What Drives Reward-based Crowdfunding Dynamics? Speed of Funding in Reward-based Crowdfunding Dynamics: Evidence from Kickstarter

Abstract

Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs to receive funding for their for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures from a large number of individuals, namely the “crowd”. While extant research devoted attention towards funding success, it somehow neglected the relevance about how fast such success is achieved. By using data from a sample of 500 projects, this thesis will shed new light on the importance of the founders’ actions on the ability to drive the speed of funding and it will offer a description of the driving factors among different projects. The setting of this paper is reward- based crowdfunding, where founders usually give the final product in its earliest version in exchange for the financial pledge, and this work will study the Kickstarter platform, considered one of the best crowdfunding platforms currently available. The results suggest that speed of funding is driven by peculiarity of the project and founders’ characteristics, and distinctive team capabilities. In particular, the projected sum of money required and the right campaign length, the team composition with previous experience among founders, and finally the importance of their network size, together with communication and marketing tools makes the project much faster reaching success. Finally, this paper will outline a supplementary analysis and it will investigate how the considered variables differ among project categories.