Exploring the Determinants of Sustainable Digital Startups in a Developing Country: A Qualitative Analysis
Аннотация
Digital startups in emerging economies experience high failure rates because of misaligned growth models and absence of localized sustainability frameworks. The study fills this gap by using a multi-round Delphi method involving domain experts from underrepresented industries like digital healthcare, agriculture, and digital transport. By stating expert consensus, we validate the 33 sustainability factors that are combined to formulate the Sustainable Startup Success Framework (S3F). The framework consists of six fundamental pillars of Founder Factors, Financial Factors, Organizational Factors, Product Factors, Team Factors, Customer Factors organized along four levels. These four levels of framework are: conditions for input, strategic pillars, outcomes, and impact use cases. S3F model transcends theoretical and practical gaps: it is a diagnostic and planning tool for founders, incubators and policymakers. The results highlight working with volatile environment and market requirements of startup world in under developed fields, product timing, recurring revenue, infrastructure skills in developing robust, scalable and SDG driven digital ventures.