There’s a lot to be consider in finding an altcoin with potential. The purpose of the whole project, the function that they will deliver. The roadmap shows what we’ll supposed to expect in the run and the project team behind.
But those roadmaps shown by them are not always what their true intentions are, I can tell you from my experience that I have been often blown away by great greats and some decent whitepapers and amazing roadmaps but what actually happens once they get their money raised is basically they hesitate to pay and get the work done. They would just pay a small exchange to list their coins and never care about what happens with their project anymore. When someone tries to get in touch either the CEO/CTO are too busy to reply or they will just tell you, we are working on the project and will update soon.
there used to be a token named coinstarter which I had high hopes but they never delivered as much as the expectations were, they were decent but the hype and the marketing they did was way too high as compared to what they delivered.
I have almost no faith in altcoins made now a days specially the ICOs because they are just scams overall.