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JAMR
17,2
262
Received 22 August 2019
Revised 14 October 2019
Accepted 14 October 2019
Journal of Advances in
Management Research
Vol. 17 No. 2, 2020
pp. 262-281
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0972-7981
DOI 10.1108/JAMR-08-2019-0164
Analyzing the startup
ecosystem of India: a Twitter
analytics perspective
Shiwangi Singh, Akshay Chauhan and Sanjay Dhir
IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use Twitter analytics for analyzing the startup ecosystem of India.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses descriptive analysis and content analytics techniques of
social media analytics to examine 53,115 tweets from 15 Indian startups across different industries. The study
also employs techniques such as Naïve Bayes Algorithm for sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet allocation
algorithm for topic modeling of Twitter feeds to generate insights for the startup ecosystem in India.
Findings – The Indian startup ecosystem is inclined toward digital technologies, concerned with people,
planet and profit, with resource availability and information as the key to success. The study categorizes the
emotions of tweets as positive, neutral and negative. It was found that the Indian startup ecosystem has more
positive sentiments than negative sentiments. Topic modeling enables the categorization of the identified
keywords into clusters. Also, the study concludes on the note that the future of the Indian startup ecosystem
is Digital India.
Research limitations/implications – The analysis provides a methodology that future researchers can
use to extract relevant information from Twitter to investigate any issue.
Originality/value – Any attempt to analyze the startup ecosystem of India through social media analysis is
limited. This research aims to bridge such a gap and tries to analyze the startup ecosystem of India from the
lens of social media platforms like Twitter.
Keywords Twitter, Social media, Content analysis, Startup ecosystem, Descriptive analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In recent times, the social media platform has been receiving increasing attention from
entrepreneurs across the world (Xiang et al., 2015; Almotairy et al., 2019). It helps in
information diffusion through platforms like Twitter, which results in strengthening the
relationship and improving the brand image (Sindhani et al., 2019). Social media platforms
attract more interest than alternative sources of information among users (Alalwan, 2018;
Simon, Goldberg, and Adini, 2015; Nisar et al., 2018). In particular, the impact of social media
platform on the startup ecosystem is important because it connects various stakeholders of
the ecosystem as well as improves the business performance (Almotairy et al., 2019). It also
impacts how a startup operates and communicates in the community. It acts as an electronic
word-of-mouth system (Bruns and Burgess, 2012; Park et al., 2016).
Given the immense rise in users of social media platforms and subsequent rise in
user-generated content, social media analytics analyzes communication pattern and
behavior in relation to external phenomenon (Hidayat et al., 2019; Garg et al., 2019; Sobti,
2019; Cao et al., 2018; Dlamini and Johnston, 2018; Kaur et al., 2018; Stieglitz et al., 2018;
Gandomi and Haider, 2015), thus investigating trends and patterns (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).
In particular, Twitter is considered to be a gold mine of data which provides a rich source of
information about the business performance and serves as a low-cost marketing medium
(Malhotra et al., 2012). Twitter is a popular medium of communication not only among
people, but governments are also using Twitter to connect with the people (Khan et al., 2014).
Twitter has been used extensively to understand public behaviors and sentiments
(Lakhiwal and Kar, 2016). Recent studies have applied Twitter analytics in contexts like new
product development (Rathore and Ilavarasan, 2020), neural network (Arora and Kansal, 2019),
political disclosure (Grimaldi, 2019) and global climate change (Dahal et al., 2019). However, in Analyzing the
the present start-up ecosystem, attempts to understand the strategies and moves of startups startup
through social media analysis are scant. This research aims to bridge such a gap and tries to ecosystem of
analyze the startup ecosystem in India through the use of Twitter analytics.
The objective of this study is as follows: first, to examine the Twitter content of the India
founder or co-founder of India’s top startup; and second, to analyze the sentiments of the
tweets and derive key insights about the start-up ecosystem of India. 263
The study contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, the study extends
the literature of startup ecosystem by analyzing positive and negative sentiments on
Twitter. Second, the study also makes a methodological contribution to start-up ecosystem
research. Prior studies have analyzed various contexts of start-up ecosystem through the
use of various traditional methodologies (Singh, Sinha, Mukunda Das and Sharma 2019;
Motoyama and Knowlton, 2017; Berger and Kuckertz, 2016; Salamzadeh and Kawamorita
Kesim, 2017; Subrahmanya, 2015; Fraiberg, 2017), particularly, case studies and small-scale
surveys. Third, the study aims to identify the factors/events impacting the startup
ecosystem. Fourth, applying twitter analytics, on a large number of tweets will provide
insights on how the startup ecosystem is perceived across geographies.
The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 2 deals with literature review of the
startup ecosystem and employment of Twitter analytics in various fields. Section 3 explains
various methods and analytics techniques that are employed in research and steps taken by
the researcher in data extraction, cleansing, preparation and analysis. Section 4 highlights
the various insights and results divided into descriptive and content analysis sections that
come out as part of the research. Finally, the researcher concludes by discussing and
summarizing findings from data analysis and specifying the limitations of his research.

