What made you interested in cryptocurrencies in the first place?
See, I have always been one of those guys that shoots for the moon. When cryptocurrencies came around, I was leading quite an exciting life already and the business that I had just started a couple years before, Black Marketing Guru, was growing every day. Thing is that I just cannot help exploring new areas outside of my comfort zone, and this holds true today as well. You can imagine that working in a start-up environment made it inevitable for me to ignore the hype, at first, and the great passion, right after my first ICO experience, for the blockchain technology and all that came with it.
How do you help ICOs? How many ICOs have you worked with?
First of all, I do not work alone. I strongly believe in the strength of synergies among team members, and this motivated me to select the best collaborators in the cryptocurrency world. What we do together is selecting the best ICOs, providing them the right tools and visibility to turn them into successful business projects. I do not just measure success looking at the quantity of money received from the investors, but also by looking at the intangible benefits brought by each of these projects to the community: sustainability cannot be disregarded, as of today. I have experimented so many growth hacking strategies on my own personal brand, that I have now mastered and shared with my collaborators an all-in-one marketing service to support ICOs achieve two of the most important goals: Marketing & Promotion, Community & Influencer. I think I have lost track of the number of ICOs that I have helped, which are certainly more than 25, but I know that I have collected about 18.4M€ so far and it has been a blast.
What achievements or projects have you done that allowed you to be credible enough to have this many ICOs seeking your advice?
If you have not read or heard about my past, from the teenage years up until now, you really should. Not because I am some mythological figure, but just because it would save you from writing some very controversial things on your blog, that might even sound too politically incorrect to yourself. If you are curious, just look me up on Google, because – yes – I have hacked that, too. Anyway, let me give you the nice and smooth answer to this question. Aside from being featured on the Financial Times, Forbes, Wired and Los Angeles Times, I have achieved a 2M€ exit with the startup CercaClienti.it and SocialAutomation.online. On top of that, I have founded Black Marketing Guru, still today the fastest growing start-up in Italy. With all this, I have created a community of thousands of satisfied customers, most of which are crypto-enthusiasts as well.
The average investor likely thinks we are still going through a bear market. Obviously there’s a little less volatility now than there was earlier this year but still the ICO market has not recovered from its all time high last December. Do you think it’s a good idea for ICO startups to do a crowdsale at this time or would it better to wait when the market reverses so as to get a higher chance of reaching their hardcap?
I get this question a lot and every time I think back to the “.dotcom” bubble that the Internet experienced around 1999, and that, when it popped, traumatized a generation of investors. We are now living in a digital world, and no one – not even your grandmother! – can now deny that we cannot go long without having Internet at our disposal. In the end, cryptocurrency markets cannot be about this quarter’s prices, this year’s most profitable coins, or this or that company’s strategic moves. I believe that the confidence that one has in crypto traces to a conviction concerning the blockchain technology itself and its fascinating applications in bettering our every-day life. Therefore, I say that it is always the right time to launch an ICO, but you need to have the right team to catch that moment, in the right place and with the right marketing techniques. No worries, you know who to call!
You also advise STOs right? Can you tell us the fundamental difference between an ICO and STO?
I have begun sensing the pivoting of the crypto enthusiasts towards STOs in these last months, especially in certain countries, and, given that I work on a global scale, I cannot ignore this trend. I have started turning to STOs just lately and did not find it difficult to cope with them, since there are just a few formal differences. I would say that STOs (Securities Token Offerings) are a subset of ICOs, where the issuer or project developer has decided that its tokens or coins are securities and to conform with securities laws in distributing those tokens.
What do you think of Bitcoin itself as opposed to the rest of the crypto space? Do you think it will remain the dominant cryptocurrency for a long time? Have you found an ICO that made you think that this could replace Bitcoin or render it obsolete?
I think that Bitcoin is the new “e-gold” of the digital era and that, when all the speculative trends will cease to make its price so volatile, it will become the risk-free asset that we all will all use to diversify out crypto wallets. I also feel like Bitcoin is still underestimated. In fact, if the percentage of Bitcoin in relation to the masses of global under-management assets went up just by only 2% right now, Bitcoin itself could have a potential upside of up to 400.000USD. Also,
in technology the law holds that the computing power of the network will triple each year for the next 25 years, thus accelerating the mining process through which we are trying to set a new gold standard for all other cryptocurrencies, including the new tokens issued by ICOs these days. Can an ICO replace Satoshi’s project? No way. We cannot forget that no causal link is two-way, and that in this case Bitcoin is Big Bang of the crypto universe.