The Community's Impact on Crowdfunding Success

This study contributes towards a better understanding of what leads to crowdfunding success. The research is significant because the restaurant industry faces difficulty finding loans and start-up capital. In addition, this research helps founders understand how and what to communicate with their prospective backers: have a supporter community before starting a funding project and share prior F&B experience. The purpose of this study is to investigate if the introduction of a new concept to a community outperforms traditional restaurant concepts in restaurant crowdfunding. This paper further investigates two moderating effects on the relationship between a new concept and funding success: (1) existing supporter community and (2) prior F&B experience of the founders. To conduct our research, we collected data on 2,431 food-related projects on the Kickstarter.com platform that were created between the years 2010 through 2021. All projects were intended to be concepts established within the United States. A regression analysis was used to observe the relationship between variables. This study found that the newness of a concept does not affect crowdfunding success, but supporter community and prior F&B experience presented different results.