Practitioner Views on Analytics for Software Startups: A Preliminary Guide Based on Gray Literature

Abstract

AbstractSoftware startup companies operate under extreme conditions of uncertainty and with limited resources. These innovative companies face constant pressure to find a product-market fit, drive growth, and maintain competitive advantage. The nature of these companies makes them suitable candidates to practice analytics. Analytics can help software startups to use data in several ways e.g. make data-informed decisions, grow business, and provide value to users. However, startup founders tend to put off practicing analytics for a later time. In addition, the existing literature on startups does not provide paved paths to establish analytics in the context of startups. Therefore, to this end, we perform a gray literature review, to understand what startup practitioners say about analytics benefits and how can startups define analytics within their particular context. We utilized YouTube as a source of our data. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria to 400 videos, we ended up analyzing 16 potentially relevant videos. We used thematic synthesis as well as quasi-statistics to analyze the data. Our results identify and report ten analytics benefits, and two key analytics practices to set up analytics in these competitive environments.