Attention, Crowd: We Need Your Money! Start-Ups’ Communicative Appearances on Crowdfunding Platforms

Abstract

Finding a way to finance their own company is one of the first issues of entrepreneurs with an innovative business idea. A new way to tackle this challenge is applying for crowdfunding on new media channels. However, the digital communication with the crowd demands special skills and in turn opens up a new exchange with a global community that enables start-ups to develop new business strategies through communicative relationships and digital media. For a crowdfunding initiative to be successful unknown people in the audience must be convinced of an entrepreneurial idea. Therefore start-ups need to attract attention, explain their idea and strategy and why their project is a better investment compared to other ventures seeking finance. To cope with these communicative demands, entrepreneurs must manage the image of their company in digital media. This paper aims at inductively identifying crucial factors of successful crowd communication in the creative industries. It applies content analysis referring to a sample of 28 movie projects serving as a first approach of investigating this novel field of research. It closely examines the usage of different elements required to present a project on startnext.com, a German platform for creative industry projects.