The startup launch & growth glossary

A/B testing is an experiment that shows two variants of a page, message, or feature to different users to determine which one performs better on a defined metric.

An activation metric is the specific, measurable action a user must complete to first experience a product's core value, used to gauge whether onboarding is working.

Activation rate is the percentage of new users who complete a specific action that signals they have experienced your product's core value.

ARR is the yearly value of a company's recurring subscription revenue, usually calculated as Monthly Recurring Revenue multiplied by twelve.

A beachhead market is a small, narrowly defined customer segment a startup targets first, aiming to dominate it completely before expanding into adjacent markets.

Bootstrapping is building and growing a company using personal savings, founder labor, and customer revenue instead of outside investment.

Bottom-up adoption is a growth pattern where individual employees discover and start using a product on their own, then spread it inside their organization until it earns official, company-wide buy-in.

Build in public is a marketing approach where founders openly share their startup's metrics, decisions, and progress on social media as they build the product.

Burn rate is the amount of cash a startup spends each month, minus any revenue, used to determine how many months of runway remain before it runs out of money.

CAC Payback Period is the number of months it takes for the gross margin generated by a new customer to cover the cost of acquiring them.

The CAC vs LTV ratio compares what it costs to acquire a customer against the total revenue that customer generates, revealing whether a business model can scale profitably.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue a business loses over a specific period, typically measured monthly or annually.

Cohort retention measures the percentage of users from a specific signup group who remain active at set time intervals after joining.

A cold email sequence is a series of scheduled, automated emails sent to prospects who have not opted in, designed to introduce a product and prompt a reply.

Cold outreach is contacting potential customers, partners, or hires with no prior relationship, usually through email, LinkedIn, or DMs, to start a business conversation.

The cold start problem is the challenge a new product or marketplace faces in attracting enough initial users, content, or supply for it to deliver value before network effects take hold.

Community-led growth is a strategy in which a brand builds an engaged community that fuels product awareness, feedback, and adoption before or alongside a formal launch.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the average amount a company spends on sales and marketing to acquire one new paying customer.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is the total revenue a business expects to earn from a single customer over the entire span of their relationship.

Daily Active Users (DAU) is the count of unique users who take a meaningful action in a product within a single calendar day.

Dark social is website traffic and content sharing that happens through private, hard-to-track channels like DMs, texts, and messaging apps, often showing up as "direct traffic" in analytics.

A directory backlink is a hyperlink to your product placed on a startup, tool, or software listing site, used to build early SEO authority and drive referral traffic.

A distribution channel is any platform or pathway, like SEO, email, or Product Hunt, that a founder uses to reach and acquire new users or customers.

Dogfooding is the practice of using your own product internally, as a real customer would, to surface bugs and validate value before or alongside launching to the market.

A drip campaign is a series of pre-written marketing or onboarding messages sent automatically over time on a fixed schedule or triggered by user behavior.

Drip pricing is a pricing tactic that advertises a low headline price upfront, then reveals mandatory extra fees (taxes, service charges, shipping) later in checkout.

An elevator pitch is a concise, memorable spoken summary of what a product does, who it's for, and why it matters, deliverable in under a minute.

Expansion revenue is additional recurring revenue generated from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, or plan upgrades, rather than from acquiring new customers.

A feature flag is a code-level switch that lets teams turn a feature on or off for specific users or environments without deploying new code.

Founder-market fit is the degree to which a founder's skills, background, and obsession with a problem uniquely position them to solve it better than other founders.

A pricing strategy that gives away a limited version of a product for free while charging for premium features, capacity, or support.

A go-to-market strategy is a plan that defines how a company will reach, convince, and sell to its target customers when launching a product.

Growth hacking is a resourceful, experiment-driven approach to acquiring and retaining users quickly and cheaply by combining marketing, product, and data tactics.

A growth loop is a self-reinforcing cycle where existing users generate new inputs, like content or invites, that pull in more users without added marketing spend.

The Hacker News front page is the top 30 ranked posts on news.ycombinator.com, a spot that can send tens of thousands of technical visitors to a startup in a matter of hours.

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the company or user segment that gets the most value from your product, buys fastest, and retains longest.

Landing page conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on a page, such as signing up, joining a waitlist, or starting a trial.

Launch assets are the complete set of prepared materials, such as screenshots, taglines, GIFs, and copy, that a team needs ready before executing a coordinated product launch.

Launch cadence is the planned rhythm and sequence of announcements, updates, and channel pushes a founder uses to build and sustain attention around a product release.

A launch day checklist is the prepared sequence of tasks, assets, and channel posts a founder executes on the day a product goes live to maximize visibility and momentum.

A launch directory is a curated website that lists new products and startups to help them gain early visibility, referral traffic, and backlinks.

Launch directory submission is the practice of listing a new product on curated startup and tool directories to gain backlinks, referral traffic, and early visibility.

Launch Karma is the accumulated trust and credibility a founder earns on a community platform through genuine, non-promotional participation before ever mentioning their own product.

A launch multiplier is a person, community, or channel that shares or endorses your launch and expands its reach well beyond your own audience.

A launch teaser is a short pre-launch video, image, or post that hints at an upcoming product to build curiosity and anticipation before it goes live.