2. Literature review
Past research has shown the importance of social media analytics to understand the
perception and to identify the events/factors influencing a brand or product performance
(Park et al., 2016; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). However, most research are focused toward
the customer’s perception toward the brand or product (Michaelidou and Micevski, 2019;
Rose et al., 2019). Very few studies on social media analytics are focused toward the startup
ecosystem. To fill the gap, this study reviews the literature startup ecosystem and recent
Twitter analytics application in various domains.

2.1 Startup ecosystem

Creation of a new venture playsa significant role in the growth and stability of a country
(Berger and Kuckertz, 2016; Naudé, 2010; Wong et al., 2005). It addresses the gap in the
national economic system among countries (Almotairy et al., 2019; Singh, Dhir, Das and
Sharma, 2019). However, the creation of a new venture is not a unilateral process; it is
dependent on the environment in which founders/cofounders of the startup operate. For
example, the Silicon Valley’s success is due to systematic co-operation between founders/
cofounders, employees, business supporters, other businesses, investors and the government
(Saxenian, 1994; Herrmann et al., 2015). These key players make the startup ecosystem(s).
Therefore, the startup ecosystem can be referred to as a socio-economic framework where
different actors collaborate to promote the startup (Acs et al., 2014; Low and Abrahamson,
1997). The key factors of a startup ecosystem are firms, physical infrastructure, network,
incubators, culture, support service and universities (Neck et al., 2004; Singh, Dhir, Das and
Sharma 2019; Roundy et al., 2017; Spigel, 2017; Mason and Brown, 2014).
A robust startup ecosystem reflects a high level of entrepreneurial activity in the
country. However, in the Indian context, a huge growth in the startup segment can be
witnessed in the past five years, i.e. 3,000 startups in 2014 to a projection of 11,000 in 2020
JAMR (NASSCOM, 2015). India has 1,200 new startups including eight unicorns in the year 2018,
17,2 thus, raising the current number to 7,200. However, in this ambivalent news, the bad news
is that seed funding is consistently declining for the startups from $191m to $151m.
A comparative analysis of the startup ecosystem in Bangalore and Gurgaon showed a trend
reversal in terms of preference towards Gurgaon over Bangalore due to ecosystem factors
like infrastructure and connectivity (Pant, 2019). Also, startup funding for Bangalore has
264 started declining since 2017 as opposed to Gurgaon as shown in Figure 1.
According to the Government of India “Make in India” website, India is recognized as the
second-largest startup hub in the world. In a day, around 26 startups are recognized by
DPIIT. Around 18,000+ startups have been recognized by DPIIT till May 2019. The key
success factors of the Indian startup ecosystem are the cost of doing business, proximity to
customers and suppliers, and size of the domestic market ( Joshi and Satyanarayana, 2014).
Sindhani et al. (2019) studied the founders of the top 25 startups of India. They analyzed that
founders involvement in the communication shared on social media platforms significantly
affects their business performance and effectiveness.

2.2 Twitter analytics and its application

Twitter being a goldmine of data is the most preferred way to connect instantly with
customers and policymakers; it is vital to analyze the factors startups are concerned about
and deeper insight into their problems and influencing factors is required. A lot of research
in different fields using Twitter analytics has already been conducted. For example,
businesses use social media analytics to generate deeper views of business, which assists
them in the long-term formulation of strategic plans and make strategic decisions (Arias
et al., 2013). Twitter analytics helps in identifying key trends and behavioral changes in the
society and analysis of topics that people are discussing about using powerful techniques
(Kwak et al., 2010) like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm, Naïve
Bayes sentiment analysis (Liu, 2012) and descriptive analysis techniques.
Twitter analytics is broadly classified into descriptive and content analyses. Descriptive
analysis of tweets is performed simply by analyzing across different metrics like user metrics,
tweet metrics, URL metrics, geographical analysis and follower metrics. Tweet metrics
provides an overview of prominent hashtags and numerical information about the tweets.
Some researchers (Al-Daihani and AlAwadhi, 2015) used it to identify how Twitter is being
used by academic libraries. Tweet metrics enables us to understand and identify the
corresponding topics of trending hashtags being discussed by the startups at the higher level.
Tweets metrics like a number of hashtags being discussed in tweets provide a broad view of
the topic of discussion on Twitter. URL metrics indicates the URL embedded in the tweets by
the users. Geographical analysis reveals drift in the trends from one region to another. It also

