  To bring their innovative ideas to market, those embarking in new ventures
have to raise money, and, to do so, they have often resorted to banks and
venture capitalists. Nowadays, they have an additional option: that of
crowdfunding. The name refers to the idea that funds come from a network of
people on the Internet who are passionate about supporting others' projects.
One of the most popular crowdfunding sites is Kickstarter. In it, creators post
descriptions of their projects and advertise them on social media sites (mainly
Twitter), while investors look for projects to support. The most common reason
for project failure is the inability of founders to connect with a sufficient
number of investors, and that is mainly because hitherto there has not been any
automatic way of matching creators and investors. We thus set out to propose
different ways of recommending investors found on Twitter for specific
Kickstarter projects. We do so by conducting hypothesis-driven analyses of
pledging behavior and translate the corresponding findings into different
recommendation strategies. The best strategy achieves, on average, 84% of
accuracy in predicting a list of potential investors' Twitter accounts for any
given project. Our findings also produced key insights about the whys and
wherefores of investors deciding to support innovative efforts.
