Startup Founder Glossary

A solution that the target buyer might use instead of yours even though it solves the problem differently.

The specific industry vertical the product is positioned to serve first — not the broader category.

Coordinated effort to get domain-relevant content creators to cover or use the product.

Hierarchical map of screens, pages, and data structures that organizes how users navigate the product.

Verifying every incoming parameter matches expected type, format, and range before processing.

Companies whose products integrate with yours — their integration becomes a distribution channel.

Specification of which third-party services the product depends on and what each contributes.

Test that exercises multiple components together — typically real HTTP calls into a test server.

Recurring cadence of build → ship → learn → adjust that drives product evolution after launch.

Lightweight, human-readable text format for structured data; the lingua franca of modern web APIs.

PostgreSQL data type that stores JSON in binary form with indexing, fast querying, and partial updates.

Compact signed token format that carries user identity and claims between client and server statelessly.

Pre-committed thresholds that trigger an automatic decision to stop building and re-allocate effort.

Free downloadable asset offered in exchange for an email signup — typically a guide, template, or report.

B2B ad platform that targets by company size, industry, role, and seniority — high CPM but precise.

Synthetic test that drives high traffic against the system to verify performance under realistic conditions.

Specific multi-word queries with lower volume but higher intent — easier to rank for than head terms.

Total gross profit a business expects from one customer over the lifetime of the relationship.

Lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost — the headline unit-economics ratio for SaaS investors.

Dimension that measures how poorly existing solutions address the identified pain.

Estimating market dollar value either from category-level data (top-down) or unit economics × buyer count (bottom-up).

Whether external conditions — tech, regulation, behaviour, costs — make NOW the right moment to build this.

Commission a marketplace charges suppliers/sellers — a revenue source that misaligns incentives with quality.

Number of unique users who took a meaningful action on the product in the trailing 30 days.

Buffer between producer and consumer services that smooths traffic spikes and decouples processing.

Hierarchical document with one headline, one subhead, and 3 supporting points used in every marketing surface.

Architecture pattern that decomposes an application into independently deployable services around bounded contexts.

Project-wide list of milestones with target dates, success criteria, and the owner accountable for each.

Specific actions taken to reduce a risk's likelihood, impact, or both — written before the risk fires.

A durable advantage — network effects, proprietary data, brand, integrations — that protects margins long term.

The structural way the business charges — subscription, usage, transaction, marketplace fee, advertising, license.

Dimension that measures clarity of the revenue path and willingness-to-pay signal.

Percentage of customers who cancel their subscription in a given month.

Predictable monthly revenue from current subscribers, excluding one-time fees.

Single application instance serves multiple customers (tenants) with strict logical isolation of their data.

Smallest version of the product that delivers core value and lets you learn from real users.

JavaScript runtime built on V8 that runs server-side; well-suited to high-concurrency webhook processing.

How well the system must perform — speed, scalability, security, accessibility — not what features it has.

Single metric that best captures the core value the product delivers to customers — guides every decision.

Non-relational database family (document, key-value, graph) optimised for flexible schema or specific access patterns.

Customer satisfaction score from one question; percent of promoters minus percent of detractors.

Revenue retained from existing customers after expansion, downgrades, and churn — best long-term SaaS metric.

Industry-standard delegated authorisation protocol — lets users grant apps scoped access without sharing passwords.

The discipline of understanding system behaviour from outside, through logs, metrics, and distributed traces.

Document that defines on-call rotation, escalation paths, communication channels, and post-incident review process.

Step-by-step path a new user takes from signup to first meaningful product use — measured in time and drop-off.

A deliberately scoped MVP that ships exactly one user value with everything else explicitly cut.

Machine-readable specification format that documents REST APIs and enables auto-generated docs, SDKs, and tests.

Counterpart to the risk register that tracks upside scenarios the team can chase if conditions allow.

Calibrated composite of the six dimension scores, weighted by go-to-market viability, mapped to a 0-100 scale.