Funding
7,000
6,000 6,237
5,000
4,351
4,000
3,000 3,269 3,046
2,790
2,000
1,000 1,262
Figure 1. 902 785
315 583
Year-on-year 0
funding trends of 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
startups in Bangalore Bangalore ($ Million) Gurgaon ($ Million)
and Gurgaon
Source: Times of India
shows the adoption of social media across different geographical regions revealing the Analyzing the
promotional preference in different regions. It can help in performing market research and can startup
thus help in identifying favorable regions for marketing and high ROI (Patino et al., 2012). ecosystem of
Followers’ metrics indicates relative popularity. More the followers, higher is the popularity.
Number of tweets per Twitter handle indicates activeness in the social media space. India
Content analysis focuses on identifying and classifying actual text into various
categories and thus identifies various topics or major themes emerging from tweets. 265
Techniques like sentiment analysis, word cloud analysis, hashtag and frequency analysis,
and word frequency analysis are performed. Sentiment analysis helps to classify the
sentiments as positive, neutral or negative. Word analysis helps to understand the actual
content. Word semantic relationship is established with the help of a hashtag association
(Wang et al., 2014).
Twitter analytics has also been used for evaluation of communication and networking
success using Twitter real-time data feeds across the researcher community (Goodier, 2018).
Though the reliability of content analysis is subject to various questions (Krippendorff,
2004), there are proven statistical techniques to mine Twitter big data (Miller et al., 2014).
Several studies have shown that social media analytics does not reveal the complete picture
(Cresci et al., 2014), but nevertheless, it is an indispensable means of gaining an overview of
underlying insights. Thus, it has been seen that Twitter analytics can be employed in a
number of fields (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).
Various tweet-related studies, like use of geo-tagged microblogs for monitoring social
events, identification of spatial correlation between Twitter networks and network of airline
flights (Takhteyev et al., 2012), GIS-based time-geographic analysis of interactions and
individual activities (Shaw and Yu 2009), and crisis management and social events using
web-enabled geo visual analytics are already being conducted (Crooks et al., 2013), to name a
few. Another famous case is the research on the Internet of Things using the keywords
search on Twitter ( Joseph et al., 2017).
Twitter analytics has also been used for the evaluation of communication and
networking success using Twitter real-time data feeds across the researcher community
(Goodier, 2018). Though the reliability of content analysis is subject to various questions
(Krippendorff, 2004), there are proven statistical techniques to mine Twitter big data (Miller
et al., 2014). Several studies have shown that social media analytics does not reveal the
complete picture (Cresci et al., 2014), but nevertheless, it is an indispensable means of
gaining an overview of underlying insights. Thus, we can see that Twitter analytics has
been employed in a number of fields (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). The top five cited studies on
the application of Twitter analytics in the field of management as published in 2019 is
mentioned in Table I.

S. No. Author(s) Area of application Journal

1 Grover, P; Kar, AK; Dwivedi, YK; Voting preferences Technological Forecasting and
Janssen, M Social Change
2 Arora, A; Bansal, S; Kandpal, C; Social influencer index Journal of Retailing and
Aswani, R; Dwivedi, Y Consumer Services
3 Li, B; Dittmore, S.W; Scott, OKM; Lo, Motivation differences Sport Management Review
WJ; Stokowski, S Table I.
4 Xiong, Y; Cho, M; Boatwright, B Hashtags in social movement Public Relations Review Top cited paper on
organizations the application of
5 Li, X; Xie, Q; Jiang, J; Zhou, Y; Huang, L Emerging technologies trends Technological Forecasting and Twitter analytics
Social Change (published in 2019)
JAMR 3. Methodology
17,2 The study uses Twitter analytics for analyzing the startup ecosystem of India. Twitter is a
stronger source of social media metrics than Facebook, blogs, Google+ and mainstream
media as less than 5 percent research papers are mentioned on these sources in comparison
with Twitter (Díaz-Faes et al., 2019). Twitter data analytics can help identifying new insights
and techniques for superior business performance (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010).
266
3.1 Extraction of tweets
The tweets were extracted using a data-streaming Application Programming Interface (API)
called Tweepy. To collect and archive data, Tweepy library, tool was used. It is a platform
used to collect, analyze and manage data (Wisdom and Gupta, 2016). It helps to fetch all
tweets across the timeline by considering the restrictions posed by Twitter. It captures
tweets sample of 15 Indian startups from different industries (Table II) for analyzing the
startup ecosystem. It also analyzes the tweets posted by their Twitter handlers or their
CEO’s handle from September 2008 to February 2019. It draws conclusions upon tweets of
the 53,000+ tweets posted on Twitter. After extraction of raw tweets, data cleansing is done
using OpenRefine tool by Google. It changes the encoding of tweets to UTF-8 and performs
simple cleansing steps of removal of punctuation/emoji/foreign characters from raw data.

3.2 Tools and techniques

Descriptive analysis focuses on a metric level analysis of various attributes like user, tweets,
URL, location, etc. It is performed by analyzing across different metrics like user metrics

