I 've been trying to find out all the things that would lead me to spot the wining ICO, meaning an ICO that will not just enter a the platforms to make a quick buck.
An ICO I can really HODL.
I have gathered the below up to now:
The founders are working on something great, with details on their design and their roadmap.
The founders are not worried with deadlines, but are making changes when necessary to ensure the safety of their project.
The founders know their project of by heart. They can answer logical questions. They love it when people ask them about their project and the details of the development.
The founders could be promising the world, but not tomorrow. If they are promising you to become rich tomorrow, something looks bad.
New points from other members:
Competent development team is the most important rule. Ideas are not enough. There should be good devs to build around those ideas. That is main rule.
ICO's with a low or reasonable market cap and ICO's that have set a max cap.
[it could apply sometimes] The winning icos will be having a large of the communities that will always try to monitoring the development process of the project that was including about the crowdsale too.
Looking forward to enhance my list. I will add your ideas to the above list.
Investing in ICO's to profit from pump isn't that hard, because most of them get pumped, but spotting an ICO that can be successful in the long term can be very difficult, because there's so many things that can go wrong even on projects that are legit. Good idea on opening this topic. I hope it becomes very useful and informative.
I agree about the founders/developers but it's impossible to know how good they are and if they do it by heart if you don't know them personally or are reknowned people that already made several known successful projects. And it's not just developers that should be good, but they should have good marketing too.
My list would be:
- Ask yourself what's the main idea of the project. What problem does it solve. Does it have any competitors. How is the idea better than competitors. Are their potential customers that would find use for the idea.
- Check the team. Are there real names posted on their website with their real photos. Google for team members. Check if they already worked on some successful projects. Do pictures and information on the website correspond to what you find on their profiles on social networks like Facebook.
- Check the website. Does it look professional. Are there many spelling errors. Serious projects will pay someone to design and lecture their website properly. Is there a whitepaper on the website (it's a must obviously) and roadmap. Is the website translated into any other language than English. Translations especially to Chinese, Japanese and Korean are a big plus.
- Check the whitepaper. Is it just a few pages of simple text written in poor English. That's bad sign for sure. Or is it about 100 pages of very technical and legal language noone really understands. If whitepaper is too complicated, it might be written this way on purpose so it would make the project seem good. Or the project might really be good, but there's possibility it won't get many investors, because not many potential investors would understand it. And if ICO doesn't get enough investors, they may not collect enough funds to work on the project. Whitepaper document should be just about right. Written without any errors, properly formatted, easily understandable but must still answer most of the questions you as investors want to know.
- Check the roadmap. What have they done already. The more the better. A working product you can try out is best. Just white paper with nothing else done is very risky.
- Check the code if they publish it on github. Are there a lot of commits every working day. This should like they're working hard on the project. But be careful if the code is forked from another project. Many of the activity might be there from the previous project.
- What's the amount they're trying to raise. Is the amount reasonable for what they're trying to achieve. Are there any cost estimates that explain what the collected funds will be used for. Is there a hard and/or soft cap for the ICO. Do you know exactly how much will you pay per token. Team that doesn't even know the estimate of their expenses can't be serious on the project. And if there's no cap, it shows they're at least greedy if not scammers. And if you can't tell how much will you pay per token this is gambling not investing.
- What's the model of token distribution. What percentage of tokens will be sold to investors and what percentage will stay with the team. Anything more than 49% of tokens staying with the team is a bad sign.
- How many tokens will be in circulation. Are they inflating, limited supply, deflating. Are there any competitive projects on the market. Compare potential token price to them in case the project reached same marketcap. What profit would you make at this marketcap. Is it worth the risk.
- What's the use of the token. Will flow of the tokens in the system drive the demand for tokens up and create buying pressure in the market.
- Check the community. Is there a lot of activity in the threads on this and other online forums and social networks. Do members of the team communicate a lot.
- Check marketing. Do you spot adds for the project, a lot of news about the ICO on different media sites, do they publish videos on youtube, send newsletters and write blogs regulary,...
- How long will it take after ICO to hit exchanges. Which exchanges on what dates.
Probably no ICO project will be perfect according to above checks. But the more checks it passes the better. And I probably also forgot some important checks, it's just what I wrote from the top of my head.
