One common issue which is always encountered by most entrepreneurs for their initial start-up is the lack of capital. Entrepreneurs traditionally seek additional fund from family, friends, or angel investors. In other cases, they might borrow the capital from the bank. In the modern time, technology has helped extending fundraising possibilities of the entrepreneurs beyond the limit of the traditional ones. Crowdfunding, as defined by the word in itself, is a new way to raise money from a potentially large group of people through the mean of the internet. This new arising phenomena has been the interest of researchers as well as entrepreneurs, yet there is little to know what qualities of founder and project influence the success of a project in a crowdfunding site.
Based on our research model developed by combining two other research models, we hopes to investigate the influences on the success likelihood of a crowdfunding project from two aspects: project factors (such as project description, project period, comments, updates, and funding goal) and founder factors (namely identity disclosure of founder and his experience). The samples of 704 successful crowdfunding projects are collected from Kickstarter which is one of the world most popular crowdfunding platforms.
After conducting multi-regression analysis in SPSS, the result has shown that experiences of a founder in starting up a project have significantly impact on the success of his or her current crowdfunding project. In addition, the result indicates a positive correlation between success of crowdfunding and the qualities found in the project such as number of comments and update. On the other hand, campaign period and funding goal have a negative relationship with success ratio of crowdfunding project. These findings give useful insights for practitioners such as entrepreneurs, backers, site managers and policy makers to realize the benefits of crowdfunding phenomena.