Success Factors in Reward based and Equity based Crowdfunding in Finland

Master’s Thesis 
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accounts. Similarly, EkoRent, Juuri and Pyynikin Käsityöläispanimo are very local 
businesses, with local customer bases. Consequently, their funders were also mostly 
local. EkoRent pre-sold driving hours to contributors, thus enticing local people to 
fund the project. This was also done to validate the idea within the customer base. 
Juuri and Pyynikin Käsityöläispanimo on the other hand sold equity, which in itself is 
not geographically tied. However, most of the investors came from Finland. Accord-
ing to Bjors a small amount of Juuri’s funders were foreign, but he made no attempts 
to market the crowdfunding opportunity abroad and assumed funders found the pro-
ject through Invesdor. 
Contrary to the others, Ambronite had a large amount of foreign funders. According 
to Suoheimo “over 50% of funders were from the US”. Ambronite spent time fine-
tuning their Indiegogo site, which due to the platform’s US origin was visible to a 
global audience. Suoheimo believed social media activity was not a key channel for 
Ambronite, since the team’s personal updates did not reach too far outside of their 
personal Helsinki and Aalto University based network. Since the Ambronite team 
focused on building a network of beta users and advocates that were ready to fund 
their project, they were able to launch their campaign with a significant amount of 
funders. These funders were people close to the entrepreneurs. Ambronite attracted 
capital from more distant funders after these initial supporters. This is in accordance 
with research by Agrawal et al. (2015) claiming more distant funders rely on the in-
formation revealed by early funders to make their funding decisions. 
From these findings, it would seem geography does not hinder the success of crowd-
funding projects. However, very location based businesses do not seem to attract 
funding from distant sources. Thus, geography does not appear to affect crowdfunding 
success, but affects the diversity of funding sources in some cases.