DICTIONARY
The creator's dictionary
The terms behind an audience business — what they mean, and what changes once you can name them.
All terms46 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
- Brand
- What people expect from you before you say anything — a reputation held in other people's heads, not a logo you own.Audience
C
- Capacity
- How much work the business can actually deliver in a period — measured in the constrained resource, not in optimism.Operations
- 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
- Conversion rate
- The share of people who take the next step you asked for, out of everyone who could have.Growth
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
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
I
- 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
- 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
N
- Net margin
- What the business actually keeps after every cost, as a percentage of revenue — the number gross margin flatters.Money
- Niche
- The narrow group you choose to be the obvious answer for — chosen by exclusion, not by topic.Audience
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
- 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
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
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
- 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