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So thought i could be of help to the newbies on how to pick a good ICO.

The reason is that I have often encounter beginners who have been scammed by ICO or have made mistakes and invested into the wrong ICO. My opinion is that if they know how to pick a good ICO to invest in, they would be less prone to losing their money in this game.

ENJOY!

5 Simple Steps;
1. A Real Business Case : A real business case and demand is key to any business and even more so for ICO. The ICO must have a product that leverages the blockchain and not just using the ICO to grab cash.

2. Small Hard Cap: A lot of ICO have ambitious hardcap in the hundreds of millions. Unless they have a one of a kind product else stick to ICO with a maximum of $40 million in hardcap. The subsequent growth in marketcap will give us better returns.

3. Great Team Members: Look for a ICO with project members who have previous ICO successes or they have held important positions in the relevant industries. Too many ICO are just being launched by people who are trying to break in industries they have no network in.

4. Super Advisors : Advisors are gold. If an ICO lists a bunch of average developers and legal people as their advisors, RUN. They must have advisors who are well known in the blockchain world or in the industries their business is trying to disrupt.

5. Amazing Marketing : Marketing is key. ICO must invest in marketing and be able to attract lots of interest for a sell out ICO. You can see this if they have lots of members in their social media especially in their telegram group. Aim for at least 500 members


DUE DILIGENCE : While the above 5 steps will be able to shortlist for you ICO with high chances of success, you must still do your own due diligence to understand their whitepaper and know what you are getting into. Your ICO investing results will depend on how much work you put in.

I hope i was able to be of help. If you think i was, please share a little merit on this post. Thanks in advance

I agree with most of your ideas to pick a good ICO but small hardcap is no way to a measure of a good ICO. I'd rather look for a legally registered company so that they may be brought to lawsuit in worst case scenario.

Perhaps you have overlooked one of the most critical factors: whether the code is open source.
The speed of open source code and code updates determines whether the ICO project will succeed.

sorta in line with what you think, but i prefer to group them into the following ratings cluster. Note to newbies: also always be careful to follow instructions clearly, including whether they accept btc or just eth, and not to send eth/btc from an exchange etc.

Hype:
twitter users
reddit posts
telegram members
discord members
responsiveness/truthfulness of moderators in these channels
  
Fundamentals:  
Availability of MVP
Team strength (number of experts in the field; linkedin profiles)  
Whitepaper originality/technicality/clarity    
Independent reviews  
Partnerships with corporates/academia  
Use-case strength  
Clarity of roadmap
  
Others:  
Existing Competition (other coins in the same space? how established are they)    
Regulation Risk (does it have security characteristics?)  
Hardcap (is it asking for too much money for its use case?)
Share of tokens distributed (are the founders/team keeping too much for themselves, escrow?)

In my opinion, it is better to make your own research and trust your guts.

The most of the privacy coins are undervalued right now.

The best opportunity is to find a privacy-related project with a low total supply (less than 100M), that way the price will be increasing much faster.

I recently found one project called Ethereum Meta, it is related to anonymity and untraceable transaction. They have a very interesting project to build the Anonymous E-Market Place.

They are on Pre-ICO stage right now, you can check their website: https://ethermeta.com/
Or even better go through their Bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2659058.0

You also need to pay attention to the possibility of implementing the project. Promises of guaranteed earnings can be immediately considered false, since it is impossible to accurately predict anything in the market for crypto currency.

Well this could bee a nice guide and following it can give you a head start, but all in all there is really nothing that can assure you that a project can be a success. I have been studying a lot about ICOs in order that I might luckily land in some successful ones, but with all precautions I still got some failures.

Good ICO is immeasurable because we can say if an ICO is good if it is successful!
Your tips is good to newbies, it may also be the factors why a certain ICO succeed. However, we cannot depend always in these factors but we also think that investors really plays a vital role for the succession of an ICO. Wether it has super team and good developer if the project is not popular, they cannot attract investors.

