Startup Founder Glossary

Unbuilt Lab's composite scoring framework that rates an idea on demand, gap, trend, competition, monetization, and feasibility.

Individual pieces of unstructured market signal scraped from public sources before clustering and scoring.

Specification of entities, data collected from users, third-party data integrations, retention, and privacy rules.

Number of unique users who took a meaningful action on the product in a given calendar day.

Holding area for events that failed processing after all retries — inspected manually before re-injection.

Numbered list of specific actions the reader must take in the next 7-30 days to start building.

Pre-set checkpoints where you formally re-evaluate go/pivot/kill based on observed metrics, not feelings.

The person inside the buying organization who actually authorizes the purchase.

Dimension that measures how widespread and acute the customer need for the proposed product is.

Scraped evidence of customer pain — complaints, feature requests, workarounds — used to rank features.

GTM motion where developers discover and adopt the tool first, then introduce it to their organisations.

Practice that combines development and operations to ship faster with higher reliability via automation and shared responsibility.

Function that bridges product and developer community — runs docs, examples, events, and feedback collection.

A company solving the same problem for the same buyer in roughly the same way as you.

Ordered list of GTM channels by expected fit, ranked before any paid spend commits.

Container platform that packages an app + its dependencies into a portable image runnable anywhere.

Uncommon but real input or condition that must be handled correctly — usually source of production bugs.

Encrypting data stored on disk so a stolen backup or database file is useless without the key.

Custom-quoted plan with unlimited or negotiated usage, dedicated CSM, security review, and annual contract.

Diagram that captures core entities (tables) and how they relate via foreign keys.

OS-level config values injected at runtime — keep secrets out of source code and let envs (dev/staging/prod) differ.

Service that aggregates exceptions across all servers with stack traces, frequency, and impacted users.

Rough person-day estimate for a feature or sprint — used to fit work into the available capacity.

System design where services communicate via events on a queue rather than synchronous request/response.

Forecast cost to acquire one customer through a specific channel — used to plan paid-channel budgets.

Retry strategy that doubles the wait between attempts to avoid overwhelming a failing downstream service.

Minimal Node.js HTTP framework that handles routing, middleware, and basic request/response plumbing.

Dimension that measures how achievable the build is given typical resources and complexity.

The specific unfair advantage — domain expertise, network, prior shipped tool — that lets THIS founder win.

Permanently free entry-level plan used to drive adoption and surface upgrade signals from heavy users.

Percentage of free-tier users who upgrade to a paid plan in a given period.

Pricing where a feature-limited tier is permanently free; paid tiers unlock usage, seats, or premium features.

What the system must DO — features, inputs, processing logic, outputs, business rules, edge cases.

European data-protection regulation governing consent, access, deletion, and breach notification for EU residents.

CI/CD service built into GitHub that runs YAML-defined workflows on push, PR, or scheduled triggers.

Total dollar value of transactions flowing through a marketplace before fees and refunds — key marketplace metric.

Three-state recommendation that closes every Unbuilt Lab Idea Validation Report.

Search and display ad platform; SEM (Search) targets high-intent queries with text ads above organic results.

Query language for APIs where the client requests exactly the data fields it needs in one round-trip.

Revenue minus direct cost of serving the customer, expressed as a percentage of revenue.

The plan for who you sell to, how you reach them, what you charge, and the channels you use to grow.

Pain so acute the buyer is actively looking for a solution today, not weighing nice-to-haves.

The all-in build + first-year operating cost that appears prominently in the Executive Summary.

A lightweight URL that monitoring services hit to verify the application and its dependencies are alive.

Above-the-fold landing section that delivers the headline, subhead, primary CTA, and a product visual.

Configuration that rejects all plain-HTTP traffic — required to prevent credential and payload interception.

Specific company or person archetype that gets the most value, easiest sales motion, and lowest churn.

Property where receiving the same request twice produces the same result — no duplicate effects.

Common technical decision that looks correct early but causes pain later — documented to be avoided proactively.

Documented playbook for who does what when the system breaks at 3am — reduces panic and mean-time-to-recovery.