Startup Founder Glossary

Splitting traffic between two versions of a page or feature to measure which performs better.

Specific, testable conditions a feature must meet before the user story counts as done.

Database guarantees: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability — critical for financial and order data.

Acquisition primarily for the team rather than the product; team joins, product often sunsets.

Cross-industry benchmark that captures how satisfied customers are with a company or category.

Single threshold that marks when a new user has experienced the product's core value — best predictor of retention.

Average annual revenue per customer contract, excluding one-time fees — used for sales-team quota planning.

Symmetric encryption standard with 256-bit keys — protects sensitive data at rest like API credentials.

Service firms (consultancies, dev shops) that implement the product for their clients in exchange for revenue share.

Iterative development framework using time-boxed sprints, daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.

Single front-door service that routes external API requests to backend services with auth, rate limiting, and logging.

Simple auth scheme where each client presents a long random secret string in every request header.

Wall-clock time from request arriving to response leaving the server — the metric users feel.

Total revenue divided by active customer count in the same period — anchor for unit-economics math.

Annualised version of MRR; MRR multiplied by 12 — the headline metric in SaaS pitch decks.

Append-only record of significant security or business events — who did what, when, to which record.

Pattern of starting with self-serve adoption and expanding account-wide into an enterprise-priced tier.

B2B sells to businesses (longer cycle, higher ACV); B2C sells direct to consumers (shorter cycle, lower ACV).

Guarantee that newer API versions accept input from and produce output usable by older clients.

Adaptive password-hashing function that adds salt + slow rounds to resist brute-force attacks.

Auth header format Authorization: Bearer where possession of the token grants access.

Direct outreach to 10-50 prospects who get early access in exchange for product feedback and case-study material.

Maximum monthly or annual spend a persona can approve without escalating to a higher tier.

Stated total budget range for a project — the financial constraint that scopes architecture and timeline.

Focused sprint at the end of a release window dedicated to clearing the bug backlog before launch.

Week-by-week sequence of what ships, in what order, to validate the MVP thesis fastest.

Rate at which a startup spends cash, usually expressed monthly; net burn = expenses minus revenue.

Profile of the human who decides to purchase — may differ from the end user in B2B.

Total marketing and sales spend required to acquire one new paying customer.

Months of gross margin contribution required to recover one customer's acquisition cost.

Rules for what to cache, where, for how long, and how to invalidate — trades freshness for response time.

The annualized rate at which a market or revenue line grows, smoothing volatility across years.

Geographically distributed servers that cache static assets close to end users to cut latency.

Deliberately injecting failures (kill DB, kill Redis, drop network) to prove the system degrades gracefully.

Automated workflow that tests every commit and deploys passing builds to staging or production without human ops.

A ready-to-send template that demonstrates problem understanding without pitching the product first.

Benchmark companies with similar shape used to anchor expectations on funding, valuation, ARR, and exit.

Dimension that measures how saturated the space is — higher score = more competitive headroom.

Structured map of direct, indirect, and adjacent competitors with their strengths, weaknesses, and target segments.

The unique narrative slot your product occupies in the buyer's mind relative to competitors.

Number of in-flight API calls being processed at the same instant — a key scaling input.

Reusing a small set of long-lived database connections instead of opening one per request — prevents exhaustion.

Pillar article plus 10-20 supporting articles linked together, signalling topical authority to search engines.

Scheduled plan of what to publish, when, on which channel — keeps cadence consistent and topics on-strategy.

Percentage of total budget reserved for unplanned costs — typically 10-20% on early-stage projects.

Revenue per unit minus variable cost per unit — what each sale adds before covering fixed costs.

Itemised view of project spend by category — development, infrastructure, third-party services, contingency.

Side-by-side comparison of cheap validation spend vs full-build commitment, used to justify staging.

Bug class where one tenant's request returns another tenant's data — usually due to missing scope filtering.

Explicit list of features NOT shipped in v1 with the rationale — prevents scope creep and signals discipline.