Crowdfunding technology projects: The impact of textual characterization on project success

Abstract

The technology sector is one of the most popular sectors for entrepreneurship. This paper investigates the success factors of fundraising in the technology sector. We argue that text elements of the project's description have a significant effect of the project success. We used text mining to extract and analyze 17,733 crowdfunding projects over an 11-year period between 2009 and 2019 from the Kickstarter platform. We identified 28 textual elements and examined whether they affect project success as measured by three different operationalizations. Most of the textual elements were found to have a significant effect on the project's success. The findings provide valuable insights and highlight substantial opportunities for crowdfunding in the context of technology.