How Should Entrepreneurs Respond to Co-creation Comments to Achieve Crowdfunding Success?

Co-creation activities between entrepreneurs and backers are evident in reward-based crowdfunding. Aside from contributing money, backers can post comments to suggest product improvement ideas before the product is marketed. Studies on how backers’ co-creation in the form of comments influences crowdfunding performance is still under researched. Little is known about how entrepreneurs should respond to co-creation comments. We aim to investigate the impact of different backers' co-creation comments (co-ideation, co-evaluation, and co-design) on crowdfunding performance and whether entrepreneurs’ responses might moderate this effect. Based on a panel dataset of 472 crowdfunding projects with 16,240 observation days, the results show that backers’ co-ideation and co-evaluation comments positively impact the crowdfunding performance but not co-design. Furthermore, reply speed negatively moderates the impact of backers’ co-evaluation on the funding amount. We also found that positive reply sentiment negatively moderates the impact of backers’ co-ideation on the funding amount, but positively moderates the impact on the number of backers. This study contributes theoretically by measuring different co-creation types as previous research mostly considered customer co-creation as a homogenous activity.