Growth Glossary

Browse 110 growth terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

110 Growth Terms

Activation Rate
The percentage of new users or accounts that complete the key actions defining successful activation, such as finishing onboarding or reaching first value. It...
Active Users
Users who meet a defined activity threshold within a given time window, such as daily active users or monthly active users. The exact definition varies by...
Affiliate Marketing
A marketing model where partners promote a product and earn commissions for referrals, leads, or sales they generate. It is common in e-commerce, software, and...
App Store Optimization
The practice of improving an app's visibility and conversion in app stores through keywords, screenshots, ratings, descriptions, and related listing factors....
ARR Growth Rate
The rate at which annual recurring revenue increases over time, usually measured year over year or quarter over quarter. Investors use it to assess momentum...
B2C
Business-to-consumer, meaning a company sells directly to individual end users rather than other companies. B2C businesses often emphasize brand, distribution,...
Blitzscaling
Blitzscaling is a growth strategy for startups that prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, deliberately accepting high burn rates...
Blitz Strategy
A go-to-market or expansion strategy focused on speed, aggressive execution, and early market capture before competitors can respond. It can work in...
Bottom-Up SaaS
A SaaS go-to-market motion where individual users or small teams adopt the product first, creating internal traction before enterprise expansion or formal...
Business Development
The function focused on forming partnerships, strategic relationships, distribution channels, and other growth opportunities beyond direct product selling....
Capital Efficiency
How effectively a company converts invested capital into growth, revenue, or durable business value. Capital-efficient startups grow meaningfully without...
Code Explosion
A sudden large increase in code volume, branching behavior, or moving parts that makes a system much harder to reason about. In engineering slang, a code...
Cohort
A group of users or customers segmented by a shared characteristic, often start date or acquisition source, so their behavior can be analyzed over time. Cohort...
Co-Marketing
A joint marketing effort between companies, such as webinars, content, events, or announcements, meant to share audience reach and credibility. It is most...
Community Building
The work of creating, sustaining, and strengthening a group of people around a shared interest, product, project, or mission. In tech culture community...
Community-Led Growth
A growth strategy where user communities, practitioner networks, events, and peer-to-peer advocacy drive adoption, trust, and expansion. It differs from pure...
Compound Growth
Growth that builds on prior growth so gains accumulate multiplicatively over time rather than linearly. Startups care about compounding because small rate...
Continuous Learning
A mindset and practice of ongoing learning rather than treating education as something finished after school or onboarding. In tech culture continuous learning...
Conversion Funnel
The sequence of stages users move through from awareness to signup, purchase, or another desired action, with drop-off measured at each step. Funnel analysis...
Conversion Rate
The percentage of people who take a desired action out of the total who had the chance, such as visitors who sign up or leads who become customers. It is one...
Cost Per Acquisition
The average cost to acquire a customer or user through a specific campaign or channel, often used in performance marketing. It can be narrower and more...
Curiosity
A genuine desire to explore, understand, and ask questions beyond immediate necessity. In tech culture curiosity is often treated as one of the strongest...
Customer Acquisition
The process of attracting and converting new customers through marketing, sales, partnerships, or product-led motion. Acquisition quality matters as much as...
Customer Acquisition Cost
The average total cost of acquiring a new customer, usually including sales and marketing expenses over a defined period. Customer acquisition cost is one of...
Customer Expansion
Growth in revenue or usage from existing customers through seat increases, added products, higher tiers, or larger deployment scope. For many SaaS companies,...
Customer Retention
The ability of a business to keep customers over time rather than losing them to churn. Strong customer retention is often a better sign of product-market fit...
DAU
Daily active users, a metric counting users who meet a product's activity threshold on a given day. DAU is useful only when the definition of 'active' actually...
Demand Generation
Marketing work aimed at creating awareness, interest, and qualified pipeline for the sales process rather than just collecting raw leads. Strong demand...
Durable Growth
Growth that is likely to persist because it is supported by strong retention, healthy economics, and repeatable demand rather than one-time spikes or...
Economics of Scale
The cost advantages that emerge as a business grows, spreading fixed costs or improving purchasing, infrastructure, and process efficiency at higher volume....
Engagement
The depth, frequency, or quality of user interaction with a product, content, or workflow. Engagement is useful only when tied to behaviors that actually...
Event-Driven Growth
A growth strategy that depends significantly on conferences, launches, webinars, meetups, or other timed events to create awareness, demand, and pipeline. It...
Exploding Complexity
A rapid increase in complexity caused by combinatorial states, coupled systems, or too many conditionals and exceptions. In engineering slang, exploding...
Flywheel
A self-reinforcing business cycle where each component accelerates the next. Amazon's flywheel: more customers → more sellers → more selection → lower prices →...
Free Trial
A limited period during which prospective customers can use a product before paying, usually to reduce purchase friction and drive activation. Trial design...
