Key points to consider before investing in ICO (share your experience)

[Weis]

Hello to all forum members!
With so many ICOs currently hitting the market, what are the key points an investor should pay attention to before "pulling the trigger".
Please share you recent experience. Thank you! 

[trumper]

You should look at whether the project really need a token, what is the economic function of token and also look at team members.

[Caesar-Giulius]

The first thing to look at is the white paper. The white paper is a detailed document stating the project objective, what is the project trying to solve, find raising information and etc.

I will look out for project that is trying to solve a problem in the economy, whether it is able to disrupt the market and how it plan to solve the problems.

[Weis]

Thank you for reply trumper and Caesar-Giulius.
How about projects with high caps? Do you believe the projects with the high caps are more risky and may turn investors away?

[MoonIsBlue]

Key points to consider:

- In theory allot is possible, is it all talk or can it actually be practically implemented?
- How much hype is there? Big caps that get saturated also means high numbers of investors which can seriously tamper with any potential profits. Favorably you want hype in the
  other direction. So not from investors saying how amazing and great everything is and how they're walking on rose peddles.
- Can the team handle what they vision?
- Is there actual demand? Social platforms, privacy idealism.. sure sounds great. But talking to the average individual telling them the USA spies on them. Google, Facebook, Twitter
  make huge profits of them. THEY DONT CARE!!!!!! PEOPLE DON'T CARE! People are generally uncaring, they prefer convienence over rights.
- Are there partnerships?
- Should I not keep my money in bitcoin, can I really profit from this ICO when Bitcoin might aswell go up. Leaving you with less worth for your sats and possible further losses.
- Is it a long term hold? If it isn't a longterm hold; I'm always out!

[Joe-Niner]

First thing you should do is figure out if it's a scam or not. Who are the people behind it, research them thoroughly.  Then go do the other stuff of white papers and use cases etc.

[Willitivity]

Before investing in any ICO, I have to check a couple of things.
- Value of coin and plan for future increase in value.
- Purpose of the token.
- The people involved in the project.
- Future plans.
- Whitepaper and roadmap for the project.

[tokencorgi]

1. Web content and quality
2. Whitepaper content
3. Team profile and social media link
4. Advisor
5. Escrow
6. Ideas and implementation plan

My target list in the coming 4 weeks are:
1. Quantstamp - security
2. MindsportsIO - chess,poker,go
3. Dmarket - gamers
4. Enjin - gamers

[Agozyen]

Dive Deep into the project website.  Verify that the 'team' members have active current social media profiles like Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter and so on.  Scroll through their post histories too to see how far back they go.  Look for misspellings and dead links on the website.  Make sure that they are active in Slack/Telegram/Discord as well.  Engage them and see if they respond.  If their profiles are loaded with what look like stock photos of impossibly good looking people and the accounts were all created within the last month, it's a scam.



Ox Fina (oxfina.com) is an example of a scam ICO.   No last names of the team members, no photos either.  Dead links and a couple misspellings.  They disappeared from social media the day the tokens were released, currently only tradeable on Cryptopia.

[naidray]

Hello to all forum members!
With so many ICOs currently hitting the market, what are the key points an investor should pay attention to before "pulling the trigger".
Please share you recent experience. Thank you! 

The team has always been my first consideration before even thinking of checking other things. That is what I always look out for first on the website and then do my findings further on linkedin and any other media. Only if I am rest assured that my fund is in the right hands, then is when I will consider reading more about the project. Doing a quick good research on the team in the past has always saved me time and energy on studying what the project is all about.

[krypt0n1]

All good points mentioned above. Definitely always read the white paper for a project you are investing in.

Also, in addition to looking at the market cap, look at how much of the total coin/token supply is going to be sold during a pre-sale. If it's too large of a proportion, expect a lot of these early investors to dump early when the project hits an exchange.

[Yuuto]

The single key point in my opinion is to see whether or not they are serving a broad enough market for it to succeed on a grand scale. There are now many ICOs out there that are serving particular niches, however not that many that are actually serving niches that need to change.

ETH, IOTA, coins that got crazy returns for investors are are general-purpose.

Also, do some research. I would never trust somebody random with my money.

[spadormie]

Based on my actual experience. These are the things you need to consider if you wanted to invest on a project and buy their coins in their ico:
1. First things first, know the whitepaper well. Their plans on their project and etc. It is all belong to the whitepaper and this is also a way in checking if they have a shitcoin.
2. See some reviews of the ICO.
3. See the meter on how many people invested on the project.
4. Check if they have an Ann thread here at this forum.

[jostorres]

You should look at whether the project really need a token, what is the economic function of token and also look at team members.

I really like this. Honestly, looking at a project, you will just know outrightly that this sort of project does not even need a token, so why even bother to do a crowdfunding for it? That alone is enough reason to question the authenticity of a project.

However, so many projects are using just about anything to generate funds anyhow these days without actually having the mind of having a real product now or later in the future, leaving the investors to their own fate.

[aoihs00]

I love ICO and always invest into those which fulfill my criteria of qualification. ;-)

My ideal ICO is the one with good capital of investment in terms of marketing, publication, and awareness campaign in the forum. This gives light over the project very profoundly and you can be sure that the project will be success in future time. The more they publish it the more crowd attracts and empty their pockets into these projects. This raises more funds and thus we can just stand over the edge of hill and start counting the money. ;-)

[Taskford]

Before i invest in an ICO i do research about the project if their project is good for the world or to the field that they are trying to get into and if their team is good and if the members of the team are not amateur and if they have a good background in their position. Those are the things that i look for a coin and i think that is the basics to do look for an ICO.

[Moz90]

whitepaper, road map, prototype?, team, market cap (room to grow?)

[BTCMILLIONAIRE]

I don't think this should be discussed in public, since it will give scammers more information to work with. Smart investors won't really care, since they do their due diligence properly and aren't influenced by empty bullshit. But the vast majority of people will get screwed even harder in the long run if scammers get smarter.

So share your experiences with care.

[thepo1m]

There are alot of projects in the space now, and you should look before you jump here because most of them will fail, what they do is to spent money they are supoose to spend developing thei platform on marketing and end up with nothing for investors. Valuation is aslo key here, recent example is Tezo ICO

[BTCMILLIONAIRE]

Valuation is aslo key here, recent example is Tezo ICO

It's always funny seeing an ICO that raised far more money than the potential value that could be created from it.