— Team, A good team can win with a non perfect product, a bad team needs a perfect product to win.

A winning team has experience of running companies at a higher level then group leader, and look out for CV pimping, work for 3 months at for example PayPal and then call themselves ex-PayPal. The winning team has also worked together on other projects, so that they trust each other, and can support the project to become successful.

— Product, What value do the product bring.

The Value Calculation is one of the most important things to evaluate, do the product have a real value or is it focusing on a temporary hype, as the problem with hype is that there are going to be thousands of other projects working to solve the same problem and there approaching the same customers,

— If the product is a Coin. What benefits over Bitcoin and other coins do it have?

Most new coins are really just clones of an other coin with an other name and a tweak or two, like changing the block size and the mining hash, so for a new Coin to become big it needs to add something new, not tweak something that exists.

— If there is a utility Token, is it needed.

The amount of zombie tokens on the exchanges is crazy, and it looks like there is no end to the flow of new listings of tokens that have no reason to exist and that are doomed to die as no one uses the utilites, the hype of Blockchain and decentralized technology made projects add those technologies where it made no sense, to be able to release a token. So evaluate if the Token is needed or if it will become one more Zombie Coin

— Scaleability, Do the product scale with headcount or independently.

Scaling with headcount has so many limitations, but the biggest one is that you can only expand your profits either by raising the price of the product or by hiring more people.

— Repeatable Business, Is the solution needed more then once? Think of google search.

A business that is not repeatable needs to have huge scale, think construction and shipbuilding, as you need to make your profits on that one thing you are selling it needs scale.

— Customer Profile, Who will be using this product, for whom is it developed

Could you see your self using this product, or your friends, can you see a use case where you think you would know whom will be the customer.

— Reach, How will the Customers be reached.

It is easy to burn your whole budget on trying to reach the customers, take the App Store, when the iPhone was released you could pretty much just upload your app and someone would buy it, now you need to pay $4 just to get someone to download a free app, so you have spent $4 to reach the customer before you have any revenue and if this is a ad model game you need to retain that customer to start making money over time.

— Market size, remember to not look market size until last in your evaluation

As if any of the earlier parts in this list is not satisfied the market size don’t matter as the product will not become a winner.

— Never invest more then what you can lose,

And be patient, normal startup investments take about 4 – 7 years to come to fruition, I know that the Crypto investment cycle is shorter then that but still be patient and follow the projects blog and support their activities.