I agree with you when we talk about long term investments, I also add that another sign of quality ICO is the well defined target. I read way too many wallpaper which claim "we are for everyone". DAMN, no! You are not for everyone, you have a market segment to aim, and you should aim to a very specific target as well.

ICOs which define their target are a step above the others in my humble opinion :)

About short term, I watch completely different factors, in primis the hype.
I saw projects that are, in my opinion, completely meaningless, with little to no reason to use the blockchain, but with a huge marketing and communication department, which led to millions of fund raised. These project usually have super fancy websites and WP. I use to join these ICO just to sell at the market opening, when the price reach abnormally high values for a short period of time, before going down.

I hope you'll find my post useful :)

Thanks for right info. One more. The product should decide actual problem, better - global.

I am very thankful that I can find this information which I can use as a reference to search good ICO. in terms of hard cap, I seldom found an ICO that pick small hard cap, most of them are the opposite. so are they categorized as bad ICO or unsuccessful ICO?
I think total supply can influence the categorization of good or bad ICO. right?

When choosing ICO, I try to find information about the project team, its creators, managers and engineers of the blockchain. Once scammers wrote fake people and it's easy enough to check.

picking a good ICO is getting harder and harder.  Definitely worried about all the coming crackdowns

Many Iko such that without the organization and thinking over their plan are simply lost and do not know what to do with the money that they have welded.

Now the truth is, to find a good ICO is a very global problem. To find the project now, it can take not one day. And the choice remains for everyone individually.

Sometimes, it's difficult to trust the team members.
Everyone can make an impostor or fake accounts. Even on LinkedIn.

When I choose ICO, I try to find as much information in social networks as possible about this project, because people share their impressions and often there write good thoughts

Nope, all this points can also be a fake / scam.
The perfect ico you don't can found.
I think all ICOs only for make money from the Company. 90% pic up the money and will go out of the project and the project will die.

Thank you, everything is very clear! But it's strange that you didn't add a "working product" to a separate item.
Today it's sooooooooo important. Having a working product confirms that the team is really working.
But of course this doesn't guarantee success :)

In fact, there are many factors by which you can determine whether it is a scam or not. One of them is a bad whitepaper, in which there are usually many inconsistencies.

Great tutorial you have written for a newcomer to pick an ICO that has a great potential. One of the most important point is to make sure the ICO has a product or something that is working from day 1.

All good points. Small cap means they give tokenized value growth priority over money grab. Of course there is always the possibility that they truly need 100m $ like when they want to start they own space program. :D

Very good topic, it will suit not only beginners, but also people who have long been in the market. I took advantage of this topic. thank you

Exactly! All ICO's seems to be good and legit. But there are almost no clear indication whether or not our investments (talkin about our money, time, resources, ourselves) are safe. Reality is, at the end of the day, even if we think we made all of the precautionary measures, we still end up choosing a project with feeling of uncertainties. Why? Because even if we are all so sure that we have chosen a good project, there is still that so called risk factor of losing our money. But this is normal and something that we need to be accustomed to. If not, then we really won't gain anything from this.

How to pick a good ICO as a newbie? Don't!

Get to grips and experience with some of the more established crypto market tokens first. Feel what it's like to experience massive bull runs and massive dips sometimes both happening over the course of a week. Only then will they have the patience required to HODL when ICOs go on the market and sometimes go to 1/4 of the ICO price only to a few weeks later become x10, x20 gains.

I like to only hold the coins that look like they can have a higher price in a short while There is a lot of coins that won't do that 100x on the ICO price.

Creators of a project place a wallet address on the official website, where coins are thrown off.  I sometimes try to check its balancing in this case, you can determine whether it is a scam or not.

They're some very useful points consider, which is why I gave you Merit.

Newbies (which I consider myself to be, with only 3 months experience in the crypto world) need all the help they can get, so any information to help in that regard is a good thing, IMHO.

Of course, the comments indicating newbies should avoid ICOs altogether may also have some validity.  I suppose it comes down to how quickly we learn, our risk aversion level, and how much money we have to invest.

crypto is the most logical choice on the money exchange ico. especially for beginners. it is hard to find the right ico so you have to pass some conditions