Glossary

The terms, defined.

Plain-English definitions for the words that show up in our blog, our proposals, and the AI-search answers that cite us.

• 5-day MVPAn MVP shipped in five business days, with a fixed scope: marketing site, auth, dashboard, database, and one core feature flow.
• AEOAnswer Engine Optimization, structuring content so search engines and AI assistants can extract direct answers from it.
• Core Web VitalsGoogle's three metrics for real-user page performance: LCP, INP, and CLS. They affect both user experience and SEO ranking.
• Edge renderingRendering a page at a CDN edge node geographically close to the user, instead of at a central origin server.
• Founder-market fitWhen the founder's specific background, network, and obsessions match the market they're going after, the cheap-to-acquire form of competitive advantage that precedes product-market fit.
• GEOGenerative Engine Optimization, making your content rank in answers from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, not just on Google.
• Idea validationThe discipline of testing a startup idea cheaply before committing real time and money to building it.
• Lean MVPAn MVP optimized for speed and learning over feature breadth. The version you ship in five days, not five months.
• llms.txtA Markdown file at the root of your domain that gives AI tools a clean map of your site's content, like robots.txt, but for LLMs.
• MVPA minimum viable product is the smallest version of your idea that can deliver real value to a real user, and ideally, get them to pay.
• Productized serviceA service offering with a fixed price, a fixed scope, and a fixed timeline, sold like a product, not a custom engagement.
• RunwayHow many months a startup can keep operating before it runs out of money. The most important number a founder watches.
• Schema markupStructured data added to a webpage in a format search engines and AI tools can parse, usually JSON-LD.
• SEOSearch Engine Optimization, the practice of structuring a site so it ranks well in classic search engines like Google and Bing.
• SSGStatic Site Generation, pre-rendering pages at build time and serving them as plain HTML files from a CDN.