Startup Name Founder/Co-founder Hashtags

Flipkart Sachin Bansal @sachinbansal

Binny Bansal
Kalyan K
Snapdeal Rohit Bansal @1kunalbahl
Kunal Bahl
Chargebee Krish @chargebee
Thiyagarajan T
Kps
Rajaraman Santhanam
Clear Tax Ankit Solanki @cleartax_in
Srivatsan Chari
Archit Gupta
Clear Trip Hrush Bhatt @Cleartrip
Edukart Ishan Gupta @edukartdotcom
Mouthshut Faisal Farooqui @faisalMouthshut
Ixigo Aloke Bajpai @ixigo
Rajnish Kumar
Mahesh Murthy Pinstorm @maheshmurthy
Meesho Vidit Aatrey @meeshoapp
Sanjeev Barnwal
Oyo Rooms Ritesh Agarwal @oyorooms
Price Baba Annkur P Agarwal @Pricebaba
Tirthesh Ganatra
Razor Pay Harshil Mathur @Razorpay
Shashank Kumar
Table II. Ola Vijay Shekhar Sharma @vijayshekhar
Indian startups Zoom Car Greg Moran @ZoomCarIndia
considered for study David Back
indicating higher level view of Twitter users from which the feed has been extracted, Analyzing the
Tweets metrics like number of hashtags, URL metrics, geographical-level analysis and startup
followers’ metrics. ecosystem of
Content analysis focuses on identifying and classifying actual text into various
categories, thus identifying various topics or major themes emerging from tweets. It is India
performed using the Naïve Bayes algorithm to divide tweets into positive, neutral and
negative categories. It provides insight from text-based documents (Pang and Lee, 2008). 267
The classification of documents helps to identify the perception of people’s ID called
sentiment analysis. Naïve Bayes Algorithm for sentiment analysis and LDA algorithm for
topic modeling (Ramyadharshni and Prathiba, 2018) of twitter feeds help to generate
insights for the startup ecosystem in India. Text mining transforms unstructured data into
structured data. Textblob.sentiments library contains NaiveBayesAnalyzer class which
allows us to perform text mining of tweets and derive the common pattern of Tweets, thus
providing an algorithmic view of sentiments of the Tweets about startups in the Indian
startup ecosystem.

3.3 Process
The process of twitter analytics is shown in Figure 2. After performing the extraction of
tweets using Tweepy API and sentiment analysis, such tweets are passed into the LDA
algorithm to measure and identify common themes coming from tweets. The stop word list
is obtained from nltk.corpus library to remove words from the bag of words. After data
cleansing, term dictionary of corpus followed by Document Term Matrix is prepared.
Genism library of Python helps to prepare the LDA Model where the top 10 topics are
identified. Textblob.sentiments library contains NaiveBayesAnalyzer class, which allows us
to perform text mining of tweets and determine the common pattern of Tweets.

4. Findings
4.1 Descriptive analysis
Descriptive analysis provides higher level insights through various metrics calculations like
tweets population providing preliminary information about the sample size of tweets,
Twitter handle analysis indicating Twitter user attributes, retweets counts – providing
insights about retweets made, number of URL shared in tweets indicating web links shared
as part of promotional/informational marketing and geographical-level analysis identifying
focus on the particular geographies ( Joseph et al., 2017).
4.1.1 Tweet metrics. Among 53,115 tweets, the study identifies 3,669 unique hashtags;
12,122 tweets contain hashtags indicating that tweets intersect multiple areas of interests.
The prominent # tags in the tweets are #AIForIndia, #AI, #BigData, #Bitcoin,
#DigitalIndia, #Aadhar, #Brexit, #Budget and #AbHarWishHogiPoori showing that
startups are talking mostly about new technologies like artificial intelligence, big data and
social issues like Brexit, Digital India and Aadhaar related issues and verdicts.
Twitter is also actively being used by ecommerce startups for promotional campaigns in
the form of various hashtags like #AbHarWishHogiPoori, #BigAppShoppingDays,
#BigBillionDays and #BigOffersDay!, created to promote services and business of the
startups. This promotional technique is followed not only by ecommerce startups but also
by startups across different domains like hotel and logistic sector – #AfterhoursAtOYO and

Document Figure 2.
Data Data Descriptive Sentiment Process of
Term
Extraction Cleanising Analysis Analysis Twitter analytics
Matrix
JAMR #AmazingOla. Startups are using all the possible opportunities for social events like Kumbh
17,2 with hashtag #ChaloKumbhWithixigo to promote their business.
Startups are also concerned about environmental issues and are helping the world to
reduce environmental pollution with hashtag #BeatPlasticPollution. Digital payment
solutions are being vehemently supported by startups through #BharatQR. Trending
hashtag #customerservice shows that the startups are keeping customers at the heart of
268 their operations. This analysis of Tweets metrics shows that Indian startups are not only
keen on the adoption of latest technology trends but also are quite responsive on the latest
developments in technology space. It also reveals that startups are influenced by local
government policies like budgetary and tax measures.
4.1.2 User metrics. Among 53,515 tweets, there were 15 unique Twitter handles with
average 3,500+ tweets per startup and 12,737 replies, i.e. approx. 850 replies per startup on
average. This clearly shows that Twitter is an active medium of communication for the
startups. Visibility of each startup can be inferred using the number of retweets received by
each startup. In terms of number of retweets, we can clearly see from Figure 3 that
faisalMouthshut (Online review website startup) is the most retweeted Twitter handle
followed by maheshmurthy (Chief executive officer of digital agency Pinstorm and a veteran
seed fund investor), educartdotcom (an online educational startup) and 1kunalbahl (CEO of
snapdeal – an online market place).
User analysis shows that FaisalMouthshut (CEO of mouthshut.com) is the most popular
startup CEO among Twitter users who retweet most of his tweets as compared to other
startups. Edukartdotcom, 1kunalbahl, maheshmurthy and vijayshekher are other
prominent Twitter handles which receive a large number of retweets. This is not
surprising as mouthshut.com is an online review website founded in 2,000, and is most
popular among Twitter users. Maheshmurthy (CEO of Indian digital agency Pinstorm) is
the next Twitter user having largest number of retweets. Remaining startups like ixigo,
meseshoapp, cleartrip, chargebee, cleartax, Razorpay, etc. from a sample more or less
receive equal number of retweets, which is significantly less in number in comparison to
other startups receiving a large number of retweets.
Another insight revealed from this analysis is that ecommerce, e-payments and online
review-based startups receive the greatest number of retweets in comparison with startups
of other categories. This is easily explainable as the business of these startups heavily
depends upon online subscribers: more retweets are expected for these startups due to their
main focus on online subscribers.
4.1.3 Number of tweets by Twitter handle. The count of tweets per Twitter handle shows
which startup is most active on Twitter. Analysis of Tweets frequency per startup

