Growth reference
Growth dossier
Keywords and metrics that define how growth actually works — with definitions, formulas, and founder-usable examples.
Loading dossier…
Growth reference
Keywords and metrics that define how growth actually works — with definitions, formulas, and founder-usable examples.
Loading dossier…
Acquisition · Finance
The fully loaded cost of acquiring one paying customer, including marketing spend, sales cost, and tooling, divided by the number of customers acquired in that period.
Acquisition · Finance
CAC calculated across all acquisition channels combined, including organic and paid, rather than isolating a single channel.
Acquisition · Finance · Channel
CAC calculated using only paid channel spend and the customers directly attributed to those paid channels.
Acquisition · Channel
New customers who arrive without direct paid spend, typically through search, referrals, word of mouth, or content.
Acquisition · Product · Ops
A staged model of how a stranger becomes a customer, typically moving through awareness, consideration, trial, and purchase.
Acquisition · Channel · Brand
The awareness stage of the funnel where prospects first discover a brand, product, or problem framing.
Acquisition · Channel
The consideration stage where a prospect actively compares options and evaluates whether the product fits their need.
Acquisition · Monetization
The decision stage where a prospect is ready to buy and needs a final push such as pricing clarity, trial, or a sales conversation.
Acquisition · Channel
A person or account that has expressed some interest in a product, typically by sharing contact information or engaging with marketing.
Acquisition · Channel
A lead that meets criteria set by marketing, such as company size or engagement level, indicating they are worth handing to sales.
Acquisition · Channel · Finance
A lead that sales has vetted and confirmed has budget, authority, need, and timeline to plausibly become a customer.
Product · Acquisition · Monetization
A user whose in-product behavior, such as inviting teammates or hitting a usage threshold, signals they are ready to buy or upgrade.
Acquisition · Finance · Channel
The set of open deals in progress, organized by stage, along with their expected value and probability of closing.
Acquisition · Channel · Ops
The practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that influenced it.
Channel · Ops
An attribution model that distributes credit for a conversion across every touchpoint in the customer journey, not just one.
Channel · Ops
An attribution model that gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint before purchase.
Channel · Ops
An attribution model that gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the first touchpoint that brought the prospect into awareness.
Channel · Acquisition · Brand
The practice of improving a site's content and technical structure so it ranks higher in organic search results for relevant queries.
Channel · Acquisition
Paid advertising placed on search engine results pages, typically bidding on keywords so ads appear above organic results.
Channel · Product · Acquisition
Generating large numbers of search-optimized pages from structured data and templates rather than writing each page individually.
Channel · Brand · Acquisition
Creating and distributing useful, relevant content to attract and retain an audience, rather than directly advertising a product.
Channel · Acquisition
A strategy that attracts prospects through valuable content and experiences rather than interrupting them with outbound outreach.
Channel · Acquisition
Proactively reaching prospects who have not expressed interest, through channels like cold email, cold calling, or display ads.
Channel · Acquisition
Direct contact, usually email, LinkedIn, or phone, with a prospect who has no prior relationship with the sender.
Channel · Acquisition
A go-to-market motion where the founder personally runs early sales conversations, demos, and closing instead of hiring a sales team.
Channel · Acquisition
A performance-based channel where partners earn a commission for referring customers who convert, tracked via unique links.
Channel · Brand · Acquisition
Partnering with people who have an established audience to promote a product to their followers.
Channel · Acquisition · Finance
Any channel where a company pays directly for exposure or clicks, such as search ads, social ads, or display ads.
Channel · Ops
An external company that resells, implements, or refers a product in exchange for revenue share or referral fees.
Channel · Ops
The content, tools, and training that help a sales team sell more effectively, such as pitch decks, battlecards, and case studies.
Activation · Product
The moment a new user completes the specific action that correlates with them understanding and getting value from the product.
Activation · Product
The specific point in a user's experience where they clearly realize the product's core value, often described as a single memorable insight.
Activation · Product
The elapsed time between a user signing up and experiencing the product's core value for the first time.
Activation · Product
The guided sequence of steps that helps a new user set up and reach initial value in a product.
Ops · Product
The single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers and that growth efforts ultimately aim to move.
Product · Ops
The state where a product satisfies strong market demand well enough that growth becomes a matter of scaling distribution rather than fixing the offering.
Product · Ops
The smallest version of a product that can be released to real users to test a core hypothesis with the least effort.
Product · Ops
A framework for understanding customer motivation by focusing on the underlying job a customer is 'hiring' a product to do, rather than demographics.
Product · Activation
The share of eligible users who try and continue using a specific feature after it becomes available to them.
Product · Retention
A feature that, once used, strongly increases the probability a user keeps returning to the product.
Product · Retention
A user who engages with a product far more frequently or deeply than the typical user, often driving disproportionate value or advocacy.
Product · Retention · Activation
A repeating cycle of trigger, action, and reward that causes a user to return to a product without conscious deliberation.
Product · Retention
The degree to which users actively interact with a product, typically measured by frequency, depth, or duration of use.
