What and When to Post Comments? The Impact of Co-creation Comments on Reward-based Crowdfunding Success

Reward-based crowdfunding is one of the most potential media for co-creation activities where various types of co-creation occur in the form of a dialogue between backers and project initiators. Backers can post comments to suggest product improvement ideas before it is mass-produced. Nevertheless, research on how backers’ co-creation activity, in the form of comments, influences crowdfunding success is still scant. This research aims to investigate the impact of backers' co-creation comments (co-ideation, co-evaluation, and co-design) on crowdfunding performance. The present study also investigates whether the time to post the co-creation comments might moderate this effect. We used a panel dataset consisting of 472 reward-based crowdfunding projects with 16,240 observation days. The results show that backers’ co-ideation and co-evaluation comments can lead to a higher number of backers. Furthermore, the impact of co-ideation and co-evaluation are higher for cocreation comments that are made long before the project reach the deadline. We found no effect of codesign on the number of backers. This study is one of the first to empirically examine, through objective measurement, how different co-creation types affect reward-based crowdfunding success.