Friction
Any obstacle, delay, confusion, or extra effort that slows users or buyers from taking the next desired action. In product and growth work, removing friction...
Frictionless
Describing an experience designed to minimize effort, delay, or complexity for the user. The term is often aspirational because real businesses still need...
Funnel Metric
A metric tied to a specific stage or transition within a user or sales funnel, such as click-through, signup completion, qualified-opportunity rate, or...
Geo-Expansion
Growth through entering new geographic regions, countries, or local markets. Geo-expansion introduces upside but also new operational, legal, and distribution...
Gone Viral
Describing content, a product, or a moment that spreads extremely quickly across networks and attracts sudden widespread attention. In internet culture the...
Growth Culture
A culture strongly oriented toward growth in users, revenue, reach, or influence, often with experimentation and speed emphasized heavily. Growth culture can...
Growth Loop
A self-reinforcing cycle where the output of one growth activity becomes the input for the next — users create content, content attracts new users, new users...
Growth Marketing
Marketing focused on measurable experimentation and conversion improvement across the full customer lifecycle, not just brand awareness. Growth marketing...
Growth Metric
A metric used to track whether the business is expanding in the desired way, such as new users, retention, revenue, or engagement depth. Choosing the wrong...
Growth Rate
The speed at which a business metric such as revenue, users, or bookings increases over time. Growth rate is simple to state but only meaningful when paired...
High-Growth
Describing a company or market expanding at a notably fast rate, often attracting investor attention and operational strain at the same time. High-growth...
Hockeystick
A growth curve that stays modest for a while and then rises sharply, resembling a hockey stick. The phrase is common in startup pitch decks and often invites...
Hockey Stick Growth
A revenue or user growth pattern that resembles a hockey stick when graphed — flat for a period, then suddenly turning sharply upward. The chart every VC wants...
Hypergrowth
An extreme phase of rapid company expansion across revenue, headcount, and operations, often faster than internal systems can comfortably support. Hypergrowth...
Inflection Point
The moment when a startup's growth rate fundamentally changes — from struggling to thriving, or from linear to exponential. In mathematics, where the curve...
Late Stage
Describing companies that are relatively mature by startup standards, with substantial revenue, larger teams, and closer proximity to liquidity events such as...
Level Up
To improve significantly in skill, maturity, capability, or technical sophistication. In engineering slang, leveling up can refer to people, teams, tooling, or...
Linear Growth
Growth that increases by roughly the same absolute amount each period rather than compounding. In startup settings, linear growth is often less attractive than...
Market Development
Growth by entering new markets or customer segments with an existing product rather than inventing a new product entirely. It is one of the classic paths in...
Market Expansion
Broadening a company's presence into additional customer segments, geographies, use cases, or demand pools beyond its original core market. Market expansion...
Market Penetration
The extent to which a product has been adopted within its target market, often measured as a share of customers, households, or businesses in that segment. It...
Mentoring
A relationship where an experienced developer guides a less experienced one through code reviews, career advice, pair programming, and knowledge sharing.
Monthly Active Users
The number of users who meet a defined activity threshold within a monthly period. Monthly active users is often the long-form expression behind the acronym...
Multivariate Testing
An experimentation method that tests combinations of multiple variable changes at the same time to understand both individual and interaction effects. It is...
Net Dollar Retention
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, accounting for expansion (upsells), contraction (downgrades), and churn....
Net New ARR
The increase in annual recurring revenue over a period after adding new business and expansion while subtracting churn and contraction. It is a cleaner growth...
Network Effect
A phenomenon where a product becomes more valuable as more people use it. The telephone is the classic example: one phone is useless; a billion phones form the...
North Star Metric
The single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers. Unlike vanity metrics (page views, downloads), the North Star Metric...
Opt-In
An explicit action by a user agreeing to receive communication, enable a feature, or participate in a program. Opt-in mechanics matter for compliance, trust,...
Organic Growth
Growth that comes from the company's own product, brand, word of mouth, and repeatable internal efforts rather than acquisitions or artificial boosts. Organic...
Paid Acquisition
Customer acquisition driven by paid channels such as ads, sponsorships, or promoted placements rather than organic or referral growth. Paid acquisition works...
PLG
Product-Led Growth — a go-to-market strategy where the product itself drives acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Users discover value through a free tier...
Product Adoption
The degree to which target users or customers begin using a product or feature in a meaningful, sustained way. Adoption is stronger than simple signup because...
Product-Channel Fit
The degree to which a product matches the economics, behavior, and expectations of a specific distribution channel. A product can be good and still fail if the...
Product-Led Growth
A business strategy where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Users try the product for free, love it,...
Product-Market Fit
The point at which a product satisfies strong market demand — users actively seek it out, retention is high, and growth becomes organic. Marc Andreessen's...
Profitability
The state of generating profit rather than loss over a defined period or on a particular unit of business. Startups often trade off profitability against...
