What is the criteria of a successful business?

That depends on you.

Are you trying to create a company from scratch to then sell it?  Are you trying to earn living as your own boss?  Are you trying to create the next fashion craze?  The next gourmet soda?

Success criteria for your business depends on what you set out to accomplish.  It may seem like an overly simplistic answer, but it's the only satisfactory one.

Sure, your may say to yourself, "I'll be successful when I'm on the Fortune 500," but is that what you really want?  There's nothing wrong with aspiring to the Fortune 500, but if that is your aspiration, then you'd better be prepared to make key decisions in that light.  You would have to decide on products that appeal to a mass market and generate profit for one.  Be willing to take educated risks for another.  The list could go on.

The point is that specific success criteria will be different for every company.  You determine the criteria by knowing what it is you're trying to accomplish.  You may not know from the beginning exactly what you want to accomplish, and that's ok.

Now, if you have no clue how to set success criteria, you can read a web-developer's article about establishing success criteria with their clients.  While the advice is web-developer specific, the same process used by the author could be more generally applied.  You can find the article here.

Really all that's meant by the phrase "success criteria" is goals.  What are they, and how are you going to measure them?  As you answer those questions, in addition to discovering your priorities in life/business, you will be able to define your success criteria.