I was wondering, if you can recommend me any rsources to look for investment opportunities in new startups and ICOs. Put your ideas and links in comments. I will certainly upvote each and every of your valuable comments.
All my best stratups and ICO finds were actually offline. I just met guys from ETH at a local meetup, the same happened with IOTA project founders and with several other less famous, but nonetheless profitable investments into ICO.
This way looks traditional, natural and I absolutely recommend it to everyone, who really wants to support local developers, to know and meet the project team face-to-face and to learn about their characters firsthand. You can get a miracle deal at that early stage and make thousands of percent in return. Thought the risks are on you, since there is 99% of your perception and skills, which will determine the investment decision. No advisor will be around, bo third-party due diligence can be done at a reasonable cost.
Talking about finding startups and ICOs from the public domain: for already established ICOs I usually check resources like Crunchbase, Bloomberg, Angel.co, F6S, ICOBench, ICORating and TrackICO.
Crunchbase, Bloomberg , AngelList and F6S together are a traditional way to learn about and research a project. They are not designed to tell you about really interesting new project, but rather to be a marketing platforms and data entry points.
There is basic information, they can help to draw a social graph etc. Not a lot of information you can get with a free access. With the paid access things are becoming better, yet the lack of recent and relevant information is still there fro every platform. Looks like they are using some centralized editorial and moderator team and are very conservative in sharing data and analytics with their users, which is a bottleneck for the data processing and distribution and a problem from the UX perspective.
Talking about ICOs, normally I use simple search is the best in terms of plurality of opinions and diversified data. Never focus on the rates, but rather on the text in reviews - they make much more sense. In the end of the day ICOBench is the only working resource with somehow independent reviews from different experts (and not so experts), approximately 10% of which know, what they are talking about (90% there are mostly rate without any analysis, fact checking or due diligence, what in my opinion makes such ratings useless and I would recommend to disregard every and each of them). Though, 10% is way more, than anywhere else. Telegram groups, "experts" personal resources, media publications and some professional groups are all even more biased and hence less usable for me (unless I know people behind personally and can filter their views and personal agenda from the actual analyses), since there is higher systematic error and corresponding risks and each centrally controlled and moderated resource is by design against the very concept of decentralization and crowd wisdom, which is so natural to blockchain and ICOs.
ICORating has better statistics and somehow working automation for ratings. Although many of their metric make little to no sense in my opinion (such as all social media metrics, if you disregard the ghost account and conversion rates for artificially populated communities, if you disregard bad bounty practices and other poor marketing methods, which may improve metrics for SM, but won't affect sales at all), so I adjust or remove those metrics and recalculate rates. TrackICO also has some useful analytics.
I'm trying not to use any websites with lists of ICOs or some unclear scoring methods behind the rates. The only reason is that those sites by design is to opaque to be trusted, and they do not stand for their prognosis (like many of those websites love to sell ICO high scores for quick fundraising and later (after the caps are reached) simply adjust those scores to less positive, just in case there will be some problem with the project in question later. I've seen it literally with each of such sites and it is an awful and dishonest practice. As much as I do not like the ICOBench rating model, it is at least transparent and all changes there are traceable.