Startup glossary

API-first is a product and engineering approach in which APIs are treated as primary, reusable product interfaces from the start rather than added after an application is already built.

A hair-on-fire problem is a customer problem so urgent, painful, costly, frequent, risky, or embarrassing that the customer is already trying to solve it now.

Also called competitive moat

A moat is a durable competitive advantage that makes it hard for competitors to copy, undercut, replace, or erode a company's business.

A pivot is a structured change in a startup's product, customer, market, business model, channel, technology, or growth strategy after evidence shows that the current path is not working well enough.

Platform risk is the business and technical risk that comes from building a product, distribution channel, workflow, or business model on top of a third-party platform you do not control.

Also called PMF

Product-market fit is the state where a product solves an important problem for a clearly reachable market well enough that demand becomes durable and repeatable.

Technical debt is the future cost of choosing a faster, easier, or locally convenient technical approach now instead of a more sustainable approach that would make future change easier.