Propensity Model
A predictive model estimating how likely a user, lead, or customer is to take a specific action such as converting, churning, or upgrading. It is often used in...
Rapid Growth
A phase where users, revenue, or operations are expanding quickly enough to strain existing systems and assumptions. Rapid growth is exciting, but it often...
Re-engagement
The effort to bring inactive or declining users and customers back into meaningful product usage through messaging, incentives, or product changes....
Referral
A prospect, customer, or opportunity introduced by an existing user, partner, investor, or other trusted source. Referral-driven growth tends to convert well...
Referral Program
A structured system that encourages existing users or customers to refer others, usually with incentives, credits, or rewards. Referral programs work best when...
Regional Expansion
Growth through entering additional regions with tailored support, compliance, sales, or operations. Regional expansion looks simple on slides but usually...
Retention
Retention in product and business context measures the percentage of users or customers who continue using a product or service over time. It is widely...
Revenue Expansion
Growth in revenue from existing customers through seats, usage, pricing upgrades, or new product adoption. Revenue expansion is a major driver of strong net...
Revenue Growth
The increase in revenue over time, often measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. Revenue growth matters because it reflects commercial progress more directly...
Revenue Per User
The average amount of revenue generated per user over a defined time period. It is often used to compare monetization efficiency across segments, products, or...
Sales Led Growth
A growth model in which direct sales is the primary engine of customer acquisition and expansion rather than purely self-serve or product-led motion. It is...
Scalability
The ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources. In startup pitch decks, it's the claim that your business...
Scale
To grow a company, product, or system without letting complexity or cost rise so fast that progress collapses. In startup language, scaling implies...
Scale Stage
The phase where a company moves beyond proving demand and focuses on expanding a repeatable engine across customers, teams, and systems. Scale-stage companies...
Scaling
The process of growing capacity, customers, and organization while trying to preserve quality, economics, and speed. Scaling challenges are usually as much...
Scaling Challenge
A problem that emerges when a business or system grows beyond what its current processes, tools, or structure can comfortably handle. Scaling challenges often...
Scaling Culture
The set of changes a company must make to preserve healthy collaboration, quality, and clarity as headcount, product scope, and operational complexity...
S-Curve
A pattern in which growth starts slowly, accelerates rapidly, and later tapers as a market or product matures, forming an S-shaped curve. Startups use S-curve...
Self-Serve
Describing a product or buying experience that lets users sign up, onboard, and get value without direct help from a salesperson or implementation team....
Senior Engineer Plateau
A stage where an engineer appears to stall at senior level because expectations shift from execution to broader influence, leverage, and ambiguity handling.
Series A
The first significant round of venture capital financing, typically raising $5-20M at a $20-100M valuation. Comes after seed funding and requires evidence of...
Series B
A financing round that typically follows Series A and is often used to scale go-to-market, product breadth, and organizational capacity once some repeatability...
Startup
A young company built to discover and scale a business model under uncertainty, usually with ambitions for significant growth rather than only stable...
Startup Culture
The mix of speed, ambiguity, role fluidity, resource constraints, and growth pressure commonly associated with early-stage companies. The phrase can refer to...
Startup Metric
Any measurement commonly used to understand startup health, such as burn, runway, activation, retention, ARR, or CAC. The phrase is generic, but in practice...
T2D3
A SaaS growth shorthand meaning triple, triple, double, double, double annual growth over five years. It is used as an aspirational benchmark for breakout...
Tipping Point
The moment when enough momentum, adoption, or market change accumulates that growth begins accelerating more naturally on its own. Startups look for tipping...
Traction
Evidence that a company is gaining real momentum, such as revenue growth, usage, retention, customer demand, or other signs the market is pulling the product....
Trial Conversion
The rate at which users who start a free trial become paying customers. Improving trial conversion often requires aligning onboarding, activation, and pricing...
Under-Monetized
Generating less revenue than the underlying usage, value delivered, or market willingness to pay would support. A product can be under-monetized because...
User Acquisition
The process of getting new users into the product through marketing, referrals, partnerships, or product-led loops. User acquisition quality matters because...
User Base
The total population of users currently using or registered for a product. Teams often segment the user base by activity, persona, geography, or plan to...
User Growth
The increase in user count over time, whether measured by signups, active users, or another defined user metric. User growth becomes meaningful only when...
Value Ladder
A structured sequence of offers or product levels designed to move customers from lower-commitment entry points to higher-value purchases over time. A value...
Viral Coefficient
A metric estimating how many additional users each existing user brings in on average through invitations or sharing. When the viral coefficient is above one,...
Viral Growth
Growth driven significantly by users bringing in other users through sharing, invitations, or social visibility. Viral growth is powerful because acquisition...
Weekly Active Users
The number of users who meet an activity threshold within a weekly period. Weekly active users is the long-form expression behind the acronym WAU.
Win-Back
An effort to re-acquire former customers or users who previously churned. Win-back strategies work best when the product or circumstances have genuinely...

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