Product · Retention
The count of unique users who take a meaningful action in a product on a given day.
Product · Retention
The count of unique users who take a meaningful action in a product within a rolling seven-day window.
Product · Retention
The count of unique users who take a meaningful action in a product within a rolling thirty-day window.
Product · Retention
The ratio of daily active users to monthly active users, indicating what share of monthly users engage on any given day.
Acquisition · Ops · Product
A description of the type of company or person most likely to buy, succeed with, and stay retained on a product.
Acquisition · Brand
A semi-fictional representation of a specific type of buyer, built from research into their goals, objections, and behavior.
Product · Monetization · Channel
A purchasing motion where a customer can sign up, configure, and pay for a product without talking to a salesperson.
Product · Acquisition · Channel
A go-to-market strategy where the product itself, rather than marketing or sales, is the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion.
Channel · Acquisition
A go-to-market strategy where a human sales team drives most new revenue through outbound prospecting, demos, and negotiated deals.
Ops · Product
A secondary metric monitored alongside a primary goal metric to make sure optimizing for the goal does not damage something else important.
Ops · Product
A metric that changes before an outcome occurs, giving early warning of a future result such as churn or revenue growth.
Ops · Finance
A metric that reflects the outcome of past actions, such as revenue or churn, and only changes after the underlying cause has already occurred.
Ops · Product
The practice of testing a change against a control group to measure its true causal effect on a metric before rolling it out broadly.
Ops
A measure of confidence that a result observed in an experiment is real and not just due to random chance.
Retention
The rate at which customers or users continue using a product or paying for it over a given period of time.
Retention
The rate at which customers stop using a product or cancel a subscription over a given period.
Retention · Finance
The percentage of distinct paying customer accounts that cancel in a period, regardless of how much revenue each represented.
Retention · Finance
The amount of recurring revenue lost to cancellations and downgrades in a period, expressed in currency rather than customer count.
Retention · Finance · Ops
Customer loss caused by failed payments, such as an expired card, rather than an active decision to cancel.
Retention
Customer loss caused by an active decision to cancel, typically due to lack of value, price, or a switch to a competitor.
Retention · Ops
Grouping users by a shared starting point, like signup month, and tracking how their behavior evolves over time relative to that starting point.
Retention · Ops
A short questionnaire presented to a customer at the moment they cancel, asking why they are leaving.
Retention · Channel
A targeted outreach effort aimed at re-engaging customers who have churned or gone inactive.
Retention · Monetization
A discount, pause option, or downgrade presented to a customer at the moment of cancellation to prevent them from leaving entirely.
Retention · Ops
A team function focused on proactively helping customers achieve their goals with a product, in order to drive retention and expansion.
Retention · Ops · Product
A composite score, built from usage and engagement signals, that estimates how likely a customer is to renew or churn.
Retention · Finance
The point at which a customer's contract or subscription continues into a new term, either automatically or through an active decision.
Brand · Retention
A survey-based metric asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product, scored from -100 to 100 based on promoters minus detractors.
Brand · Retention
A survey metric that asks customers to rate their satisfaction with a specific interaction, such as a support ticket, usually on a 1-5 scale.
Retention · Ops
A survey metric measuring how much effort a customer had to expend to get something done, such as resolving an issue or completing a task.
Monetization · Finance · Ops
The automated process of retrying failed payments and notifying customers when a card fails, before treating the account as churned.
Monetization · Retention
A state where expansion revenue from existing customers, like upsells, exceeds the revenue lost from churned or downgraded customers.
Virality
A measure of viral spread equal to the number of invitations each existing user sends multiplied by the conversion rate of those invitations.
Virality · Product
A repeatable cycle where using a product naturally exposes it to new potential users, who then join and repeat the cycle themselves.
Virality · Acquisition · Channel
A structured incentive program that rewards existing customers for bringing in new customers, typically with a discount or credit for both sides.
Virality · Product · Brand
A dynamic where a product becomes more valuable to each user as more people use it.
Virality · Brand · Channel
Organic recommendation of a product from one person to another, without direct incentive or company involvement.
Virality · Product
A specific in-product feature that prompts a user to bring in other people, such as team invites, shared documents, or collaborative links.
Virality
The average time it takes for one user to invite another and for that invitee to convert and send their own invitations.
Virality · Acquisition
A queue that prospective users join before a product is fully available, often used to manage demand or build anticipation.
Monetization · Finance
The total revenue a business expects to earn from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship.
Finance · Monetization
The ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost, used as a shorthand for whether growth spend is sustainable.
Finance · Monetization
The number of months it takes for the gross margin from a customer to cover the cost of acquiring them.
Monetization · Product · Acquisition
A pricing model offering a free tier with limited functionality alongside a paid tier with full functionality.
Monetization · Activation · Acquisition
A time-limited period during which a prospect can use the full paid product before being asked to pay.
Monetization
Selling an existing customer a higher tier of the same product, typically with more features, usage, or seats.
