1.project team There will always be a very large community behind a potential project to promote the success of the project.
2.white paper Through the white paper, you can learn about many project parties' data, such as transaction volume, currency holding addresses, and the amount of funds in the mining pool.
3.Exchange listing Many newly-listed tokens will be used on unheard of cryptocurrency exchanges with very low trading volume. If it is listed on Binance, it may be the most anticipated of all projects.
The second point you mentioned regarding the white paper is definitely not a reliable one to judge whether a project is worth investing. It serves as a very rough orientation as to whether you like the direction the project is supposed to once take, the vision. I guess 950 out of 1000 white papers during the ICO mania back in the days have never even been put to practice by 10% of what was written down in those papers. Some of the projects even only got to launch their mainnet and it was game over...