Hi to all, I am a newcomer here at bitcointalk. I read through the comments here and it summarizes what we are facing now with our Wellmee project. We just started with the promotion heading to initial token offering in November and I see how it will be damn difficult with no budget for marketing to let people know about us and to prove that our intentions are sincere. Any idea how to "get out of the crowd"? except of hard work and all full of enthusiasm - we have that already :-)
Thanks for any kind of advice, Milan
Since you have realised how difficult it will be to let people know about the project without adequate funds for marketing purposes, the most important thing you should be focus on is how to get the required fund to finance your marketing activities as without that you might realise you have wasted efforts. First is to shelve the idea of using your token to exclusively pay for marketing activities as doing that might face resistance from the community. There are ways to raise funds which range from your micro contacts to established.
First option you need to consider is raising funds from savings and your team members who believed in your project with that, you can kick start the preliminaries such as the designing of logo, website, ANN thread, signatures etc. after which you can expand to other individuals outside your comfort zones.
After the above, you can then combine the payment of advertisers with the fund you are able to raise with your coin or token which you can crowd fund through the pre-ICO sale then from there, you have a good start. Other options is getting venture capitalists of financing the project from the start to finish but they are sure to have equity control.
One important factor to make this work is if you have a workable solution as your design and advertisement can only attract people to you but the content of the project would make them want to stay and invest.