Big or small investors? I prefer not to deal with funds because I do not have such a large scale project while the funds are interesting in projects with tens of millions of dollars budget. Initially the average check was at the level of three and a half thousand dollars, then fell to three thousand and now it is about one and a half or two thousand dollars.

How do you feel about the abundance of ICO? In which project would you invest now?

I follow the market. There are many projects which copy our idea (the real sector, production), there are many real estate projects (I have them a lot in my telegram chats). But it is important to understand what ICO is. It is about raising funds, but those ICOs that collect actually something are around ten in a week.

If we talk about me, now I do not see the projects in which I would like to invest in. There was an interesting project for me named Tokencard. But now the informational flow is so big and it is difficult to isolate something worthwhile. I would invest in infrastructure projects which offer not a concrete solution to one task but a complex solution.

What are your future plans? Do you have any simultaneous projects?

Firstly, I am consulting some projects with a similar business model or with a similar idea. There are a variety of these projects, however among them there are a very few which actually do something. I usually choose the projects in which the founder has the own vision, the approach of projects such as “we want to raise money, so let’s apply the standard strategy” is not interesting for me.

Secondly, it will be difficult period during winter – the launch of the new Sand Coin project, I will deal with it closely.

Thirdly, people say that Sand Coin is very interesting in terms of ideas, but it is very narrow, and I would like to make of it something more massive, large scale, and maybe spread it to more quarries. I recently was in Dubai and I talked with some investors. This is a very conservative country in terms of investment. They think in advance all the moves. Many projects disappointed expectations, so investors did not want to invest or postpone this issue - but during the ICO process everybody works quickly, does not want to waste time on one or two investors. And I was told that if the project was more scalable, we would have invested, it's unclear why we need to invest now.

Are you going to go somewhere else to present the project?

By countries? I think there is no point in the road show. When I was sitting in the office, I received a phone call from Japan: the interlocutor said that there are investors ready to invest 300 thousand dollars, the deal was concluded. You can spend time, fly, walk around the conferences - but you can just get a phone call. If you have a good marketing and an interesting project, you will be found. What you need to do exactly is to find those investors who have their own pool, a small fund. They can explain everything on the Internet. For instance, in USA there is a person who makes expert selections, for example he or she finds projects in which is worth investing - and the people are invested in these projects.

Are you going to renew the ICO? It's a common practice - there is even one project that has the ICO during one year.

Everything will depend on the interest of investors. If we understand that there are not enough days before the hard cap collection and investors need a little bit more time – this is possible. But I'm not one of those people who like to change things. We had many moments when we wanted to postpone something, but I am against such decisions. In an extreme case, I can use this opportunity - it is an adequate solution. But the ICO ends on October 18, let's take a closer look. We will not issue additional tokens categorically. The obligations that we take on ourselves - within the established number of tokens.

I am often asked a question - here you will raise your funds, buy a yacht and Ferrari. But they do not understand that from a sandy quarry one can earn much more money. We have not earned money now, but we raised funds to earn later.

Tell about the channels of promotion.

There are ICO-trackers, sheets, sites. They do not work very well, but they operate for "whale" investors, not small investors: "whales" go to these sites purposefully, look out, wait. If there is a budget, it is necessary to be placed on all the trackers.

As for Facebook and Google: they work, but the audience of crypto-investors is not so big. This tool should be used, but the return is not so great. I would rather focus on communication with the media – it is a media stream. If they write about you, then you are not a scam. This must be used. One person wrote me the day before yesterday that he invested in us because he had previously seen an article about our project and was interested.

I summarize - you can not orient to anything absolutely, but you need to use all the tools to the maximum and be media, public and open.

After the ICO I plan to make a selection, what works, what does not work - what channels to use, etc. Why not share this information?