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company) are most active Twitter users. Thus, number of tweets per Twitter handle helps ecosystem of
us to compare and infer relative level activeness of startups among them. Average number
of tweets per Twitter handle is 2,310 which shows that Twitter being an active medium is India
the preferred medium of communication with customers. Most of the tweets have customer
experience and issue at their hearts; this pattern is evident across the industries. 269
4.1.4 Followers metrics. The popularity of a startup is generally assessed in terms of
numerical strength of its followers as shown in Figure 5. It is generally believed that more
the followers, more popular is the startup. Twitter data analysis shows that Vijay Shekhar
Sharma (CEO of Indian startup Paytm) is followed by a majority of users on Twitters
followed by Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal (an Indian ecommerce startup) and Sachin Bansal of
Flipkart (an Indian ecommerce startup). Mahesh Murty (CEO of Pinrest) also has
comparable number of followers similar to Sachin Bansal. The analysis reveals that
ecommerce-based startups are now utilizing Twitter as the major medium of reaching users
as compared to the other startups.
4.1.5 URL metrics. URL metrics analyses tweets for the presence of hyperlinks to the other
webpages. This study shows that out of more than 53,000 tweets, only 2,063 tweets contain
web links to different tweets. It further shows that less than 1 percent of the tweets contain
the URL. It indicates that the URL is generally not tweeted by the startups in their tweets.

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JAMR One of the reasons for this could be the limit of 140 characters for tweets. This URL analysis
17,2 also reveals that tweets by startups contain shorter URL considering the word limit on Twitter
as opposed to full URLs. By analyzing the tweets with links, the tweets URL can be categorized
into an informative URL and promotional URL. The informative URL redirects the user to an
informational page like enabling small-scale entrepreneurs to sell online, five infrastructure
projects that will transform realty in MMR, and five Simple Tips to Save Tax by Investing in
270 Property, to name a few. Promotional URL provides a link to promote the startup on the social
media like Snapdeal handloom day.
4.1.6 Geographical-level analysis of tweets. Generally, in the Indian startup context,
we find location-based tweets analysis. Figure 6 illustrates that New Delhi based
startups and CEOs are mostly active on Twitter while Chennai-based startups are less
active on Twitter. Bengaluru is fast catching up with Delhi in terms of Twitter adoption.
This could be attributed to the huge multilingual population of Delhi, Bengaluru and
Mumbai with English as common language compared to Chennai tweeting mainly in Tamil.
More than 50 percent of total tweets are coming from New Delhi and Bengaluru based
startups, whereas the contribution of Mumbai and Chennai based startups is 30 and 8
percent, respectively. This clearly shows the preference for Twitter adoption by startups
across different locations.
It is observed that New Delhi has received approximately 15,000 tweets from
startups, whereas Chennai has less than 4,000. This shows a stark difference in terms of
startups numbers and Twitter adoption between the capital Delhi and southernmost state
of India. It shows the need to pay attention toward startup ecosystem in southern India
by the policymakers.

4.2 Content analysis

Content analysis examines the information or content, in written or symbolic format (Neuman,
1997). The content analysis is performed by word frequency count, hashtag analytics, word
cloud, sentiment analysis and topic modeling ( Joseph et al., 2017).
4.2.1 Word frequency. Word frequency analysis (Table III) shows that startups are also
using Twitter to express their views and concerns about government policies, e.g. GST, GOI,
etc. along with acknowledging customer-related issues like refunds, inconvenience, troubles,
etc. Twitter is also a popular medium of keeping their customers aware of new product
launches and helping them with queries regarding their bookings, etc. The most used word in
the tweets of startups are please, GOI, Sorry and thanks which shows that startups mostly
tweet about issues of customers and try to pacify them by reassuring them on a public
platform. It also shows that the Government of India is the next most frequent word used in
tweets of startups indicating that they want to convey their issues to the policymakers
through the medium of Twitter. Table III shows the analysis of word frequency.
4.2.2 Hashtag frequency. Hashtag frequency analysis shows trending topics of discussion
among the startups; 3,669 unique hashtags were found in the tweets. On average, there are

Chennai

Mumbai

Gurugram

New Delhi

Figure 6. Bengaluru
Location-based tweets
0 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 10,000 12,000 14,000 16,000 18,000
Word Frequency Word Frequency
Analyzing the
startup
Please 4,556 Booking 1,450 ecosystem of
India 3,104 GST 1,160
GOI 1,591 Assist 1,001 India
Sorry 1,350 Concern 665
Thank 1,316 Launched 611
Internet 255 Complaint 265 271
India 3,104 Assistance 337
Apologize 196 Digital 262 Table III.
Refund 1,090 Inconvenience 575 Word frequency
Dm 2,072 Budget 337 analysis

