0. (Conditional) Operate a serious and long-term business.
ICO causes almost no risk if you have any concern around the sustainability of your business and would like to run away to the underground world and spend your rest life after getting money with ICO.
In contrary, ICO would bring critical reputation risks to your business if you would like to make your business surviving long term.
To make people disappointed with your ICO, you would face fatal problems with your main business.
1. Have a plan to be listed in a stock exchange in Japan.
It is heard that stock exchanges in Japan like Tokyo Stock Exchange show its policy not to allow a company which has done ICO to be listed.
2. Have nothing to execute the plan in a white paper.
You can see many of scammers in this space. They do nothing intentionally.
Even a serious project has same kinds of issues against its will.
For instance, your company would be a middle-sized company in the gaming industry and have never done a platform business.
If your company would plan to build a versatile trading platform for virtual items with tokens distributed publicly in ICO, the success rate of the concept is extremely low.
The reason why is simple.
Meaningful success for this sort of business needs millions of userbase and ICO is not a silver bullet like bringing such amount of userbase to you.
Actually, many projects like the followings are based on their huge userbase and they should be strong competitors to your project.
WAX: 2 millions of transactions in the service called OPSkins brought the WAX team to execute ICO.
BUFF: The project is based on the service called Overwolf installed by millions of PC gamers.
Achieving those amounts of users should be almost impossible only with ICO.
3. Have a limited lifespan.
As you know, common ICOs have semipermanent lifetimes for better or worse.
So ICO has bad chemistry with a fixed term project.
However, many exceptions are there with this condition.
One solution is making the term for tokens traded publicly limited.
Apex Token Fund shows its plan to make its token destroyed after its liquidation for the fund’s assets and the term would be between 24 and 36 months after the tokens issued.
Selling token simply without ICO could be another option.
You can sell your tokens with your own smart contracts and the tokens would be exchanged in distributed exchanges (DEX).
Your responsibility would not be so tough compared to be listed in public exchanges.