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Top1. Introduction
The astounding growth of software startups is a result of the startup of new markets, freely accessible technologies, and venture finance (Zielske & Held, 2021; Shanbhag & Pardede, 2022). In the United States, more than 4,000 new firms open each month, creating 20% of the country's new jobs (Ghezzi, 2019). However, 60% of businesses fail because of high business risks, lost market opportunities, a lack of a formalized business strategy, and the supply of goods that have little to no commercial or market value (Melegati et al., 2019). Startups are newly founded companies with little to no history that struggle with significant market and technology volatility (Giardino et al., 2014; Unterkalmsteiner et al., 2016).
Many researchers on software startups have emphasized “innovation” as a differentiating trait of businesses in the literature on software engineering (Ghezzi, 2019). They also mentioned that the lack of IT and other resources for software startups was a key problem that impacted how businesses addressed their target market and how they made use of their skilled labour, tools, and technology, as well as software development processes (Klotins et al., 2021; Kencanasari & Dhewanto, 2022). Software startups, in the opinion of these experts, are businesses that create software products with the goals of reducing costs, meeting consumer demands, and hastening time to market. (Klotins et al., 2021; Parthasarathy & Daneva, 2021). Notably, software startup companies are known for their potential and ability to deliver software solutions to customers as quickly as possible. In the context of a startup, customers typically set the standards, thus engineers must be adaptable right away (Giardino et al., 2014).
As a result, by addressing customer needs, software customization is essential to the successful creation and implementation of software products by startups (Ali et al. 2019). It is difficult for startups with minimal IT resources and staff to implement software changes and fulfill client demands (Parthasarathy & Daneva, 2021). We evaluate and illustrate the level of excessive software modification that results in a low customer satisfaction index or a high number of testing errors during implementation, resulting in the label “failure” for these projects, using actual evidence from startup software projects. For startups, it's crucial to implement their minimally customised, pre-built software solutions. Software modification is a risky but necessary effort that businesses must undertake to create a customer-specific software solution (Zielske & Held, 2021). Hence, startups should make sure to change their software before deploying it or keeping it up to date, so that it doesn't hurt the project.