Success Factors in Reward based and Equity based Crowdfunding in Finland

9.2.4. Project Type and Rewards 
The interviewed projects came from different industries and markets: Ambronite be-
ing a healthy food based product, EkoRent an environmentally friendly rental car ser-
vice, Autolla Nepaliin a movie about a good cause, and Juuri and Pyynikin 
Käsityöläispanimo a restaurant and a brewery respectively.
None of the projects were held by non-profit organizations, but the movie Autolla 
Nepaliin was not looking to gain profit from its completion. Funding that exceeded 

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Master’s Thesis 
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the target amount was partially spent for charity. Additionally, after the movie became 
a hit, ticket revenues were donated to charity as well. According to Leppänen the 
movie project’s philanthropist nature affected the success of the crowdfunding at least 
to an extent. He said “people follow things that are a) good b) funny or c) something 
you want to associate yourself with”. This is in tune with Belleflamme et al. (2013) 
stating that non-profit entrepreneurs are more likely to reach their target goal. 
Both Pere from Pyynikin Käsityöläispanimo and Bjors from Juuri also believed that 
the nature of their businesses positively affected their crowdfunding. They stated that 
owning a restaurant or a brewery is “sexy” and something people want to associate 
themselves with. According to Bjors some people dream of owning a restaurant and 
were thus more inclined to contribute. Pere went on to say “crowdfunding is easier for 
this kind of industry, because people will rather fund breweries than for example pa-
per mills”. This would imply that the type of industry or business a crowdfunding 
initiative belongs in affects the success of the funding. In accordance with this, the 
Kickstarter statistics stating some categories have better success rates than others 
might be linked to the nature of the category, not only to the size of funding targets in 
said category. Categories such as Music and Dance have better success rates than 
Technology, which might mean that certain industries fare better in crowdfunding. 
The type of compensation given to funders for their contribution has also been found 
to impact crowdfunding success. For equity-based crowdfunding the compensation 
for contributing is equity shares, thus there is no variance in types of rewards. Re-
ward-based crowdfunding however, can utilize a wider selection of compensations. 
Out of the three interviewed reward-based funding projects, one had a product as its 
reward, one had a service and one had a mixture of the two. Ambronite offered its 
products as compensation for contributing and EkoRent offered driving hours as com-
pensation. Ambronite raised over double their target amount, whereas EkoRent raised 
only approximately 35% more than their funding target. These findings are in line 
with earlier research stating reward-based crowdfunding projects tend to attract more 
funding if the compensation for participating is a product instead of a service (Belle-
flamme et al., 2013). Autolla Nepaliin offered both movie tickets and DVDs of the 
movie depending on the size of the contribution. It was a creative project and success-

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