Terms.

A

8 terms

• A/B Testing

  A controlled experiment comparing two versions of a page or flow on live traffic to see which performs better on a chosen metric.

• AARRR

  The pirate metrics funnel: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue, five stages that locate where a product leaks growth.

• AI Guardrail

  Programmatic checks around an AI system's inputs and outputs that block unsafe or off-policy behavior.

• AIaaS

  AI as a Service: AI models and capabilities delivered as metered APIs, no training or infrastructure required by the buyer.

• API

  An application programming interface: the contract through which one piece of software requests data or actions from another.

• ARPU

  Average revenue per user: total revenue divided by active users over a period, a pulse check on pricing and expansion.

• ARR

  Annual recurring revenue: the yearly run-rate of active subscriptions, the standard scale metric of SaaS valuation.

• Agent Harness

  The environment an AI coding agent operates inside: file access, shell, editor and rules.

B

3 terms

• B2B

  Business to business: products sold to companies and teams, with multi-stakeholder buying, per-seat pricing and contracts.

• B2C

  Business to consumer: products sold directly to individuals, with self-serve signup, low prices and high volume.

• BaaS

  Backend as a Service: a ready-made server backend, database, auth, storage, functions, consumed through SDKs instead of built.

C

13 terms

• CAC

  Customer acquisition cost: the fully loaded cost of winning one paying customer, the floor your unit economics must clear.

• CD

  Continuous delivery or deployment: keeping every change in a always-releasable state, and deploying it automatically once verified.

• CDN

  A content delivery network: geographically distributed edge servers that cache and serve your static assets close to each visitor.

• CI

  Continuous integration: automatically building and testing every commit so breakage is caught within minutes, not at release time.

• CLV

  Customer lifetime value: the total revenue a customer generates before churning, the ceiling on what acquiring them can cost.

• CORS

  The browser security policy that controls which origins may request resources from another, enforced via HTTP response headers.

• CRDT

  A data structure that merges concurrent edits on replicas without central coordination, always converging to the same state.

• CRM

  Customer relationship management: the system of record for every contact, deal and interaction across the sales cycle.

• CTA

  Call to action: the specific instruction that tells the visitor what to do next, typically a button or link with one clear verb.

• CTR

  Click-through rate: the percentage of people who see a link, ad or result and actually click it.

• CX

  Customer experience: the sum of every interaction a customer has with your company, product, support, billing and communication combined.

• Churn

  The share of customers or revenue lost per period; the leak rate that every other SaaS metric must out-run.

• Context Window

  The maximum number of tokens a model can consider at once, combining input and generated output.

D

3 terms

• DAU

  Daily active users: the count of unique users who engaged with the product on a given day.

• DTC

  Direct to consumer: selling straight to end customers through your own channel, without retailers or marketplaces in between.

• DevOps

  The practice of merging development and operations: automated pipelines, shared ownership and infrastructure as code from commit to production.

E

1 term

• ETL

  Extract, transform, load: moving data from sources through a transformation step into a destination where it becomes useful.

F

3 terms

• FUD

  Fear, uncertainty and doubt: a persuasion tactic that sells by alarming rather than demonstrating, common in tech marketing and forum debates.

• Feature Flag

  A runtime switch that turns a code path on or off per user or percentage, without a new deploy.

• Fine-Tuning

  Continuing a pretrained model's training on your own examples so its behavior specializes to your task or voice.

H

2 terms

• HCI

  Human-computer interaction: the study and craft of how people use machines, interfaces, input methods and feedback loops.

• Headless Commerce

  An e-commerce architecture where the storefront frontend is decoupled from the commerce backend, communicating through APIs.

I

4 terms

• ICP

  Ideal customer profile: the specific segment your product serves best and wins most easily, defined by real attributes, not demographics alone.

• IaC

  Infrastructure as code: defining servers, networks and services in declarative files that are versioned and applied automatically.

• IaaS

  Infrastructure as a Service: raw computing resources, virtual machines, storage, networking, rented on demand from a cloud provider.

• Inference

  Running a trained model on new input to get a prediction or generated text, priced per token.

J

1 term

• JWT

  JSON Web Token: a signed token that carries identity claims so an API can authenticate requests without a session store.

K

1 term

• KPI

  Key performance indicator: the small set of numbers that tell you if the business is moving toward its current goal.

L

3 terms

• LLM

  A large language model: a neural network trained on vast text corpora to predict and generate language, the engine behind modern AI features.

• LTV

  Lifetime value: the total profit a customer contributes across the whole relationship, the ceiling on acquisition spend.

