From Napkin to MVP

AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), aka the Pirate Funnel: Dave McClure's five-stage model that pins one measurable metric to each stage of growth.

Building the product so the API (application programming interface) is the actual product and any dashboard or UI is just a thin layer on top.

The first moment a new user crosses from "signed up" to "got real value," usually pinned to a specific in-product action taken inside a fixed time window.

A tiny version of the product where the founders personally do the work by hand for a few customers, learning the workflow before writing any code to automate it.

The practice of interviewing potential customers before you build anything, to confirm the problem is real and painful enough that someone would actually pay to fix it.

Using your own product in real, daily work so the team feels every bug, missing feature, and bad default before customers do, also called eating your own dog food.

A staged map of the user journey, wide at the top (everyone who could hear about you) and narrow at the bottom (the few who actually act), used to spot where users drop off.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): the tight slice of buyers (industry, size, role, pain, budget) where your product wins fast, loses rarely, and pays the most.

The motion where prospects find you on their own, pulled in by content, SEO, community, word of mouth, or product reputation, rather than by you reaching out first.

A framework that says people don't buy products, they hire them for a specific job, so you should study the job itself, not the buyer's demographics.

The smallest, ugliest, most embarrassing version of your product that still lets you test whether anyone actually wants it.

Giving the core code away free and selling everything around it: hosting, support, enterprise add-ons, or a managed cloud version of the same software.

The motion where the seller reaches out first to people who never asked, usually through cold email, cold calls, or LinkedIn DMs run by sales development reps.

PLG (Product-Led Growth): the motion where the product itself drives signup, activation, and expansion, with users self-onboarding into a free or trial tier before any sales conversation.

PMF (Product-Market Fit): the moment your product stops needing to be pushed onto people and starts getting pulled out of your hands by a market that genuinely wants it.

A structured change of strategy, product, customer, or business model that keeps one foot planted in what the team already learned and swings the other foot somewhere new.

The earliest institutional round, usually $250K to $1M from angels, micro-VCs, or accelerators in exchange for 5% to 10% on a SAFE, raised before real product-market fit.

A pre-MVP test where you fake the product with cardboard, screenshots, or a script just well enough to see if anyone would actually use the real thing.

The share of users from a given cohort who keep using the product after a set window, usually checked at day 1, day 7, day 30, and beyond.

A platform with two groups of users who transact with each other, where your job is to bring both sides on at the same time and take a cut of every match.

A deliberately narrow first product chosen because it cracks open a customer or market you could never win head-on, then lets you expand from inside.

The move where you enter a huge market through one narrow, undeniable use case, win trust and distribution there, then expand outward into adjacent use cases later.

An MVP where users see what looks like a fully automated product, but a human is quietly doing the work behind the scenes, named for the man behind the curtain.