DICTIONARY
The founder's dictionary
The terms that decide a founder's next move — what they mean, and what changes once you can name them.
All terms37 terms
A
- Activation
- The first moment a new customer gets real value — the step between signing up and actually using the thing.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
- 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
- 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
- Contribution margin
- What one extra sale contributes toward fixed costs and profit: its price minus the variable cost of serving it.Money
- Customer acquisition cost
- The fully loaded cost of winning one new paying customer, sales and marketing included.Money
D
- 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
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
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 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
- 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
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
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