Interview: Mersad Ajanovic, CEO at SpotShot
By: Georgiana Ghiciuc
Tags: Cryptocurrency News, News, Bitcoin

1. Why ICO and not IPO? Can you give us 3 reasons why ICO is better leaving aside the obvious benefits offered by Blockchain (e.g. transparency, security, fast transactions, anonymity?)

The answer to the question strongly depends on who you ask. Do you ask a company that is successfully running a business for 5–10 years or longer or are you asking a startup? For me as a startup founder the answer is quite obvious. Both ICO and IPO are a way of raising money but the IPO doesn’t really make any sense for a small startup. ICO’s changed that. They made raising money in an early stage possible which is great and dangerous at the same time!

So one reason would be that companies can raise money with an ICO at any time, which is not the case with IPO’s.

The second reason is that with an ICO you don’t have to necessarily give away any equity. During an IPO founders and early investors give away equity to raise large amounts of money. An additional benefit to ICO’s is that companies can raise amounts that are on average similar to stage B funding rounds. Startups can therefore keep most of their equity until further funding is needed.

The third reason is very important for the public. The investment in ICO’s enables the general public to also invest early in projects. When a company goes public investors will already have made their profits and the public will get the expensive leftovers. Investors get company shares for cents while the public pay many dollars for their shares. ICO’s even the playing field to a large degree which is great.

In addition to the above reasons there is a fourth one that is very interesting. When companies raise money via an ICO they mostly get the investment in the form of cryptocurrencies. Depending on when the money is raised companies can profit a lot if the currency used rises in value. This happened to many startups that raised money in the past years.

2. Big companies like IBM, Baidu, Alibaba, Amazon, and others, are flirting with Blockchain technology. Leaving rumors about Facebook launching its own cryptocurrency aside, what other big company would you say might jump on Blockchain (and possibly launch an ICO or develop its own cryptocurrency)?

Every company should consider the use of blockchain technology. It is like back in the 90s where the internet started to take of. At the beginning many offline services got ported to internet based services and many companies profited from that. Amazon for example. The same is happening today with blockchain. There are all kinds of services and offerings being recreated on blockchain at the moment. Youtube on blockchain, Dropbox on blockchain, Social Media on blockchain and so on. Not necessarily every company will use blockchain tech. If we look back there are many companies that were big and missed the train and failed. We should rather look at up and coming companies than all these already existing ones. Google or Amazon were not big when it all started. If I had to guess who of the big companies might use blockchain I would say Google and Apple. All big tech companies will have to use blockchain technology one way or another.

3. How can one market/advertise their ICO now that Facebook has banned paid ads? Would you say the future of marketing Blockchain-related projects will depend entirely on high-quality content creation?

Advertising ICO’s is forbidden but not advertising your company or project. If you advertise your project and grow your following everyone will know you are doing an ICO one way or another. I find it more important to get following for your project and create public awareness. Your followers are the ones that will spread the word. Therefore I would say that facebook is not necessarily of limits for blockchain related projects. Companies that really want to focus ICO advertisement should do it on ICO focused platforms and publications anyway.

4. Many companies in industries like banking, finance, technology, advertising, and healthcare, are jumping on Blockchain. Without a shadow of a doubt, it is more than a mere trend. Where do you see Blockchain technology in 10 years?

As I mentioned above existing companies and services are slowly shifting to blockchain but that is like companies in the 90s switching from mail to e-mail. What we don’t see yet are the uses cases that will be enabled through blockchain advancements in the future. Streaming videos, listening to music without downloading it and video chatting globally is what happened after the internet evolved. There will be many many things that will be only possible after the blockchain technology has evolved.

5. Why all the bad press surrounding ICOs, and how can one protect his business from being called a scam?

ICO’s and cryptocurrencies made it easy for scammers to collect large amounts of money without ever getting caught. They presented an idea in a whitepaper, put a fake team together and gave everyone a public address to collect crypto. After that they ran and you never heard of them again. Nobody did their due diligence before investing and many people got burned by this. In addition to that many legit ICO’s got hacked. Public addresses of ICO’s were changed by hackers to their own address to collect investments of legit companies. Things like that happening just added fuel to the fire and that is the reason why so many people call ICO’s scam.

For new businesses it is really hard to do their own ICO because as soon as you use that word anybody that has no knowledge of this space screams scam. That also includes governments, regulators and even investors. The only way to protect yourself as a business is to go through all kinds of due diligence processes set in place by partners, regulators and investors. To get through these processes you need a good team, a good business model, a good idea, a MVP and a very good token use case. You also have to present yourself to the public so that everyone knows you are real. Many scam ICO’s used fake personalities and never really showed themselves.

6. What went well for you and what advice would you give to others?

I learned that to move forward you will need a great team. It doesn’t matter how great you are. You will accomplish nothing if you try to do it alone. So the best advice I can give is to get a great team together that shares the same vision of what you are trying to accomplish. Also don’t forget team work! Having a great team won’t help you if you don’t know how to effectively work together. What also many people forget is to keep learning. Just because you finished school or a degree doesn’t mean you should stop learning. Keep learning as much as you can and share your knowledge with your team. When you get stuck don’t look at the problems that are stopping you, look for the solutions that let you keep moving forward.

Mersad is the CEO and Co-Founder of SpotShot, a new social media startup that is building a platform for fun challenges. Back in 2013 he joined the blockchain community as a small miner and later in 2017 started investing into ICO’s. Thanks to his insights into this space he saw a great use case for a token on the SpotShot platform and started planing an ICO with his team. He is now using his knowledge to design the token model and ecosystem for SpotShot’s own token.

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Mersad is the CEO and Co-Founder of SpotShot, a new social media startup that is building a platform for fun challenges. Back in 2013 he joined the blockchain community as a small miner and later in 2017 started investing into ICO’s. Thanks to his insights into this space he saw a great use case for a token on the SpotShot platform and started planing an ICO with his team. He is now using his knowledge to design the token model and ecosystem for SpotShot’s own token.