Startup Founder Glossary

Growth-stage round after product-market fit is proven; capital fuels scaling and team expansion.

Successive growth-stage rounds raised as the company scales — each tied to specific revenue and growth milestones.

Hacker News post format where the maker shares something built; high-quality submissions reach the front page.

Contractual commitment from a service provider on uptime, latency, or other measurable performance.

Minimal end-to-end test run after every deploy to confirm the most critical paths still work.

The realistic share of SAM you can capture in 3-5 years given competition, capacity, and GTM motion.

Visual kanban or table where every ticket in the current sprint moves through Todo → In Progress → Done.

Single-sentence commitment for the sprint that defines what 'done' means by Friday demo.

Defending against untrusted input that gets concatenated into SQL queries — usually via parameterised queries.

Cryptographic certificate that authenticates the server and encrypts traffic between client and API.

Pre-production replica of the system where the next release is verified end-to-end before going live.

Entry paid tier priced for small teams or single-location operators just past the free quota.

Public web page showing current system status, ongoing incidents, and historical uptime — builds customer trust.

Logs emitted as machine-parseable key-value records (JSON) instead of free-text strings.

Recurring fixed payment (monthly or annual) for ongoing access to the product.

Effort, money, and risk a customer must absorb to leave one product for another — sources of stickiness.

The total annual revenue opportunity if you sold to every possible buyer in the category globally.

The set of languages, frameworks, databases, and services chosen to build and operate the product.

Shortcuts taken to ship faster that will require rework later — explicit when intentional, painful when not.

Pattern where every database query automatically filters to the authenticated tenant's rows.

Long-tail buyer the product can serve but not lead with — informs feature gating and pricing tiers.

Slowing a client's request rate (rather than rejecting) when it exceeds limits — keeps systems responsive.

Discrete pricing levels (Starter / Pro / Enterprise) each bundled with distinct features and limits.

Minutes between signup and first successful API call — the critical activation metric for developer products.

Dimension that captures whether market interest in the problem space is growing, flat, or declining.

Private company with a valuation of $1B+ — once-rare label that became common in the 2021 ZIRP era.

Test that exercises a single function or class in isolation, with dependencies mocked.

Percentage of time a service is operational and reachable — typically measured by external probes.

Customer pays in proportion to consumption — API calls, GB processed, minutes streamed, transactions.

Step-by-step path a target user takes from awareness to activation to retained usage.

A short narrative in the form 'As X I want Y so that Z' that captures one persona's outcome.

A short list of cheap, time-boxed tests that disconfirm key assumptions before any code is written.

Structured plan that schedules validation experiments against time-boxed gates with clear success criteria.

Concise statement of what the product does, for whom, and what specifically gets better as a result.

Software-as-a-Service tailored to one specific industry vertical instead of horizontal use cases.

Growth that comes from users inviting other users, with optional referral incentive boosting conversion.

One sentence describing what the product becomes once it succeeds at scale.

Compressed Scrum cycle where the team plans, ships, demos, and reviews within a single calendar week.

Pre-launch signup list used to build demand, surface early adopters, and stage controlled invite waves.

HTTP callback where one service POSTs an event payload to another service's URL when something happens.

Persistent append-only log of every webhook received, signature-verified, and processed — for debugging and compliance.

Dedicated service that receives webhook POSTs, validates them, and enqueues for asynchronous processing.

Validating the HMAC signature on an incoming webhook proves the payload originated from the trusted sender.

Persistent TCP connection that allows bidirectional real-time messages between client and server.

The narrow time frame before larger incumbents notice the opportunity and ship competing solutions.

The price range a target customer will actually pay, validated from interviews and stated-preference signals.