Improving marketing strategies for software product startup companies in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the current software industry, the failure rate of the software product startup companies is high. The main reason for the above fact is, the software engineering concepts and the marketing strategies were not aligned appropriately. In Sri Lankan context, vast count of software related undergraduates are joined to the software industry annually. While working as software professionals in the software industry, they gain software based experience in practical manner. This causes them to initiate their own software startup with innovative concepts. The innovative concepts are not sufficient for the software product success as there are number of existing competitors are in the industry and the software product needs to be aligned with marketing strategies. Through this dissertation, software product marketing strategies will be identified which leads to select best fit set of marketing strategies for the software products. As per the nature of this study, a qualitative research requires face to face interviews to be conducted as the data or evidence collection method. In order to conduct a data collection interviews, it requires interview questionnaire with direct answered, semi structured and open ended questions. The straightforward answers were given by the respondents, are the key findings and their general perspectives are the explanatory evidence for the collected data. Collected data has been analyzed in a proper method to introduce best fit set of software product marketing strategies for the software products which develop within the Sri Lankan software product startup companies. With the lack of knowledge in software product marketing, the software product startup companies should essential to focus on marketing strategies even if the software product is innovative or non-innovative. This study identifies the marketing strategies in theoretical and practical perspective. From the set of marketing strategies, the study identifies the best fit set of marketing strategies for the considered software product types through the data analysis of this research for the software product startup companies in Sri Lanka. As the significance of this dissertation, software product startup companies have to gain a clear picture of marketing strategies which requires to be defined the marketing boundaries for their software products to direct them to their success.