Phase Dependency of Success Factors in Startups

The purpose of this article is to analyze the specific success factors of start-ups and to examine their phase dependency. Based on a literature study, 13 start-up-specific success factors from three categories (founders, situational occurrence, strategy) are identified and examined for their influence and phase dependency. For this purpose, 54 employees of successful german start-ups are asked how strongly they assess the influence of the respective success factor and in which phase (pre-foundation, foundation, growth) it has the strongest effect. The results show that the hypotheses derived from the theory are confirmed to a very large extent by the study.