An Empirical Analysis of Success Factors on Crowdfunding: Focusing on Foreign Kickstarter
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Seo Young Soo 
Published: December 2024

Crowdfunding, one of the methods to raise investment funds, has been attracting great attention both at home and abroad.,Above all, it is possible to invest in small amounts, to participate easily anytime and anywhere, and to communicate smoothly with the proposer. This study analyzed the success factors using the project of Kickstarter, the world’s No. 1 crowdfunding site, and tried to predict the success of the project through this. For this purpose, we set up seven independent variables, namely category, target money call, project-making country, fundraising period, fundraising amount, target amount, number of sponsors and two dependent variables, and then performed logistic regression analysis and k-average cluster analysis. The results of logistic regression analysis are summarized as follows.,As a variable affecting the success of project funding, the fundraising period, the amount of fundraising, and the target amount were very significant as in the previous studies, and the number of sponsors was also significant. On the other hand, the target amount currency was not significant except for the British pound. In project-making countries, Asia and others were significant, but unexpectedly, Oceania, North America and the United States did not show significant variables. Most of the categories showed significant results, but not in the three areas of Journalism, Photography, and Publishing. Next, to analyze the characteristics of each cluster, 3 clusters were created using 4 quantity variables. As a result, cluster 1 was distributed appropriately for less than 25 days, cluster 2 was distributed for more than 45 days, and cluster 3 was distributed for more than 25 days and less than 45 days. As a result of confirming the distribution of categorical variables, cluster 1 with the shortest fundraising period was very likely to succeed compared to other clusters. This means that the shorter the fundraising period is, the more likely the funding project will be to succeed. First, in the case of cluster 1, the probability of success was high in the US and UK currencies, and in the category of success in the US and Europe, the probability of success was high in the category of ‘Theater’, ‘Dance’, ‘Comics’, ‘Game’, ‘Film & Video’ and ‘Art’. Second, cluster 3 with medium fundraising period had lower probability of success than cluster 1 while cluster 2 had higher probability of success than cluster 2. The following implications were derived from the results of this study. First, this study has significance in that it has established the foundation to determine the success of the crowdfunding project through the empirical analysis of a single platform. Recently, it is expected that the results of this study will cause sufficient interest to project funding developers and sponsors at the time when studies on the success factors of the crowdfunding project are required in various fields. Second, the analysis results of the success factors of regional projects around the world, which was first attempted in this study, are considered to be highly practical use value for domestic start-ups considering overseas market entry, and especially, it can be said that there is a great academic implication in terms of establishing regional subdivision strategies of online platforms. Third, based on the results of this study, the online platform has drawn strategic implications that it should focus on enhancing synergy and building related infrastructures by activating online word-of-mouth not only inside the community but also outside.