A launch trailer is a short, high-energy video (usually 30 to 90 seconds) that shows a product's core value and key features to hook viewers in the first few seconds on platforms like Product Hunt, Twitter/X, or YouTube.

A launch window is the specific, deliberately chosen time period when a startup makes its public debut to capture maximum attention and momentum.

A lead magnet is a free resource, such as a template, checklist, or ebook, offered in exchange for a prospect's contact information.

A listicle is an article structured as a numbered or bulleted list, such as "10 tools to try in 2026," that uses the list format to organize its points.

The magic moment is the specific point in a user's first experience where they personally realize the product's core value, not just understand it intellectually.

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect who has engaged with your marketing enough, through actions like downloading a guide or signing up for a newsletter, to warrant follow-up.

A messaging framework is a structured document of core value statements, proof points, and audience-specific language that keeps all marketing and sales copy consistent and persuasive.

An MVP is the simplest version of a product a team can ship to validate its core assumptions with real users before building anything more.

MRR is the predictable revenue a subscription business expects to collect every month from its active customers.

Net Promoter Score is a survey metric that measures customer loyalty by asking how likely someone is to recommend your product, scored from -100 to +100.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) measures the percentage of recurring revenue a company retains from existing customers over a period, including expansions, downgrades, and churn, but excluding new customer sales.

Network effects occur when a product or service becomes more valuable to each user as more people use it, creating compounding value and growth.

The single measurable metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers and reliably predicts long-term business growth.

An onboarding flow is the sequence of steps a new user completes to set up a product and reach their first meaningful value.

Payback period is the number of months it takes for the gross margin a customer generates to fully repay the cost of acquiring them.

Pirate Metrics (AARRR) is a growth framework that segments the customer lifecycle into five stages, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue, so founders can measure what's working and what's broken.

A positioning statement is an internal, one- to two-sentence articulation of who a product is for, what category it competes in, and why it is uniquely better than the alternatives.

A pre-launch landing page is a single web page published before a product ships that pitches the value proposition and collects emails to build an audience ahead of launch day.

A Product Hunt Launch is submitting a product to Product Hunt for a 24-hour feature window to earn visibility, upvotes, and early feedback from its maker and early-adopter community.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy in which the product itself, usually via free trials or freemium plans, drives customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

Product-market fit is the state where a product satisfies strong, real market demand, shown by organic growth, low churn, and customers pulling the product rather than being pushed toward it.

A Product Qualified Lead (PQL) is a user who has reached a meaningful value milestone inside a product, usually through free trial or freemium usage, making them a strong candidate to convert to paying.

A qualified lead is a prospect who matches your ideal customer profile and has shown genuine buying intent, making them significantly more likely to convert than an average lead.

A referral loop is a built-in product mechanism where existing users invite new users, and those new users go on to invite more, creating a self-sustaining growth cycle.

Retention rate is the percentage of customers or users who continue using a product over a specified period of time.

Runway is the number of months a startup can keep operating before it runs out of cash, based on its current cash balance and burn rate.

A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a prospect that sales has vetted for both intent and fit, and deemed ready for direct outreach or a sales conversation.

SEO is the practice of shaping a website's content, structure, and authority so search engines rank it higher for relevant queries, generating free organic traffic.

SAM is the portion of the total market a startup can realistically reach and serve with its current product, geography, and go-to-market channels.

Show HN is a Hacker News post category where founders and makers share something they built directly with the community, inviting comments, critique, and technical feedback.

A smoke test is a quick, low-cost experiment, like a landing page or ad campaign, used to gauge real demand before you build a product.

A soft launch is a limited, low-visibility release of a product to a small audience or single market, used to test and fix issues before the full public launch.

Subreddit etiquette is the set of written rules and unwritten norms specific to a Reddit community that founders must follow when promoting a product, or risk removal, downvotes, or a ban.

The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to keep pouring time or money into a failing product, feature, or strategy because of past investment rather than future potential.

Time to First Value is the amount of time it takes a new user to experience the core benefit of your product after signing up.

Time to market is the length of time it takes to move a product from initial idea or development to availability for customers to buy or use.

Time to Value (TTV) is the amount of time it takes a new user to experience the core benefit of a product after signing up.

Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the total revenue a business could generate if it captured 100% of the market for its product or service.

A Unique Selling Proposition is the specific, defensible benefit that makes your product different from and better than alternatives, stated from the customer's point of view.

An upvote ring is a group of founders or users who coordinate to upvote, comment on, and engage with each other's launches to manipulate ranking algorithms on platforms like Product Hunt or Hacker News.

A value proposition is a clear statement of the specific benefit a product delivers, who it's for, and why it beats the alternatives.

Vanity metrics are numbers like page views, downloads, or follower counts that look impressive on a dashboard but do not correlate with revenue, retention, or business viability.

The viral coefficient (K-factor) measures how many new users each existing user generates through referrals, revealing whether growth is compounding on its own.

A waitlist is a pre-launch signup list that captures interested users' contact details, letting founders measure demand and build an audience before a product ships.

A wedge product is a narrow, specific solution to one painful problem that a startup uses to enter a market and win initial customers before expanding into a broader platform.