Abstract
Software startup companies are seen everywhere across the globe. These companies are driving today’s
economy and innovation. However, a significant number of startups fail despite the constantly evolving
and widespread launch. While research provides key practices to increase the odds of success for these
companies, it lacks in providing evidence on how startups reduce uncertainties by utilizing analytics in
their specialized context. This is the research gap that we want to address in our study. The uncertain
nature of software startups makes them good candidates to empower themselves with analytics. We
employ a multi-method research design to answer the research question. In particular, we perform multivocal exploratory studies, multiple-case studies, and a survey study. Our preliminary results, primarily
based on multi-vocal exploratory studies, show an understanding of startups regarding analytics and
identify challenges they face from an analytics perspective. Currently, we are executing multiple-case
studies and in-process of selecting potential cases according to the designed criteria. The future work
includes completing the remaining work on multiple-case studies and corroborating the findings with a
survey study.