From Buzz to Bucks: How Digital Communities Drive and Challenge Entrepreneurial Success

How Digital Communities Drive and Challenge Entrepreneurial Success

Imagine you’ve just come up with an idea for a new product and decide to launch it on a crowdfunding platform like Indiegogo, hoping the public will help bring your vision to life. But soon you realize how many other campaigns eventually fail, and you start asking yourself what it actually takes to make yours stand out.

How can you make your campaign skyrocket instead of stalling? Should you turn to social media to build buzz? A study recently published in Research Policy provides answers to these questions.

Act I: Campaigns set the stage

The first thing the researchers look at is how entrepreneurs present their campaigns.

Features like the length of the campaign description and the number of updates posted provide detail and context. These elements can help a campaign succeed by making it more informative and persuasive. The researchers find that campaigns with longer descriptions and more updates consistently raise more money.

Think of your campaign description like the opening chapter of a book: it sets expectations, draws a picture of the journey, and lets potential backers understand the risks and opportunities of your endeavor. Each update is like a new page, keeping the story moving and the audience engaged.

Act II: The crowd joins the plot

Once the campaign is live, it doesn’t exist in isolation. Digital communities, for example, on Reddit or the backer community on the crowdfunding website, start interacting with it. More engagement on the crowdfunding platform generally boosts funding. This clearly emerges from the study. The researchers attribute this to the fact that content is typically curated and primarily comes from backers who support the campaign. Reddit discussions, however, are trickier.

Critical posts can be linked to higher funding, especially for smaller campaigns. One possible explanation, suggested by the researchers, is that campaigns that already attract attention are more likely to receive critical posts, so scrutiny may simply reflect visibility rather than directly driving success. But more Reddit comments, especially when they appear late in the campaign or respond to promotional posts, tend to correlate with lower funding outcomes.

Here’s where the “double-edged sword” comes in: digital community engagement can both amplify your success and expose weaknesses in your campaign, depending on timing and context. The story you publish becomes a story the public tells about your campaign.

Discussions can reinforce your narrative – or challenge it – in ways that affect your funding outcomes.

Act III: Confirmation or collapse

The researchers frame this through a simple idea: narratives create expectations and digital communities either confirm or disconfirm them through public discourse. Backers eventually respond by pledging more or by walking away. Digital communities act like curators of credibility and shape how your campaign is perceived, ultimately influencing its success.

Key takeaways for entrepreneurs

1. Details matter: More detailed texts and more frequent updates can help your campaign succeed.

2. Digital communities are powerful, but not all attention is equal, as timing and intent matter: Community engagement – even critical posts – can boost your campaign, but late engagement or engagement with your own promotion posts may backfire.

3. Your campaign exists in a digital ecosystem: The narrative you create interacts with community feedback to shape your credibility and success.

The future of digital entrepreneurship

The study highlights that entrepreneurship in the digital age needs to be considered in an ecosystem, not in isolated spaces. What entrepreneurs publish acts as the authored “novel,” but digital communities, discussion boards, and social media write the sequel. Success depends not only on the content you create but also on how digital communities interpret, discuss, and either amplify or scrutinize it.

For creators, this means crafting a story around their idea that is not just compelling but durable. It must withstand scrutiny and inspire constructive discussion.

In the digital age, entrepreneurial success isn’t just about the story you tell but about the story the digital world writes with you.

This blog post is based on the study: Bade, M. & Reichenbach, F. (2026). Entrepreneurial narratives, digital community discussion, and crowdfunding success. Research Policy, 55 (2), 1-17