Glossary

The SaaS meme glossary

Every meme here speaks fluent founder. This is the plain-English translation: the vocabulary of MRR, churn, runway and vibe coding, defined for anyone who has felt these words before they could explain them.

ARR: ARR (annual recurring revenue) is MRR multiplied by twelve, the bigger number founders reach for in pitch decks and milestone tweets. It is the same revenue, dressed up for investors.
Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping is building a company on its own revenue instead of outside funding. It trades the rush of a big raise for the slow freedom of owning every decision, and every bill.
Build in public: Building in public is sharing the messy process of building a startup as it happens: the metrics, the failures, the small wins. It is part marketing strategy, part group therapy, performed mostly for other founders.
Build trap: The build trap is the habit of shipping feature after feature without asking whether anyone wants them. It feels productive and looks like progress, which is exactly what makes it a trap.
Burn rate: Burn rate is how fast a startup spends its cash each month. Paired with runway, it is the quiet countdown clock founders try very hard not to look at.
Churn: Churn is the rate at which customers cancel and leave. It is the number that arrives the week you finally relax, the slow leak that no amount of new signups quite fixes.
Distribution: Distribution is how a product reaches the people who would use it. Founders learn, usually too late, that distribution beats quality, and that building the thing was never the hard part.
Dogfooding: Dogfooding is using your own product the way a customer would, to feel its rough edges firsthand. It is the fastest way to discover that the onboarding you built is, in fact, terrible.
Fake it till you make it: Fake it till you make it is projecting more confidence, traction, or stability than you actually have, hoping reality catches up. For founders it is less a tactic than a daily survival mechanism.
Indie hacker: An indie hacker is a founder who builds and runs a small software business mostly alone, often bootstrapped. The job is every job at once, measured in MRR screenshots and shipped on optimism.
MRR: MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is the predictable revenue a SaaS collects every month. It is also the scoreboard founders refresh far more often than is healthy, the number their mood quietly depends on.
One-person company: A one-person company is a business where one human is the CEO, the engineer, the marketer, and the support team. It runs on context switching, caffeine, and a stubborn refusal to hire.
Product-market fit: Product-market fit is the moment a product so clearly solves a real need that growth starts to pull itself. Founders chase it for years and usually only recognize it in the rear-view mirror.
Ramen profitable: Ramen profitable describes a startup earning just enough to cover its founders' basic living costs. It is not wealth, it is runway made of revenue: the point where you can keep going indefinitely on instant noodles.
Runway: Runway is how many months a startup can survive before it runs out of cash. It is measured in dread, recalculated after every expense, and the most sobering number on any founder's spreadsheet.
Ship fast: Shipping fast is treating speed as the core strategy: deploy, learn, repeat, polish later. It is the small team's only real edge, and occasionally the reason production is on fire.
Vibe coding: Vibe coding is building software mostly by prompting an AI and trusting the result, guided by intuition rather than line-by-line review. It ships features at incredible speed and bugs nobody can quite explain.
Zero customers: Zero customers is the founding condition of every startup and the lonely reality of most for longer than expected. It is the silence after launch, the dashboard that stays flat, the motivation problem nobody warns you about.
Zero to one: Zero to one is creating something genuinely new rather than copying what already exists. It is the hardest and most celebrated kind of startup work, and far rarer than pitch decks suggest.