Success Factors in Reward based and Equity based Crowdfunding in Finland

Master’s Thesis 
58 
ties - enough to not require the use of crowdfunding platforms, “especially since they 
are quite costly”. 
The lack of viable alternatives seemed to also weigh in the choice of platform. Bjors 
stated, “this was the only option” in regards to choosing Invesdor as Juuri’s platform 
for equity funding. Autolla Nepaliin considered multiple options, but since their fol-
lowers were predominantly Finnish, American platforms were found ill fitting due to 
language and the American checkout system. Having excluded foreign platforms, 
Autolla Nepaliin “did not really have other options than Mesenaatti in Finland” and 
Mesenaatti was deemed too costly and new to be viable. Ambronite also excluded 
platforms from their alternatives. Kickstarter was not viable, since “there were no 
food products on Kickstarter”. Additionally, the requirement for a US social security 
ID and a “strong technology focus” made Kickstarter a non-option for Ambronite. 
Only Suoheimo from Ambronite and Suojanen from EkoRent spoke very positively 
about a platform option. The other entrepreneurs seemed to have chosen their plat-
form by eliminating other alternatives. For Ambronite, the chosen platform was Indi-
egogo, because “it was the first crowdfunding platform, and it was very large and 
included other food products”. This rationale is in line with research stating crowd-
funding decisions are affected by other similar projects 
(Ward and Ramachandran, 
2010)
. Indiegogo also “gave a more competitive fee and good references” for Am-
bronite. EkoRent on the other hand chose Joukon Voima specifically due to their 
smallness and novelty. Using a larger more established platform, EkoRent would have 
been “one project amongst all the others”, whereas with Joukon Voima the platform 
“will give 110% of their time, energy and resources”.