0.069 hashtags per tweet. Analysis of hashtag frequency shows that startups are mostly
concerned about #GST implementation as evident in the following word cloud and
particularly about tax and #GSTR1 form. It is also evident in the Information Technology (IT)
Act #66 A, which is related to the penalized sending of “offensive messages.” Other
trending topics on Twitter are promotional events of various products and services like
#oneplus5, #OLAPAY, #XIOMI and latest technologies like #BITCOIN, #CES2017 event,
etc. Few social and geopolitical events are also evident in the tweets of startups like
#BREXIT, #HIRING, #JOBS, etc.
4.2.3 Sentiment analysis. The main aim of sentiment analysis is the classification of text
into sentiment categories of positive, negative and neutral. In Figure 7, sentiment analysis of
tweets of the startups shows that 45 percent of total 53,000+ tweets are positive in nature,
while neutral sentiments are close to 44 and 11 percent of the total tweets are negative in
nature. This analysis shows that the Indian startups have more positive than negative
sentiments, which shows that the Indian startup ecosystem is optimistic. However, a lot of
work has to be done by the startups through ecosystem functioning to convert neutral
sentiments to positive ones. A snapshot of the classification of text is shown in Figure 10.
Location-based analysis of sentiments shows that New Delhi is leading in terms of
positive sentiments (Figure 8) because of the availability of infrastructure, connectivity and
huge market base of consumers from different areas of the country. Bangalore is slightly
lagging in terms of infrastructure and connectivity; hence, startups are finding it a bit
difficult to do business there as compared to New Delhi. The following example of tweets
shows the positive sentiments:
• RT @BeingPractical: 120 days. 0 Spent on marketing. 1 Million Downloads for
@PaytmMoney. and by GST Tech.

Sentiment of Indian Startups

23,474, 23,780,
44% 45%

Figure 7.
5,883, Sentiment breakdown
11% of tweets
Total positive Total negative Total Neutral
JAMR 8,000

17,2 7,000

6,000

5,000

272 4,000

3,000

2,000

Figure 8. 1,000
Total positive tweets
by user location 0
Bengaluru Chennai Gurugram Mumbai New Delhi

• The webinar on Filing of GSTR 10 Final Return on GST portal in Hindi is now
available on GSTN’s Youtube channel.
• RT @gfulgoni: Stunning growth in the ad business.
In terms of negative tweets (Figure 9), Bangalore is leading with tweets mostly related to
the policy measures and infrastructure availability. The following example of tweets
shows negative sentiments, e.g., a few tweets by Sachin_bansal show common issues faced
by startups:
• @rehanyarkhan There is a long period of uncertainty coming before the world settles
down into a new rhythm. Expect turbulence for some time.
• Driving on the road why do some people overtake and then slow down in front of
you. #firstworldtrafficproblem.
• @snapdeal team supports #CarFreeDay in Gurgaon. About time we all fixed this
problem together.
Chennai, on the other hand, is at bottom of the negative as well as positive sentiments
compared to the other cities, which is attributed to the presence of a smaller number of
startups, due to language and culture barriers along with infrastructure availability.
In terms of neutral sentiments by user location, it is evident from the following analysis
that New Delhi is leading, followed by Mumbai and Bengaluru. Chennai has least number of

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

Figure 9. 500
Total negative tweets
by user location 0
Bengaluru Chennai Gurugram Mumbai New Delhi
neutral tweets which shows that Chennai-based startups are not using Twitter much as Analyzing the
compared to other locations. Figure 10 shows the distribution of neutral sentiments of startup
tweets by startups from various locations like Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurugram, Mumbai and ecosystem of
New Delhi.
4.2.4 Word cloud. Word cloud explains the visualization of tweet texts (Figure 11). It India
highlights the word with more frequency (Mcnaught and Lam 2010). The highlighted words
are GST, India, Fail, customers, Tax, UPI, Oneplus and others. The word cloud analysis 273
(Figures 12 and 13) of hashtags reveals that falling indices, GST implementation, Brexit
uncertainty, regulatory decisions like 66A, infrastructure issues, etc. are major issues for
startups, whereas they are optimistic about tax-related policies like E-way bill, GST Bill,
Digital payments, Aadhar verdict, etc. Figure 12 shows the negative sentiment hashtags,
whereas Figure 13 shows positive hashtags tagged by startups in their tweets.
Thus, Hashtag frequency and word cloud of frequent words provide deeper level
insights of tweets posted by the startups and their CEO. Sentiment-level analysis further
enriched the analysis through clear identification of negative and positive topics.
4.2.5 Topic modeling. The tweets were clustered into ten prevalent themes of startup
ecosystem, using LDA. The identified themes are technology and ecommerce platform,
travel industry and digital transaction, customer experience, digital connectivity and mobile
phone launch, digital payment initiatives, social issues, customer’s issue resolution, startup
issues and difficulties, government initiatives and political issues, and entrepreneurial story
of India. Each of these clusters have different keywords. The clusters and their keywords
are shown in Table IV.

