The world has been witnessing the rapid spread of tech-entrepreneurship around different corners of the globe. A combination of infrastructure development, such as cloud computing, mobile software development, and easy-to-use tools have significantly accelerated the rise of software startups by reducing the cost of doing it. Besides, increasing number of accelerators, incubators and advisors provide the “know-how” of doing a startup, contribute to a growing number of software startups. Moreover, they also enable new ways of starting up software business, such as fund crowdsourcing, global startups, etc..

The landscape of software startups is extremely dynamic, unpredictable and even chaotic. The competition is high. About 90% of the startups end up as failure. Success is accidental. To make sense in such a chaotic environment, software entrepreneurs need to act quickly, fail fast and in an economic way, and learn from the failure. The emergence of “Lean Startup” methodology has been readily accepted as the natural fit for the needs of software startups. It advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses the feedback to evolve them much faster than before. The effectiveness of Lean startup, however, is not yet empirically validated.

Many high-tech startups are still experiencing problems of lacking systematic methodologies on business, product, team and market development. Without scientific foundation, it is hard to explain, to learn from startup failures and to repeat successes. The question is how to extract and synthesize knowledge from software startups, and contribute a guideline to increase entrepreneurial success rates.

The workshop intends to bring together the technological, methodological and operational perspectives on software startups. The aim of the workshop is to gather industrial and academic minds together to explore the potentials and synergies underlying these perspectives. As a result of the session, we should have a clearer understanding on how they shape the future of software startups.

To this end, we encourage people who are working on or interested in the area of software startups to submit their original research studies or their industrial experiences regarding the abovementioned perspectives. Due to the emerging and nascent nature of these topics, conceptual or opinion papers with original insights are also welcome. The topics listed below are only suggestive and serves to solicit more interesting related topics:

Failure (or success) stories of software startups
Impact of new technological trends on software startups
Lean startup concepts and their implication to software business
Application of lean startup approach
Customer/Consumer Development
Underlying theories/principles for software startups
Software Requirement engineering in software startups
Agile approaches in software startups
Marketing practices in software startups
Practices of user involvement in software startups
Challenges and opportunities in financing software startups
Each submission will be reviewed by three external expert reviewers. The accepted papers will be included in the main conference proceedings.