The Indie Founder Glossary

MRR × 12. The number most B2B SaaS founders benchmark against.

A link from another website pointing to yours. The primary currency of SEO.

Funded from revenue and personal savings, without outside investment.

The total cost of acquiring one paying customer. Marketing spend + sales cost, divided by new customers.

The rate at which paying customers stop paying you. The silent killer of SaaS.

A link that passes SEO ranking signal to the target. Opposite of nofollow.

Ahrefs' 0–100 score of a domain's backlink authority. A rough proxy for SEO trust.

A pricing model with a permanently-free tier and paid upgrades for advanced features.

SEO for AI-powered answers — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude.

A solo founder or small team building profitable internet businesses without outside capital.

The public reveal of a new product — a moment optimized for peak attention.

A proposed standard for websites to tell LLMs how to crawl and use their content.

The total revenue a customer generates before they churn. What you can spend to acquire them.

The predictable monthly revenue from active subscriptions. The indie-founder scoreboard metric.

A go-to-market motion where the product itself drives acquisition, activation, and expansion.

The point at which users pull the product from you instead of you pushing it to them.

The launch platform where products compete for daily top-ranking within 24 hours.

The percentage of customers who stick around. The inverse of churn, but usually tracked by cohort.

Structured JSON-LD data that tells search engines what a page is about.

The practice of getting a page to rank higher in Google's search results.

The total possible revenue if you captured 100% of the market for your product.

A curated site that lists tools by category, typically providing a permanent listing page and often a backlink.

Pricing that scales with how much the customer uses the product — API calls, records processed, GB stored.

The narrow initial use-case that opens the door to a broader product later.