• Local-First Software

  Software architecture where the primary copy of data lives on the user's device, with sync to servers happening in the background.

M

6 terms

• MAU

  Monthly active users: unique users who engaged with the product within the last 30 days.

• MRR

  Monthly recurring revenue: the normalized monthly value of all active subscriptions, the headline number of a SaaS.

• MVP

  Minimum viable product: the smallest version that delivers real value and generates validated learning about the market.

• Merchant of Record

  A payments provider that legally resells your product, handling global sales tax, invoicing and compliance as the seller of record.

• Modular Monolith

  A single deployable application organized into well-bounded internal modules with explicit contracts, instead of distributed services.

• Monorepo

  A single repository holding multiple projects or packages, for example the web app, API and shared libraries together.

N

2 terms

• NPS

  Net Promoter Score: a loyalty metric from one survey question, would you recommend us, scored from minus 100 to plus 100.

• NoSQL

  A family of databases that trade relational strictness for flexible schemas or specialized access patterns: document, key-value, wide-column, graph.

O

6 terms

• OAuth

  An open standard for authorization: lets a user grant one service limited access to their account on another, without sharing passwords.

• OKR

  Objectives and key results: a goal-setting framework pairing a qualitative objective with measurable outcomes that prove it was reached.

• OLAP

  The analytical query workload: scanning and aggregating large historical datasets, usually in columnar storage.

• OLTP

  The transactional workload: many small concurrent reads and writes with strict consistency, the profile of an application's main database.

• ORM

  An object-relational mapper: a library that maps database rows to objects in your language, so you query with code instead of raw SQL.

• OTT

  Over-the-top: video, audio and messaging services delivered over the open internet, bypassing cable, satellite and telco bundles.

P

3 terms

• PPC

  Pay per click: an advertising model where you pay for each visitor the ad sends, priced by keyword auction.

• PaaS

  Platform as a Service: managed hosting where you deploy code and the provider runs the servers, runtime and scaling for you.

• Prompt Injection

  An attack where untrusted text read by an AI system contains instructions that hijack its behavior.

R

4 terms

• REST

  An architectural style for APIs built on resources addressed by URLs, manipulated with standard HTTP methods and status codes.

• ROI

  Return on investment: the gain or loss from a spend, expressed as a percentage of what it cost.

• Rate Limiting

  Capping how many requests a client may make in a time window, protecting the service from abuse and overload.

• Reverse Proxy

  A server that sits in front of your application, receiving client requests and forwarding them, adding TLS, caching and routing.

S

9 terms

• SDK

  A software development kit: installable libraries and tooling that let developers integrate a service into their app in their own language.

• SEM

  Search engine marketing: paying to appear in search results, usually pay-per-click ads.

• SEO

  The practice of growing a site's visibility in unpaid search through content depth, technical health and earned authority.

• SERP

  Search engine results page: what a searcher sees for a query, the battlefield where ranking positions are won.

• SLA

  A service level agreement: a provider's contractual commitments to uptime and performance, with remedies when they are missed.

• SSO

  Single sign-on: authenticating once against a central identity provider that vouches for the user across services.

• SaaS

  Software as a Service: centrally hosted software sold as a subscription, accessed through the browser, updated continuously.

• Serverless

  An execution model where the platform runs your code per request, scaling and capacity management fully abstracted away.

• Sync Engine

  Middleware that keeps a local copy of data on the device and reconciles changes with the server in both directions.

T

2 terms

• TTV

  Time to value: how long a new user needs before the product delivers the payoff they signed up for.

• Token

  The chunk of text a language model reads or writes; roughly four characters of English per token.

U

2 terms

• UI

  The interface layer users directly see and touch: layout, components, typography and visual design of a product.

• UX

  The overall experience a person has using a product: how easily they reach their goal, how it feels along the way.

V

3 terms

• VPC

  A virtual private cloud: a logically isolated section of a public cloud where your resources run in a private network you control.

• Vector Search

  Retrieval by semantic similarity: comparing embedding vectors to find items close in meaning rather than matching keywords.

• Vibe Coding

  Building software by describing intent to an AI coding agent and steering the output, rather than writing every line by hand.

W

2 terms

• WebSocket

  A protocol that upgrades an HTTP connection into a persistent two-way channel, letting server and client push messages any time.

• Webhooks

  A pattern where a provider POSTs events to your HTTP endpoint as things happen, instead of you polling their API.

G

1 term

• gRPC

  A high-performance RPC protocol over HTTP/2, using protocol buffers for typed contracts between services.