Determining when a new venture is legitimate: A changepoint analysis of social media rhetoric

Alisa Jno-Charles, Raja Singaram, Miruna Radu-Lefebvre and William B. Gartner

Journal of Small Business Management, 2025, vol. 63, issue 6, 2507-2543

Abstract: Despite the advances in scholarship on legitimation strategies, measuring the threshold for when new ventures attain legitimacy has remained elusive. We developed three theory-based linguistic markers for legitimation. Using these markers, we analyzed the social media rhetoric of 105 startups in the wearables sector that succeeded in their crowdfunding efforts on Kickstrater.com. Our dataset includes 21,687 social media posts from Twitter and Facebook collected in a time-matched pattern corresponding to crowdfunding funding progress. Using a novel technique for analyzing longitudinal text, we detect when new ventures cross their legitimacy threshold. We find that startups reduce legitimacy-seeking behavior on social media only after reaching 135 percent to 180 percent of their originally desired funding. The implications of our results for new venture legitimacy literature are discussed. We discuss how the analytical method developed here can be applied to study a variety of constructs in entrepreneurship at different venture stages.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2024.2437550

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