📜 108 Business 'Vocabulary' Words for the Startup Entrepreneur - Issue #9

Mar 19, 2022

Whether you are planning to start an entrepreneurship journey or already at the initial phase, you’d likely need to know common words business people use in day-to-day activities. Today’s issue will add 108 common words into your business ‘vocabulary’ in the following order:

People
Business
Marketing
Finance
Analytics
No-code

Wantrepreneur: an idea person that haven’t started execution yet.
Technical founders: founders who are well-equipped with tech-related skills such as programming.
Non-technical founders: founders with the main idea and/or business related roles such as strategic planning, execution, partnership and business development.
Serial entrepreneur: someone who launches multiple businesses either simultaneously or one after another.
Hipster: designer of the product i.e., Chief Designing Officer (CDO).
Hustler: seller of the product i.e., CEO or COO.
Hacker: builder of the product i.e., CTO.
Angels: individuals that provide capital for startups at initial stage.
VCs: private firms that provide capital for (1) viable startups so they can develop and (2) already established businesses so they can expand.
Board of directors (B of D): representatives of shareholders who supervise the activities of a company.
Target market: your ideal buyers.
Early adopters: are the first users of your product.
Evangelists: buyers who strongly believe in the product and convince others to adopt it.

Startups: emerging companies based on perceived demand for certain product or service, usually less than three years old.
Cottage business: business that produce goods in small scale and in a decentralized manner.
Unicorn: companies valued at over $1 billion.
Decacorn: companies valued at over $10 billion.
Hectocorn: companies valued at over $100 billion.
Dragon: startups that raise over $1 billion in one single round.
Ecosystem: formed by people, startups in their various stages and various types of organizations in a location (physical and/or virtual), interacting as a system to create new startup companies.
Consumer products: businesses that produce products which is used by buyers.
Enterprise products: businesses that produce products which is used by companies.
Software as a service (SaaS): a tech product with features that customers can use under a subscription such as paying a monthly fee for hosting or using an email marketing platform.
Platform as a service (PaaS): a cloud computing model where a third-party provider delivers hardware and software tools to users over the internet.
Alpha release: first release of software which may contain serious errors and is incomplete, but functional.
Beta release: second release of software that is given out to a large group of users to try under real conditions, and is likely to contain bugs.
Disruption: products and business models that introduce an innovation that makes a significant difference in the market and the world.
Business model canvas: a visual strategic management template used for developing new business models and documenting existing ones by categorizing the key areas of business such as customer segments, value proposition, key partners, revenue model and acquisition channels.
Roadmap: a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of a product offering over time.
Lean: performance-oriented business that maximizes value while minimizing waste.
Agility: the ability to iteratively and incrementally develop a product while testing quickly.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP): the first versions of the product that only include the core features that aim to test the riskiest assumptions before building the next versions with more advanced features.
Prototype: an early model or sample of a planned final product created to test its performance, solicit feedback and introduce to investors.
Usability: a measure of how well a product can be used effectively and efficiently allowing users to accomplish the desired outcome with maximum clarity/ease of use.
Accessibility: the degree a product and its features are accessible to the target market.
Scalability: the ability of a business to perform well under increased workload or market demand.
Stealth mode: a temporary state of secretiveness about upcoming products or services so as not to alert potential competition.
Value proposition: a short statement that communicates why buyers should chose your products or services.
Competitive advantage: an attribute that makes a customer choose your business over another one.
First mover advantage: resource, brand loyalty, technology, customer acquisition and other advantages of a company that enters the market first.
Sweat equity: non-monetary contribution (such as time, skills and knowledge) that individuals or founders of a company make towards a business venture.
Term sheet: nonbinding agreement that is used as a starting point for negotiations by setting out the basic conditions for making investment.
Cap table: a spreadsheet/table that contains a list of all the stakes your company has issued with the respective owners.
SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) note: documents that startups often use to help raise seed capital by allowing an investor to purchase a specified number of shares for an agreed-upon price at some point in the future.
Vesting: a process by which an employee is rewarded with shares or stock options but receives the full rights to them (1) over a set period of time (usually 4 years) or (2) after achieving certain milestones.
Cliff: the vesting of employee benefits over a short period of time (usually at least 1 year).
Pitch deck: a brief presentation that gives potential investors or clients an overview of your business plan, products, services and growth traction.
Incubators: organizations that help flesh out business ideas (of early-phase startups) by providing mentorship, capital, and connections to investors and business partners.
Accelerators: organizations that speed up the growth of existing companies that already have a minimum viable product (MVP)
Iteration: minor changes to the product, target buyer or any important aspect of the business model.
Pivot: a major change to the business model such as the way you make money, ideal customer profile or the solution (product).
Mergers: a legal consolidation of two companies into one.
Acquisitions: a purchase of one company by another.
Exit strategy: a plan that a founder or owner of a business makes to sell their company, or share in a company, to other investors or other firms (through an IPO or mergers and acquisitions).
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Demographic: the age, gender, income, schooling, occupation and related characteristics of your ideal customers.
Traction: the progress and the momentum a start-up gains as the business grows.
Search engine optimization (SEO): strategies and tactics through which companies can gain higher search engine ranking.
Inbound marketing: a methodology of attracting your ideal customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them such as guides, educational videos, trainings, podcasts and Infographics.
Outbound marketing: a methodology in which a company pays platforms like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn to initiate and push its product to potential customers or leads.
Funnel: a model that shows the way a potential customer goes from becoming aware of your brand to purchasing a good or service.
Chasm: the technology adoption lifecycle, or the transition from the early market into the mainstream eye.
Freemium: a two-tiered user acquisition strategy (for SaaS) where the cheapest, most basic product tie is free while enticing subscribers to upgrade to paid plans for more features and advantages.
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Revenue: the amount you generate before paying expenses.
Income: revenue minus expense.
Cashflow: the amount of money flowing in and out of the business.
Free cash flow (FCF): the amount cash left in the business after paying expenditures.
Burn/Burn rate: an amount that startup will spend over a predetermined period.
Runway: the number of months a startup can keep operating before it’s out of money.
Return on investment (ROI): the return an investor receives relate to the investment they made.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): the amount of predictable revenue that a company can expect to receive on a monthly basis.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): the amount of predictable revenue that a company can expect to receive on an annual basis.
Run rate: the projected (future) performance of a startup based on current financial data.
Trailing 12-months (TTM): the past 12 consecutive months of a company’s performance data used for reporting financial figures.
Bridge loan (also known as swing loans): a loan taken out for a short-term period, typically between two weeks and three years, until long-term financing can be arranged.
Bootstrapping: the process of starting a startup with the personal resource of the founder or revenue generated by the company itself.
Crowdfunding: a new funding model that allows entrepreneurs to raise money from a large group of backers or angel investors (typically via online platforms) without necessarily going through the venture capital route.
Angel round: a small funding round designed to get a new company off the ground.
Seed round: the first official equity funding stage right after an angel round, although there is no required sequence to follow.
Series A, B, C: funding that comes after seed round, a Series A round tend to have reached product-market fit and the funds will help them scale faster. Series B and C are for startups that continue to grow towards an acquisition or IPO.
Initial public offering (IPO): when a startup’s share of stock are made public for the first time.
The valley of death: the span of time from the moment a startup has begun operations until it finally begins generating revenue.

