Business Development

Vanity metrics are performance statistics that appear impressive at a glance but don’t actually correlate to real-world traction for the business.

A user story is a well-formed, short and simple description of a software requirement from the perspective of an end-user, written in an informal and natural language. It is the main artifact used in the agile software development process to capture user requirements.

A unique selling point (USP) is the differentiating factor that separates your brand, product or service from its competitors. Of course, you want this USP to represent a desirable benefit for users.

Total addressable market (TAM), sometimes referred to as total available market, refers to the size of the financial opportunity a particular product or service offers. It covers the revenue a company or organization could expect to generate if it had 100% market share and reached every single relevant customer in every market.

Much like a shipwreck, a sunk cost (by definition) cannot be recovered. Sunk costs are inevitable in business. And, because they cannot be recovered, they should not be included in any future budgets.

Success requirements are the factors that influence whether or not a SaaS business is successful in achieving its strategic and financial goals.

Success factors are all of the different internal and external influences which can impact the potential success of a business.

Seed capital is a relatively small investment that contributed to a startup at the very earliest stage of the venture.

Sales forecasting refers to a company’s estimation of future product sales, based on a number of factors, such as historical sales data, economic trends, and other brands’ performance.

The Return on Sales (ROS) is a percentage measure, used to indicate how efficiently a business transforms sales into profits, e.g. the amount of profit generated per dollar earned.

Return on Investment, or ROI, shows how profitable an activity was by looking at its upfront cost versus the net profit it produced.

As a term, product analytics concerns the gathering and application of key data, to determine how and why users engage with a digital product. Companies can take advantage of these insights to identify gaps in their user/customer experience, recognize opportunities for growth, and improve their products based on accurate research.

The Price elasticity of demand refers to the change in demand for a product based on alterations to its price. For example, if a popular productivity tool’s price increases within two years of its release, will demand for the product increase, decrease, or remain the same?

Sometimes referred to as the "land and expand" approach, penetration strategy is an approach used by companies (especially in SaaS) to penetrate or infiltrate a new market, or rapidly expand in their current market.

A payback period is the length of time a business expects to pass before it recovers its initial investment in a product or service.

Opportunity cost is the loss of potential gain by selecting one idea or action over another. Whenever you choose to focus on a certain activity — be that a feature builds, software update, marketing campaign or new business venture — there are inherent opportunity losses. This could be measured in time or in money.