Monetization
Selling an existing customer a different product or add-on beyond what they originally purchased.
Finance · Monetization
The predictable revenue a subscription business expects to receive every month from active customers.
Finance · Monetization
The annualized value of recurring revenue, typically calculated as monthly recurring revenue multiplied by twelve.
Finance · Monetization
Total revenue divided by the total number of active users in a period, showing average monetization per user.
Finance · Monetization
Total revenue divided by the total number of paying accounts, commonly used in B2B where 'account' may include multiple seats.
Retention · Monetization · Finance
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from an existing customer cohort over a period, including expansions, contractions, and churn.
Retention · Finance
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from an existing customer cohort, counting churn and downgrades but excluding any expansion revenue.
Monetization · Finance
Additional recurring revenue earned from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, or seat growth, rather than new customer acquisition.
Ops · Finance
The total revenue opportunity available if a product achieved 100% market share of everyone who could theoretically buy it.
Ops · Finance
The portion of the total addressable market that a specific product can realistically serve given its current business model, geography, and positioning.
Ops · Finance
The realistic share of the serviceable addressable market a company can capture in a defined time period given its resources and competition.
Finance · Ops
The rate at which a company spends its cash reserves each month, net of revenue.
Finance · Ops
The number of months a company can continue operating at its current burn rate before running out of cash.
Finance · Monetization
The direct revenues and costs associated with a single customer or transaction, used to judge whether the business model is fundamentally profitable.
Finance
Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering a product or service, expressed as a percentage of revenue.
Finance
Revenue minus all variable costs associated with a customer or unit, showing how much each additional sale contributes toward fixed costs and profit.
Finance · Ops
A SaaS benchmark stating that a healthy company's growth rate plus profit margin should sum to roughly 40% or more.
Finance · Ops
A ratio of net new annualized revenue generated to the sales and marketing spend from the prior period, used to gauge go-to-market efficiency.
Monetization · Finance
A pricing model where customers pay based on how much of the product they actually consume, rather than a flat recurring fee.
Monetization · Finance
A pricing model where customers pay per individual user license, or seat, added to the account.
Monetization · Product · Finance
The specific unit a pricing model charges against, chosen because it scales in proportion to the value a customer receives.
Monetization · Finance
The maximum price a customer is willing to pay for a product before deciding it's not worth the cost.
Monetization · Brand
A pricing tactic that presents a higher reference price first so a subsequent price feels more reasonable by comparison.
Monetization · Finance
Reducing a product's list price, usually to accelerate a purchase decision or win a competitive deal.
Monetization · Product
A restriction that blocks access to content or features until a user pays or upgrades.
Monetization · Finance
Allowing existing customers to keep their original pricing or plan terms even after a company changes its pricing for new customers.
Finance · Monetization
The average annualized revenue value of a single customer contract, commonly used in B2B sales to size deals.
Monetization · Channel
A go-to-market motion that starts with a small initial deal, then grows the account over time through upsells and cross-sells.
Brand · Product
The deliberate choice of how a product is understood relative to alternatives in a customer's mind, including category and key differentiator.
Brand
The extent to which potential customers recognize and recall a brand, whether prompted or unprompted.
Brand
The commercial value a brand holds beyond its functional product, such as the premium customers will pay or the trust that speeds up decisions.
Brand · Product
Defining a new market category rather than competing within an existing one, so the company can be seen as the category's leader by definition.
Brand · Channel
Publishing original insight or opinion in a domain to build credibility and authority with an audience.
Brand · Ops
The reputation a company has as a place to work, which shapes its ability to attract and retain talent.
Brand · Product · Ops
A structural advantage that protects a business from competitors copying its success, such as network effects, data, brand, or switching costs.
Channel · Brand · Retention
A go-to-market strategy where a community of users, not paid marketing or sales, drives awareness, support, and advocacy for a product.
Ops
A cross-functional team, often spanning product, engineering, marketing, and data, dedicated to running rapid experiments across the funnel.
Product · Acquisition · Ops
A closed-loop system where an output of the product's use becomes an input that drives more usage or acquisition, rather than a one-directional funnel.
Ops · Brand · Product
A business model where multiple reinforcing loops build momentum over time, so each part of the business makes every other part easier.
Channel · Finance · Ops
The average time elapsed between a lead entering the sales pipeline and the deal closing, either won or lost.
Channel · Finance · Ops
A composite measure of how quickly and how much revenue moves through the sales pipeline, combining deal count, size, win rate, and cycle length.
Channel · Finance
The percentage of sales opportunities that close as won deals out of all opportunities that reach a decision.
Channel · Ops
The revenue or deal target a sales representative is expected to hit within a given period, typically a quarter.
Product · Brand
A systematic practice of collecting and synthesizing direct customer feedback to inform product, marketing, and pricing decisions.
Channel · Monetization
A hybrid motion where a customer can largely self-serve but a salesperson steps in at key moments, like a demo or contract negotiation, to help close.
Monetization · Retention
A customer moving from a higher-priced plan to a lower-priced one while remaining a paying customer.