The best example for your topic is AWC (Atomic Wallet Coin) which is a utility token for Atomic Wallet. The Atomic Wallet team never conducted an ICO and still, they were in profit from day one. If you create good products and provide good support you do not need an ICO or IEO.
AWC is listed on IDEX and BINANCE DEX.
I checked the markets for AWC and gross volume is just $200. I don't think we call a coin successful if its real market is not even 0.03 BTC!
Also, wallets and exchanges are completely different area of play. In order to create a successful wallet/exchange based coin, we first have to build a successful wallet/exchanges which is being used by minimum 100K users (that's my personal definition of success for such projects).
Features? Well, at present we have all sort of altcoins. PoS, PoW, privacy coin, anonymous coin, no-fees coin, instant confirmation, unlimited supply, limited supply, ERC-20, independent chain, coin with dapp platform, altcoins today have all kind of features. I don't think investors care about features at all while buying coins.
I still care about this, lets say the new coins more safe and faster than the original source.
Example one of my coins called X-CASH, they using a monero source code for their algo. The transaction was really anonymous, faster and more cheaper than monero, X-CASH got a good ROI. At the beginning of their project, the diff mining get price around 20 Litetoshi and now they reach 120 Litetoshi in the past few weeks ago.
Features are surely the backbone of any cryptocurrency. I don't argue that. But you can't go forward and create a new currency by just adding a few features to existing one. I always advocate the idea that whenever someone thinking to create new currency, he should only execute the idea if the project gonna bring some major improvement to ecosystem, not just how a coin works. For example, Solidity i.e. the language developed along with Ethereum to create smart contracts has several limitations. One of which is that you can't generate random number using this language. Another limitation which is comparatively minor is that you can't create array of strings in Solidity.
Now if I compare these two limitations, former is proving to be a major hurdle as one of the popular use of blockchain is gambling and it isn't possible to create completely fair game with smart contract. But on the other side, it is easy to tackle latter one with some front-end Javascript-based library.
So, if someone solves the problem of RNG and creates a new blockchain/coin, it is understandable. But if someone just improve the chain and provide the capability of adding array of strings and create new blockchain/coin, then I don't think the coin will be successful at all.
~I didn't say these words. Please always try to quote correctly~
BCH its non-airdrop, its a forked you need to hold "Bitcoin" to get BCH.
Airdrop its a free distribution for the coin, but if you want to get BCH you need to hold Bitcoin to your wallet or some exchange who share their snapshot BCH for the customer.