Critical success factors throughout the life cycle of information technology start-ups

Information technology start-ups (ITSs) contribute towards the rapid growth of society as well as encourage innovation, create technical jobs, and support the economic and technological development of countries. Despite their importance, however, ITSs have a high failure rate worldwide, making it important to identify the factors that influence their success throughout the life cycle. Moreover, studies of this topic are scarce. This study aims to identify the factors that influence the success of an ITS throughout its development stages to mitigate the risks of failure. We review the critical success factors that affect ITSs and their life cycle stages based on the literature and consider the relationship between these factors and stages. An empirical study is carried out to test the presented hypotheses about the perceptions of 125 CEOs of ITSs in Peru using a descriptive analysis, simple and multiple correspondence analysis, and the Student’s t hypothesis test. Five stages of the life cycle of an ITS are established: seed, early, growth, expansion, and exit. Of the 93 hypotheses tested to assess the influence of 27 critical success factors, 77 are supported. This study proposes an ITS life cycle composed of five stages, defines the critical success factors for each of them, and establishes their influence in all stages.