مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

۱٫ Crowdfunding: From creative projects to a commercial launch platform

platform Eric Migicovsky created the Pebble smartwatch, which perpetually remained on because it was made of e-paper and had a battery life of up to 10 days. While he was able to raise some funds for its development through a business incubator, he failed to raise sufficient venture capital. Migicovsky then turned his hopes to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter (Netburn, 2012). The Pebble campaign launched in April 2012 with an initial fundraising target of $100,000. Backers could pay $115 to preorder a Pebble watch, which would later retail for $150. Pebble reached its funding goal within 2 hours and went on to raise $10.3 million with almost 70,000 individual pledges (Newman, 2012). From a venture capital finance perspective, the Pebble’s appeal to funders on Kickstarter made it one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever. Pebble was also a massive marketing triumph as it went on to become a major consumer brand and sold over a million smartwatches by the end of 2014 (Seifert, 2015).

The Pebble Kickstarter campaign often is used to illustrate the power of crowdfunding as a source of financing for entrepreneurs who do not have access to other sources. Crowdfunding allows founders to seek financing by attracting relatively small contributions from a large number of individuals using the internet (Mollick, 2014). There are many crowdfunding websites, ranging from large sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Gofundme to niche websites such as Teespring (t-shirt crowdfunding), DonorChoose.org (charity fundraising), and Patreon (fundraising for online content creators). In 2015, an industry report by Massolution predicted that the annual amount of crowdfunding would soon reach $34 billion, surpassing venture capital (Barnett, 2015). The crowdfunding phenomenon also started a wave of academic research on various phenomena, including its dynamics and economics (Agrawal, Catalini, & Goldfarb, 2014; Mollick, 2014), key success factors for entrepreneurs (Belleflamme, Lambert, & Schweinbacher, 2014; Etter, Grossglauser, & Thiran, 2013), and the motivations of project backers (Gerber & Hui, 2013).

If the original Pebble campaign showcased the potential of crowdfunding, it was success of the second campaign that indicated how crowdfunding might develop in the future. In February 2015, Pebble launched an initiative for its new model, the Pebble Time. This second campaign reached its fundraising goal of $500,000 in only 17 minutes. By the end of the campaign, Pebble had raised $20.3 million from more than 75,000 backers (Lapowsky, 2015). Although Pebble CEO Migicovsky averred that the company’s return to Kickstarter was driven by the desire to ‘‘work directly with you, the community that got us here’’ (Lapowsky, 2015), whether the firm really needed crowdfunding the second time around is questionable. By the end of 2014, Pebble had sold over a million smartwatches (Seifert, 2015), which were then readily available at major retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon. The company and its brand had been well established. Even if Pebble Technology Corporation lacked readily available capital to develop a new smartwatch model, it is unlikely that it would have had problems obtaining funding elsewhere. Venture capital and public stock issues would likely have been attracted to the fact that Pebble was now a leading brand in the smartwatch space, with a successful offering and a large fan base.