8,000
7,000
6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
Figure 10.
1,000 Total neutral tweets
0 by user location
Bengaluru Chennai Gurugram Mumbai New Delhi

Figure 11.
Hashtag word cloud
for all tweets
JAMR
17,2

274

Figure 12.
Hashtag word
cloud for negative
sentiment tweets

Figure 13.
Hashtag word
cloud for positive
sentiment tweets

Technology and ecommerce platforms are extensively using latest technological means in
their business and are persuading sellers and customers to come together at their online
marketplace. A group of researchers (Misopoulos et al., 2014) mentioned how an airline
industry is using Twitter data analysis to gauge and improve customer experience. Startups
are appreciating digital initiatives and are more focused on better customer experience.
Startups are also concerned about the various social issues like education, water crisis,
elections, online education mediums and technology. It shows that the Indian startups are
not only profit driven but also cognizant of social issues. Another import insight is that
Twitter is now being considered as the main source of resolving customer issues
immediately. Twitter allows real-time escalation of issues and may harm the reputation of
the startup; hence, real-time resolution is being provided by startups on Twitter.
Various other topics emerging from topic modeling are issues and difficulties faced by
them in their entrepreneurial journeys like infrastructure-related issues, budget concerns,
taxation difficulties and tough competition in the Indian startup ecosystem providing
Cluster
number Cluster name
1 Technology and
e-commerce platform
2 Travel industry and
digital transaction
3 Customer experience
4 Digital connectivity
and mobile phone
launch
5 Digital payment
initiatives
6 Social issues
7 Customer’s issue
resolution
8 Startup issues and
difficulties
9 Government
initiatives and
political issues
10 Entrepreneurial
story of India
Analyzing the
Keywords startup
ecosystem of
Snapdeal, online, India, app, products, design, awesome, new, sell, now,
sellers, launches, great, mobile, offline, freecharge, platform and market place India
Refund, amount, processed, airline, booking, fee, cancellation, per, day, failed,
cleartrip, however, charged, working, any, trip, fare and transaction
Thanks, good, delivered, awesome, morning, work, made, experience, like, 275
food, guys, ordered, great, glad, order, nice and quite
India, launch, android, Samsung, galaxy, RAM, China, now, official, new,
announce, oneplus, phone, note, asus and power
Payment, online, mobile, UPI, how, using, payment, new, digital, here, app,
user, razorpay, future, tech and pay
Degree, role, technology, customers, water, love, service, online education,
election, education, learning, program, MBA, google, campaign, free, career
and read
Sorry, please, soon, feedback, earliest, connect, escalated, ensure, service,
concerned, discussed, surely, provider, thank, asap and detail
Old, cost, set, risks, harsh, diverse, resilience, competitors, dominating,
behavior, deceptively, regulatory, harder, ceo, founder, economic and our
Gstbill, budget, budgetology, budgetclearhoga, airways, infrastructure,
digitalindia, govt, logical, interim, deficit, parliament, centre, invoicing,
protests, economic and government Table IV.
Unicorns, month, results, first, movement, till, now, what, were, compliance, Clusters and
day, from, destinations, implemented and countries their keywords

inspiration and preparing young startups to adopt a cautious path. Twitter can help in
interactive and reactive marketing for business and thus help startups in promoting brands
and solving customer issues (Burton and Soboleva, 2011). Therefore, startups are not only
engaging with customers for resolution of their issues, but are also discussing social issues
and sharing their experiences on the social media. Startups are also responding to the
government initiatives, political issues and difficulties; for example, GST bill, budget
announcements, Digital India campaign, Section 66A of the Indian IT Act, risks and
regulatory challenges. Thus, topic modeling generates deeper insights and reveals thoughts
of the Indian startup ecosystem.

