Re-Examining Crowdfunding Success: How the Crowdfunding Goal Moderates the Relationship of Success Factors and Crowdfunding Performance

The factors determining the success of crowdfunding projects is one of the central issues for crowdfunding researchers. Quantitative approaches recognise the number of funds targeted as an important control variable. However, little is known about the impact of the funding goal on other factors that impact crowdfunding success. We hypothesise that the effect of crowdfunding success factors varies contingent on the funding goal level. A dataset of 338 crowdfunding projects from the largest German crowdfunding platform StartNext in the years 2015 to 2016 is analysed by conducting regression analyses controlling for varying funding goal sizes. We use the dependent variables success, the degree of success and the number of project supporters and control whether the effect of independent variables such as comments, updates and social media depend on different funding goals. Our study indicates that the impact of the investigated success factors, in fact, strongly depends on the funding goal levels of crowdfunding projects. By grouping projects into clusters of varying funding goals, we find that the impact of individual success factors changes and that the funding goal plays a moderating role for factors impacting project success. Implications for Central European audience: Many crowdfunding studies focus on the most popular US-based platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. We examined projects on the largest German reward-based crowdfunding platform StartNext. These results help both researchers and future entrepreneurs in Europe to better understand supporter behaviour. We suggest that future entrepreneurs should be aware that factors influencing the success of a crowdfunding project strongly depend on the set funding goal, which should be adequately considered in future crowdfunding research.