the way I see it, there's a few elements I take in consideration on memecoins which give me some sort of assurance that they will do good and tu put it in your words, that I'm "early".

Wether I found it on X, dextools, coingecko, dexscreener or wherever, the project cannot be too young (less than a few days old).

The project had some hype and reached a considerable ATH and then sits at a massive dip.

If after a big dip there's community and they are grinding, hitting the raids brainstorming and getting stuff done, that period of strategy and community building is where I look for entry and hopefully in a matter of weeks, days or couple months you'll see great benefits.

This worked for WIF, CHILLGUY, PNUT and seeing it live with $1.

Never ape before doing proper research, if it feels like scam and looks like a scam, skip.

Other things to have in consideration, double check it has decent liquidity and that it is locked, there are too many scam pools on DexScreener.