Pre-money valuation: the value of a company’s equity before raising a round of financing.
Post-money valuation: the value of a company’s equity once the round of financing has occurred.
Key performance indicators (KPI’s): the metrics by which startups judge their performance, progress and targets.
Total Available Market (TAM): the total market demand for a product or service.
Serviceable Available Market (SAM): the segment of the TAM targeted by your products and services which is within your geographical reach.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): the portion of SAM that you can capture.
Lifetime value of the customer (LTV or CLV): the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer account throughout the business relationship.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC): the amount of money a company spends to get a new customer.
Churn: the percentage of paying users stop using the service/product.
Retention: a company’s or product’s ability to retain customers over time.
Bounce: a metric that measures how long website visitors spend on the page before leaving.
A/B testing: a user experience research methodology to compare two versions of a single variable, typically by testing a subject’s response to variant A against variant B, and determining which of the two variants is more effective.
Product-Market fit: a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product in numbers large enough to sustain that product’s growth and profitability.
Hockey stick growth: a sudden and extremely rapid growth after a long period of linear growth.
Growth hacking: using unconventional strategies to fuel exponential growth at costs significantly lower than the “average” amounts needed to accomplish the same result.
Product-led growth (PLG): a business methodology in which user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by the product itself.
Scale up: a company that has already validated its product in a market and is economically sustainable.

“Scaleups are companies growing at 20% per year over the past three years.” - Endeavor
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Visual development: an approach to program development that allows users without coding knowledge to create what they need through visually applied methods such as drag-and-drop.
Drag and drop: a way of building something visually i.e., taking (dragging) the content blocks you need (for example, items or an image) and ‘dropping’ to the desired place in your project.
No-code: a method of building applications through tools such as drag-and-drop as opposed to writing code.
Low-code: the slightly grey area between zero code and code in order to build applications and processes.
Embed: to add a document so it appears with the rest of your content, rather than linking to it externally.
Content management system (CMS): a type of application that is used to manage and publish web content, like blog posts, images, videos, and various other types of collections without needing to use code.
Integration: the process of making one or more apps or tools work together.
Responsive design: an approach to web design that makes web pages detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly.
Plug-and-play: products or tools that you just sign up for and can start using right away without needing to install software to make it work.
Email marketing service (EMS): a service that facilitate email marketing such as Mailchimp.
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That's it for today! Have a fantastic weekend 🙂

𝗪𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 | 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲 💵

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