5. Discussion and implications

Social media platforms bring opportunities for analyzing the opinions of key stakeholders
(Xiang et al., 2015; Kwok and Yu, 2013). Sindhani et al. (2019) argue that the information
shared on Twitter includes views on current trends, future, company updates, key issues,
social issues and political issues. By examining the tweets, this study provides some key
insights on the start-up ecosystem and startups of India.
First, this study found that prominent hashtags for startup ecosystem are AIForIndia, AI,
BigData, Bitcoin, DigitalIndia, Aadhar, Brexit, Budget and AbHarWishHogiPoori.
Researchers have argued that the key trends of the digital economy are bigdata and
artificial intelligence (Tan et al., 2017) and the medium of currency is the bitcoin (Shamali et al.,
2019). The startups are more inclined toward the recent digital technologies, social issues and
promotional offers (Singh and Dhir, 2019; Dhir et al., 2019; Hasan et al., 2019; Dhir and Dhir,
2017). The startups are also concerned about the environment as #BeatPlasticPollution, which
is the trending hashtag in the startup community. The startup ecosystem revolves around the
3Ps concept: people, planet and profit as discussed by Bocken (2015). An analysis of retweets
reveals that e-commerce, e-payments and online review-based startups receive the greatest
JAMR number of retweets in comparison with startups of other categories. Thus, customers play a
17,2 key role in the ecosystem (Kwok and Yu, 2013; Lu and Stepchenkova, 2014) of these startups.
The URL analysis categorizes the link into promotional and informative URL ( Joseph et al.,
2017). The promotional URL provides a link to promote the startup on social media. The
informative URL redirects the user to an informational page. The geographical analysis of
tweets reveals that the startup ecosystem of New Delhi is more robust than that of Bengaluru
276 and Chennai. The possible reason could be availability of infrastructure and other key
resources. Therefore, the Indian startup ecosystem is inclined more toward digital
technologies, is concerned with people, planet and profit, and the infrastructure,
information and resources acts as a catalyst in boosting the start-up ecosystem.
Second, this study also measures the sentiment of startups on various issues. The study
categorizes the emotions of tweets as positive, neutral and negative. Therefore, it provides
the factors which influence the startup ecosystem positively or negatively. Various studies
had examined online reviews for understanding the sentiments of the user (Moniz and
de Jong, 2014; Kang and Park, 2014; Joseph et al., 2017). The majority of the tweets are
categorized into positive sentiments followed by neutral and negative sentiments. The
startups have mentioned generally about the policies of the government or acknowledged
customer-related issues. The negative sentiments are generally related to governmental
policies like 66A, GST and tax policies. The positive sentiments are related more to the
digital technologies. This shows that the future of the Indian startup ecosystem is Digital
India. Also, topic modeling enables the categorization of the identified keywords into
clusters. The identified clusters include technology and e-commerce platform travel
industry and digital transaction, customer experience, digital connectivity and mobile phone
launch, digital payment initiatives, social issues, customer’s issue resolution, startup issues
and difficulties, government initiatives and political issues, and entrepreneurial story. These
clusters act as the basis for the development and growth of the startup ecosystem in India.
The study contributes to the existing literature on the startup ecosystem and social
media analytics. First, this paper applies social media analytics using Twitter data. Even
though various studies have used Twitter analytics to examine the tweets in various
contexts (Sindhani et al., 2019; Joseph et al., 2017), analyzing tweets to understand the Indian
startup ecosystem has not been done previously. Also, the character limit of Twitter is more
than that of general survey questions (Park et al., 2016). This approach could be more
helpful in analyzing the views on the startup ecosystem. Second, the startups can also gain
insight about the customer needs, preferences and pain points. This will lead to
improvement in their business performance. Third, as the sentiments associated with the
tweets are identified, it could help policymakers in formulation of favorable policies by
understanding trends to strengthen the startup ecosystem. Fourth, the keywords in the ten
identified clusters can be analyzed to understand key factors/startups/events, which acts as
a booster for the development of those clusters of the startup ecosystem.

6. Conclusion
Based on the Twitter analytics data of 53,115 tweets, the paper shares key insights
emerging from the analysis related to the startup ecosystem. The user analysis, URL
analysis, sentiment analysis and identification of themes provide a broad picture on the
focus of the Indian startup ecosystem and factors/events which boost this ecosystem. It also
provides the key cluster which forms the base of the Indian startup ecosystem and
keywords from each cluster provide insight on these identified clusters. Positive emotions
show the brighter picture of the startup ecosystem of India, whereas the negative emotions
are the ones which need to be addressed.
This research is a small step toward using data analytics techniques in the context of the
Indian startup ecosystem. However, the author acknowledges the scope for further research
in this space. First, the data collection period was very short. For a broader view, future Analyzing the
studies could collect data over various time periods. Second, this study is limited to hashtags startup
of various startups. However, the other search words which may refer to the Indian startup ecosystem of
ecosystem could be included. To investigate a meaningful pattern in social media
communication, other techniques like network mapping can be used to study the behavior of India
the components of the startup ecosystem.
277
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About the authors

Shiwangi Singh is Research Scholar in Strategic Management Area at the Department of Management
Studies (DMS), IIT Delhi. She is gold medallist during her studies in graduation and post-graduation.
Her area of research is the strategic management, innovation, implementation of innovation and
startups. Her research papers were selected for presentations at various research conferences like
PANIIT International Management Conference (PANIITIMC), Academy of International Business
(AIB) India Chapter and Academy for Global Business Advancement (AGBA). She has also been
conferred with “Best Paper Award” at AGBA Conference, 2018.
Akshay Chauhan has completed his MBA from the Department of Management Studies, IIT Delhi.
He has an Engineering Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from UP Technical University,
Lucknow. He is currently working as a Lead Data Analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland. He has over
seven years of corporate experience in Data & Analytics. His past assignments were at Accenture and
Sapient Consulting in Business Intelligence and Data & Analytics.
Dr Sanjay Dhir is Assistant Professor in Strategic Management Area at the Department of
Management Studies (DMS), IIT Delhi. He is a Fellow (PhD) from the Indian Institute of Management
(IIM) Lucknow. He worked at corporate sector – Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd (Automotive), R&D
Department, Nasik – for three and a half years. He has published several research papers in leading
international journals. His research interests include strategic management, joint ventures, alliances,
international business and creative problem solving. His research papers were presented and
published as conference proceedings at several prestigious academic conferences such as Academy of
Management (AoM), Academy of International Business (AIB), Strategic Management Society (SMS),
Southern Management Association (SMA), International Simulation Conference of India (ISCI, IIT
Mumbai) and Strategic Management Forum (SMF, IIM Lucknow). Dr Sanjay Dhir is the corresponding
author and can be contacted at: sanjaydhir.iitd@gmail.com

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