How to do your own research and write a review for an upcoming NFT project

This is a small template that should help you do your own reasearch on upcoming mints for NFT projects and if you like, write a review for your community or whoever. 

1.
Introduction: Start with a small overview of what the project actually is and what benefits it gives to its holders. A few sentences should be enough for a quick overview. The sentences could consist of:

• 2–4 sentences of the given NFT project, including: what kind of NFT is this project (e.g. Gaming, DAO, DEFI, Art, fashion brands, software(like bots,charting, etc.), Metaverse, etc.)
• mint information (short and direct information about the mint with: mint date, mint time, mint price, mint supply)
• Why is everybody looking forward to it?; What is special about this specific project (to spark the interest of the reader)?

2.
The roadmap: The following step would be to analyse and describe the roadmap of the given project, to give a detailed view of what the project wants to achieve in the first place.

• Do they have no roadmap/a basic roadmap/whitepaper and how detailed is it?
• At what point of the roadmap is the project right now (just started, right in the middle, almost done)
• What does the team include in the roadmap? Do they include every step like setting up discord and twitter in the roadmap OR do they just include the important stuff like what is really planned for the project (e.g. staking, breeding, merch, irl use cases, collaborations, etc.)
• How ambitious is the roadmap and is this doable in a reasonable amount of time (the crypto/nft space moves FAST)

This leads to the next part, the team!

3.
The team: In my opinion one, if not the most important part, the team. Every project needs a good team if they want to become a big name and part of the NFT space.

• How big is the team?
• Do they have widely known people in their team (reputation), for the respective ecosystem or in crypto in general?
• Job references of the team (the lead/leaders, developer, marketing, mods, community manager, etc.), to see if the team is capable of delivering the roadmap that is promised (if best, overdeliver)
• Is the team doxxed?
• How is the team behaving, are they friendly, helpful and communicate or are they not communicating at all?

4.
Marketing: Marketing plays also an important role in how the project evolves and specifically how the mint goes.

• Twitter and discord statistics and activity
• Do they have more exposure (for e.g. Instagram, medium article, etc.)
• What kind of marketing are they doing (paid promotions, natural follower growth, any clever marketing technique, WL giveaways, etc.)

5.
Design: Design is important for a lot of people, as some might buy a certain NFT just for the art and sick artwork gets more attention by itself I would say. But also how much time and effort was put in the NFT and also the website.

• Does the design of the projects get a lot of attention?
• Is it something new or copied from anywhere?
• Something that resonates with people and can be scaled well?
• Number of and detail in the traits

6.
Discord structure: Say a few points about the structure of the discord, as discord is the main way of retrieving news and communicating with the community.

• How organized is the discord (how many channels, how is the structure of the these)
• Is the team active in the discord (daily communication, participation in events and games, etc.)
• How often do they make announcements and what do they announce? (Is this really important stuff OR rather irrelevant)
• Do they have enough mods to help answer questions? (Do they have mods for every time zone or are they focused on one timezone specific)

7.
The mint: The mint is what every person in the community is looking forward to, may it be for getting the utility of a project, just the art to use as a pfp or to flip for profits, etc.. In a review there needs to be a detailed overview about everything regarding the mint.

• What kind of mint (e.g. whitelist, raffle, pure public, etc.)
• Mint price (to low, to high, possible comparison to other projects)
• Supply (tiny,small,medium,large,giant)
• Are there any DAOs getting whitelist spots (if there is one) and how easy/hard are they to get?
• Are they trying to onboard new people into the ecosystem or giving more value to already big players/influencers (not to pick on big individuals, they earned being big, but a mint distribution should be fair)

8.
Biggest concerns/red flags: You should always look at the bright and dark sides of projects. This template is not only for praising upcoming projects, but also for highlighting the things that are not going well. Still, don´t just FUD the project if you are not giving any reason to do so. If there are no or only little critical points, you can tell that in here as well.

• Do the creators of the project have connections to any kind of rug pull?
• If they are not certified through any doxxing or rug protection kind of service, mention it.
• Whatever seems suspicious to you.

9.
Comments: Write whatever else comes to your mind that has not been mentioned earlier in the review or needs another mention.

10.
Price prediction: A possible price forecast could find a place here, although I don't like to do that, because it would set an expectation and probably a lot of negative comments, if the price goes into another direction. Also this would indicate some kind of financial advice and that is not what we are doing publicly, right?

11.
Summary: Write a few closing sentences, similar to the introduction where you summarize your research. Points you could mention here:

• Most exciting part about the project
• Most disappointing part about the project

A few finishing words. This is just a template for people looking to do their own research and have no idea where to start. You can add or delete categories or single points of this, use it as you like. Remember, however, that everyone has different expectations and reasons for a mint, so a review is ALWAYS part of subjective nature.

Therefore have a good day and enjoy your research.
Niklas