Abstract
Software 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.