The Dictionary

The words founders, creators and business owners actually use — defined in twenty seconds, in the language they are used in.

Start with your side of the work

37 termsThe founder's dictionary

Money, product and the numbers that decide which bets you are allowed to make.

46 termsThe creator's dictionary

Audience, offers and the difference between attention you rent and attention you hold.

52 termsThe business owner's dictionary

Clients, margin and the operating numbers behind an established practice.

Search terms

68 terms

A

Accounts receivable: Work you have invoiced but not been paid for — revenue on the books that cannot pay a salary yet.Money
Activation: The first moment a new customer gets real value — the step between signing up and actually using the thing.Growth
Attribution: Deciding which marketing effort gets credit for a sale — always an approximation, and dangerous when treated as a fact.Growth

B

Backlog: The list of work agreed but not started — useful when it is ranked and honest, and a source of guilt when it is neither.Product
Base rate: How often something happens across all comparable cases — the number your own optimism is measured against.Judgement
Bottleneck: The single slowest step in a process — the only one where an improvement changes the total output.Operations
Brand: What people expect from you before you say anything — a reputation held in other people's heads, not a logo you own.Audience
Break-even: The revenue at which the business stops losing money: fixed costs divided by contribution margin per sale.Money
Burn rate: The net amount of cash the business loses each month — money out minus money in.Money

C

Capacity: How much work the business can actually deliver in a period — measured in the constrained resource, not in optimism.Operations
Cash conversion cycle: The number of days between paying to deliver work and being paid for it — how long your own money funds your customers.Money
Change order: A written amendment recording a change to an agreed scope, its price and its effect on the date — the mechanism that makes "yes" affordable.Operations
Churn: The share of customers or subscribers who stop paying in a given period.Growth
Cohort: A group of customers who started in the same period, tracked over time so you can see whether the product is getting better.Growth
Contract: A written record of what each side promised — most useful long before any dispute, as the thing you both check.Legal
Contribution margin: What one extra sale contributes toward fixed costs and profit: its price minus the variable cost of serving it.Money
Conversion rate: The share of people who take the next step you asked for, out of everyone who could have.Growth
Customer acquisition cost: The fully loaded cost of winning one new paying customer, sales and marketing included.Money

D

Deferred revenue: Money you have been paid for work you have not delivered yet — cash in the bank that is still a liability.Money
Discovery: The work of finding out what people actually need before you build it — conversations about their past, not their opinions of your idea.Product

E

Email list: The set of people who agreed to hear from you directly — the most durable owned channel most businesses will ever have.Audience
Engagement rate: The share of the people reached who did something — the metric most likely to be optimised into meaninglessness.Audience
Escalation: The agreed route by which a problem reaches someone able to decide — written in advance, so nobody has to invent it mid-crisis.Operations

F

Funnel: The ordered steps between a stranger seeing you and paying you, measured so you can see where people stop.Growth

G

Gross margin: What is left of a sale after the direct cost of delivering it, as a percentage of revenue.Money

H

Handoff: The moment work passes from one person to another — the most common place for it to stall, and the least measured.Operations

I

Ideal customer profile: A description of the customer your offer serves best, written from evidence rather than aspiration.Audience
Intellectual property assignment: The clause that transfers ownership of what was created from the person who made it to the person who paid for it.Legal

L

Lead magnet: Something useful given away in exchange for an email address, so a stranger becomes reachable.Audience
Liability: What you can be held responsible for if the work causes harm — and, in a contract, how much of that you have agreed to carry.Legal
Lifetime value: The total gross profit one customer produces across the whole time they stay with you.Money
Loss aversion: The tendency to feel a loss more strongly than an equivalent gain — which makes protecting what you have beat pursuing what you want.Judgement

M

Monthly recurring revenue: The predictable revenue that repeats every month from subscriptions, normalised so annual and monthly plans are comparable.Money
MVP: The smallest thing you can put in front of real users that produces a real answer.Product

N

Net margin: What the business actually keeps after every cost, as a percentage of revenue — the number gross margin flatters.Money
Net revenue retention: What last year's customers are worth this year, with upgrades counted against cancellations — above 100% means the base grows on its own.Growth
Niche: The narrow group you choose to be the obvious answer for — chosen by exclusion, not by topic.Audience
Non-disclosure agreement: An agreement not to share specified information — routine between working parties, and near-useless as a way to protect an idea.Legal

O

Offer: The specific exchange you are proposing: this result, for this person, at this price, on these terms.Audience
Opportunity cost: The value of the best thing you gave up in order to do the thing you chose.Judgement
Owned audience: The people you can reach without permission from a platform — a list you hold, not followers you were lent.Audience

P

Payback period: How many months a customer takes to repay what you spent winning them — the speed at which growth returns its own cash.Growth
Positioning: The place your offer occupies in a buyer's head — who it is for, what it replaces, why it wins.Audience
Premature optimisation: Polishing something before you know it matters — effort spent on a constraint you do not have yet.Judgement
Pricing power: How much you can raise your price before customers leave — a measure of how replaceable you are.Money
Product–market fit: The state where a specific group of people want what you built badly enough to pull it out of you.Product

R

Referral loop: A repeatable path by which a satisfied customer produces the next one — deliberate word of mouth rather than lucky word of mouth.Growth
Release cadence: How often you put work in front of people, on a rhythm — a fixed interval beats a variable one at almost any size.Product
Rented audience: Reach you access through someone else's channel — real, valuable, and revocable without notice.Audience
Retainer: A recurring fee for ongoing access or a defined monthly scope — predictable revenue, and the easiest agreement to lose money on.Money
Retention: The share of customers still with you after a given period — the same fact as churn, read from the side that grows.Growth
Reversible decision: A choice you can undo at low cost — and therefore one that deserves speed rather than deliberation.Judgement
Roadmap: An ordered statement of what you intend to do next and what you are therefore not doing — a sequence, not a calendar.Product
Runway: How many months the business can keep operating before the cash runs out, assuming nothing changes.Money

S

Scope creep: The steady growth of a project past what was agreed, one small addition at a time.Operations
Scope document: The written record of what a project includes, excludes and depends on — the reference that makes a later disagreement checkable.Operations
Seasonality: The predictable rise and fall of demand across a year — the pattern that makes a normal month look like a crisis.Growth
Second-order effect: What happens after what happens — the consequence of the consequence, which is usually where the real cost sits.Judgement
Service level agreement: A written promise about how fast and how reliably you will respond — a boundary as much as a commitment.Operations
Social proof: Evidence that people like your buyer already chose you and were glad — the substitute for the judgement they cannot make themselves.Audience
Standard operating procedure: A written procedure for work that repeats — the thing that lets a task leave your head without leaving your standard behind.Operations
Subcontracting: Paying someone outside the business to deliver work you are contracted for — capacity you can buy, with the risk still yours.Operations
Sunk cost: Money, time or effort already spent and unrecoverable — and therefore irrelevant to what you should do next.Judgement
Survivorship bias: Drawing conclusions from the cases that made it, while the ones that did the same thing and failed are invisible.Judgement

T

Technical debt: The future cost of a shortcut taken now — borrowed speed that charges interest on every change you make afterwards.Product
Top of funnel: The widest stage of the funnel — people who now know you exist but have not asked you for anything yet.Growth

U

Unit economics: What one customer costs to win and earns you afterwards — the smallest unit at which a business is either working or not.Money
Utilization rate: The share of paid hours that are billable — the number that decides whether a team of ten earns like a team of ten.Operations