Abstract
Software startups play a critical role in driving innovation and boosting the economy. However, building these distinguished companies is extremely challenging and often comes with an alarmingly high failure rate. The failure reasons include but are not limited to, product development issues, premature scaling, cash flow mismanagement, and difficulties in securing investment. The current study aims to explore the role of prioritization of financially related requirements in the success of startups. We performed a multiple-case study with 16 software startups. We primarily collected data through 29 semi-structured interviews with these companies and analyzed data using thematic analysis. Our findings reveal a strong correlation between using financially focused requirements prioritization criteria such as estimated revenue, return on investment, time to value, cost of development, and the probability of startup success. We also demonstrate that successful startups prioritize product features with a solid business case, optimizing for time to value. In contrast, startups that neglect the cost of feature development increase the likelihood of failure. We conclude our study by highlighting the relationship between feature requirements prioritization activities and their impact on the financial metrics of startups, such as burn rate and runway.