The essential dictionary of concepts, metrics, and technologies for the AI-augmented founder.
A business process where AI agents handle decision-making and execution autonomously, with minimal human intervention.
An AI system that autonomously perceives its environment, reasons through tasks, and takes actions using tools to achieve a goal.
A product built primarily by wrapping an existing LLM API with a UI, without a meaningful proprietary data or workflow layer.
The annualized value of all active subscription contracts — the primary health metric for SaaS businesses.
A development approach where functionality is designed as APIs before any UI, making the product composable and integrable.
Using software to perform tasks with minimal or no human input — ranging from simple rule-based scripts to sophisticated AI workflows.
The percentage of customers or revenue lost in a given period — the single biggest destroyer of SaaS value.
An unsolicited email sent to a prospect with whom you have no prior relationship, used to generate B2B sales pipeline.
Creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and drive profitable action.
The maximum amount of text an LLM can process in a single interaction — measured in tokens.
The total cost to acquire one paying customer, including sales, marketing, and tooling.
The total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire relationship.
Serverless code that runs in data centers geographically close to users, reducing latency for dynamic requests.
The ability of emails to reach recipients' inboxes rather than spam folders — a technical and reputational challenge.
Numerical vector representations of text that encode semantic meaning, enabling similarity search and clustering.
Providing an LLM with 2–10 examples of the desired input-output format before asking it to complete a new task.
The process of further training a pre-trained LLM on a domain-specific dataset to improve its performance on targeted tasks.
A sales motion where the founder personally handles customer discovery, demos, and deal closing in the early stages.
A pricing model where a core version of a product is free, with premium features available on a paid tier.
The simplest version of a product that delivers enough value to attract early customers and validate core assumptions.
The predictable monthly revenue from all active subscriptions, excluding one-time charges.
An architecture where multiple AI agents collaborate, each handling specialized subtasks, to complete complex workflows.
A metric measuring customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend your product on a 0–10 scale.
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers after accounting for upgrades, downgrades, and churn.
The single metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers and predicts long-term company health.
The deliberate act of defining how your product occupies a specific place in customers' minds relative to alternatives.
The structure that determines how a company charges customers — per seat, usage-based, outcome-based, or flat rate.
A go-to-market strategy where the product itself drives user acquisition, conversion, and expansion.
A user who has demonstrated buying intent through product usage behavior — a stronger signal than a marketing-qualified lead.
Creating large volumes of pages by populating a template with structured data — targeting long-tail keyword clusters at scale.
The practice of crafting inputs to LLMs to reliably produce high-quality, structured outputs for a specific task.
A cloud execution model where the provider dynamically manages infrastructure, and you pay only for actual compute used.
A software delivery model where applications are hosted in the cloud and accessed via subscription, rather than installed locally.
A documented, step-by-step process that enables consistent task execution without direct supervision.
A holistic approach to analysis that focuses on how a system's components interrelate and work over time.
The accumulated cost of shortcuts and suboptimal implementation decisions that slow future development.
The basic unit of text that LLMs process — roughly equivalent to 0.75 words in English.
The degree to which Google considers a website a trusted, comprehensive source on a specific subject area.