I usually don't invest in ICOs that much, simply because there are so many, information is typically scarce or imcomplete, there is no working product and so on. This applies, except if I get a good from someone who knows the team or - even better - I get to meet the team myself.
This just so happened with wysker, one of the first German ICOs, where I met Tobi (CEO) and was able to visit them in their office in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
What is wysker?
wysker is this cute cat-faced shopping app which allows you to quickly browse through and discover items you may be interested in. What quickly means is really hard to explain, but basically you have a button one the app that you drag up, which increases the speed in which new items are shown to up to a dozen or so items per second. If you find that hard to imagine, you should probably watch the material they have on their website or here:
Why an ICO?
Apart from the obvious fundraising they're conducting, the wys token will allow advertisers to pay for visibility, users to get paid for using the app and seeing items. Users can then use the wys tokens they've earned to get discounts at retailers to buy products they love. That way, users can participate in the success of the wysker network, as well. For further information, it's best checking out the whitepaper, e.g. on page 11.
Why I invested
Product concept
While I'm far away form being a shopping junkie and I'm not even sure I would use the wysker app myself, I think there's a huge potential with the "generation Snapchat" (I don't really use Snapchat, either). These are also people who want to discover a vast number of different items in a really short time, and I can totally imagine them being hooked on the playfulness of the app.
Maturity
As opposed to most utility-token ICOs in the space, wysker has a working product I could have a look at. The app isn't launched yet, but will be on January 31st, 2018, right when the token sale starts. Also, the team is currently adding shops to the platform in a ridiculous speed, so there will be plenty of material to discover right at the start.
Press
wysker has been mentioned in so many German newspapers and magazines it's even hard to believe. Apparently, they've either done some great PR work, or they were super lucky, but they had articles in Handelsblatt, FAZ, manager magazin, t3n, and more. The only thing that could top that was Tobi being voted #2 on the watchlist of the top 100 founders and makers by Business Punk! Wow, and congrats btw!
Team
Last, but most importantly, I got to meet a good part of the team, and they're awesome. I'm not writing this because I know them and want to kiss their butts, but because this is of utmost importance for the future success of the company. I get to work with startups a lot, so I can typically tell whether they have what it needs to succeed. wysker have an experienced team, also on the tech side of things, and have all the expertise you need to make a product successful: strategy, product, marketing, software, plus the right attitude.
What can go wrong?
So, why isn't the ICO sold out already if it's all so awesome? Isn't that a bit weird? It is - and I've also been struggling with the reasons why the presale is a bit slow. You can check out the progress on Etherscan as wysker don't publish the figures themselves there are currently two smart contracts for investing, one for larger tickets of 25ETH and above and one for anything else (you get different bonuses on those).
While it's generally beneficial for ivnestors if the ICO doesn't sell out (the remaining tokens will be burned), you obviously want wysker to raise enough capital to make their product successful. So here's why I think there's still quite some road ahead:
They've been affected by the Parity bug and had to restart the pre-sale (all investors keep their tokens, but some raised ETH got lost). So bear with the wysker team, they had already raised over 1,600 ETH before, which doesn't make it look that bad anymore.
Germany is not ICO-land. ICOs in Germany are not the most popular investment vehicles and people are kinda skeptic. How is that, Germany is a rich country? Yes, but we're also conservative, and we quickly get jealous. That's why the media coverage in Germany didn't boost the token sale as much as one would expect.
The price increase of ETH isn't really in wysker's favor. Sounds weird? It's not. It simply means that the price of the tokens has gone up > 6-fold since the start of the pre-sale, drastically changing the economics of the token sale. Of course you could argue that the team could've adjusted the terms, but who would've seen that coming? And the thing with smart contracts is, that they're really hard to change once they are deployed. In addition, giving out cheaper tokens now would obviously piss off existing investors.
Conclusion
In my opinion, wysker is a comparatively low-risk investment, if there at all is something like a "low-risk" in the world of ICOs. However, I think they have the potential to create an awesomely successful product, so I hope they raise enough money to get it there.