27 terms
Glossary
The vocabulary an investor will use in the first meeting and assume you already know. Defined plainly, with the Nigerian case stated wherever it genuinely differs.
- ARR (annual recurring revenue)
- Monthly recurring revenue multiplied by twelve.
- Bottom-up market sizing
- Building a market estimate from countable customers rather than a global figure.
- Bridge round
- A smaller raise to reach a milestone before the next real round.
- Burn rate
- How much more money leaves the company each month than comes in.
- CAC (customer acquisition cost)
- What it costs you, all in, to win one paying customer.
- CAC payback period
- How many months a customer takes to repay what you spent winning them.
- Cap table
- Who owns what, and what they paid for it.
- Churn
- The share of customers, or of revenue, that leaves in a period.
- Cohort
- A group of customers who started in the same period, tracked together.
- Customer concentration
- How much of your revenue depends on your largest few customers.
- Data room
- The folder of documents an investor reads after they are interested.
- Dilution
- The reduction in your ownership share when new shares are issued.
- Due diligence
- The checking an investor does before money moves.
- Go-to-market (GTM)
- The plan for how a product reaches buyers and turns them into revenue.
- ICP (ideal customer profile)
- The specific kind of buyer your product fits best, described precisely.
- LTV (lifetime value)
- The total gross profit one customer produces before they leave.
- LTV to CAC ratio
- How many naira of lifetime value each naira of acquisition buys.
- MRR (monthly recurring revenue)
- The predictable revenue that arrives every month without a new sale.
- Pre-seed
- The first outside money, usually before meaningful revenue.
- Product-market fit
- The point where the market pulls the product out of you.
- Retention
- How many customers are still there after a given time.
- Runway
- How many months you can keep going before the money runs out.
- Seed
- The round raised to turn early evidence into a repeatable machine.
- TAM, SAM, SOM
- Total market, the slice you can serve, and the slice you can realistically win.
- Traction
- Evidence that people want this, stated in numbers rather than adjectives.
- Valuation
- The price agreed for the company in a round, not a measure of its worth.
- Vanity metric
- A number that reliably goes up and predicts nothing.
Put these numbers somewhere an investor can read them
The GTM profile asks for them as structured fields, scores what you have, and shows you which blank one costs the most.
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