آنالیز سرمایه گذاری جمعی مبتنی بر پاداش به عنوان منبع مالی برای استارت آپ ها و کسب و کار های کوچک Does the crowd mean business? An analysis of rewards-based crowdfunding as a source of finance for start-ups and small businesses

1. Introduction Start-ups and small businesses represent a hub for innovation and growth in many economies (Beck and Demirgüç-Kunt, 2008; Agénor et al., 2014; Brancati, 2015). One of the most commonly cited obstacles for start-ups and small businesses is raising sufficient funding to finance their business plans and exploit growth and investment opportunities (Kortum and Lerner, 2000; Gompers and Lerner, 2004). Against this backdrop, a consensus has started to emerge among practitioners and academics that reward-based crowdfunding represents a crucial new source of entrepreneurial finance (Bruton et al., 2015; James, 2014; Mollick, 2014; among others). Given these expectations, it is surprising that little empirical research has been undertaken into the extent to which reward-based crowdfunding provides financial support to start-ups and small businesses relative to other types of activity, such as creative and cultural projects. This study addresses this deficiency in the literature through the analysis of a comprehensive and unique data set covering around 205,000 reward-based crowdfunding projects across a number of leading platforms in the USA, the UK and Canada. This analysis allows us to address the primary research question of our study: RQ1. How do reward-based crowdfunding campaigns in the “Business” category perform relative to those in other categories? Our analysis shows that, while the overall success rate in reward-based crowdfunding is about 23 per cent, the amounts typically raised by each campaign tend to be relatively trivial in the context of funding for start-ups and small businesses. The mean (median) amount of funding raised is just $4,455 ($315) across all campaigns and $15,120 ($4,320) among those that successfully met their targets. However, the main focus of our analysis is the 9,502 campaigns recorded in the “Business” category, which accounts for 4.6 per cent of the total number of campaigns in our sample. The performance of “Business” campaigns is below average, with only 1 in 25 campaigns in this category successfully achieving their funding target. Compounding this relatively low chance of success, the mean (median) amount raised by business campaigns is shown to be only $10,000 ($5,000).