While most people who are new to cryptocurrency think it's all about Bitcoin they couldn't be more wrong. Coinmarketcap lists over 1,500 cryptocurrencies, and if you look to the far reaches of places like bitcointalk you'll likely find new ones popping up every week that are not even listed there yet. This leaves what's called the "dilemma of choice" where too many options becomes confusing or gives you buyer's remorse. How then do we sort through all of this noise to find our investments? How do you find a coin that has not yet reached its full potential but has the ability to become a great investment?
Analysis Websites and aggregators
As always, you should do your own research, and you should take any financial advice you find with a grain of salt, but this can be a great way to find out about new investments. Often times these sites will offer a cryptocurrency investment analysis that can help you quickly learn about what makes certain features about an investment special. You should use these types of sites to quickly gain information while forming your own opinion. Often times this is a quick way to digest a coin's features or to find out about potential concerns or competitors. For example, is this coin the best player in the space? Do they have a team and a marketing budget capable of reaching their goals? Is the supply too large to easily achieve the price point you're looking to get for this coin?
Many times these sites will also be a great resource for links that may be hard to find for a coin that you should want to look at more in depth. This will include the ability to monitor social media or trend pages to see how much a project is being talked about which can be very helpful in determining their marketing presence. Sometimes these sites will even list big upcoming news or releases that have to do with a certain coin. If you can catch one of these before other people get a whiff of it then it can be a great time to buy. Unfortunately, not all coins have great SEO for their pages, and some of the information that's relevant to your decision could be buried in the results. An aggregator often makes your job easier by putting all of this information in one place.
Smaller Exchanges
Getting a coin listed on a big exchange like Bittrex or Poloniex is tough. Most coins which are just starting out have to go for a smaller exchange listing that's cheaper and easier to obtain first. For that reason you can often find some great coins that have not yet reached their full potential on these smaller exchanges. Many times way before they are even listed on Coin Market Cap!
This method takes a lot of work, but you can find some real gems if you check out some of these lesser exchanges. I like to sort by the cheapest coins, and then work my way up. Visit each coin's website and social media pages to evaluate their potential. It's possible to pick up very cheap coins this way to hold for later once they develop. Even getting listed on a higher volume exchange can greatly effect a coin's price and appearance to other investors. Many holders made a lot of money simply by being the early bird.
One note I will make is that some of these exchanges are unfortunately not so great. Sometimes they are run poorly or they have limited resources. For that reason you should never keep coins you buy here! Always download the official wallet or a multi-coin wallet for which you hold the private key. If you don't and the exchange vanishes overnight you will most likely never get back your coins. Be careful where you store your investments.
Bitcoin Talk Forums
Bitcointalk forums are where almost all baby coins are hatched. If you want to snag coins here you'll need to be vigilant, but if you don't mind hanging out here this is where you can snag new investments basically from their birth. Pretty much every project, even ICOs, create an announcement thread here. Why? It's because this is one of the oldest places on the web to talk about cryptocurrency related projects. Due to the large amount of investors that hang around here most coins make it a priority to keep their thread updated and hopefully pushed to the top of the altcoins section.
The filtering leaves much to be desired though so you'll just have to skim the topic titles or you can choose to be notified when new topics are created in certain boards to save some time. However, you may miss some opportunities this way. If you're interested in a coin then bypass anything with "ICO" in the title. Typically I do this as I don't like the risk associated with these projects most of the time until they are more established. This also helps if you're looking for something you can mine since an ICO will not fit the bill. After that the only thing left to do is to carefully inspect each project. It's typically easy to see which ones people are excited about since they will stick to the top, but don't discount some that are slower. They could be hidden gems.
Check Reddit, Twitter and Discord
Not all coins are active on every social media platform, but these three seem to be the best ones for me. These are usually the ones I check first to see which coins have an active community, and which ones do not. While I love Discord sometimes I feel that an active Reddit sub is more appealing than any other profile. Simply because Reddit is very public, and if their sub is empty it can look like nobody is holding the coin which can scare off new investors. In addition, Google loves Reddit, and every thread will be indexed which ups the presence of the coin in question in search results when people start seeking information about the coin.
Reddit and Twitter are also good places to learn about new coins. While it's important to judge for yourself there's nothing wrong with getting a tip from a fellow crypto enthusiast. Just make sure you can judge for yourself whether or not a coin is on the right track, and you aren't just listening to someone talking up their investment. However, if you check it out, and it ticks all your boxes then there's nothing wrong with sharing the wealth so to speak.