Glossary: Startup Marketing

Every key term from the course, in plain English. When a lesson says a word you don't know, it lives here.

The First 100 Rule

Get 100 real, active users through manual outreach before spending one dollar on ads or agencies. The receipt that proves you have something; everything before it is a hypothesis.

The Launch Loud Playbook

The announcement sequence that maximizes day-one attention: tease, prove, mobilize, push, convert — a four-week campaign, not a single post.

The Compounding Engine

Your content system — publish, get found, capture, nurture, convert — where each piece adds to the last instead of expiring like an ad.

Attract

Stage one of the four-stage framework: turn strangers into visitors with content, SEO, launches, and social.

Convert

Stage two: turn visitors into leads with landing pages, forms, and lead magnets.

Close

Stage three: turn leads into customers with nurture emails, outreach, demos, and trials.

Delight

Stage four: turn customers into promoters with onboarding, support, reviews, and referrals — feeding the next wave of Attract.

Buyer's journey

The three phases every buyer moves through: awareness ('I have a problem'), consideration ('what are my options?'), decision ('why you?').

Lead magnet

A free, valuable offer — guide, template, email course — traded for a visitor's email address. The engine of the Convert stage.

Landing page

A single-purpose page with one job: convert. Headline, mechanism, one form field, proof — no navigation, no distractions.

CTA (call to action)

The specific next step you ask the visitor to take. Smart CTAs change based on what you know about the visitor — and convert roughly twice as well as generic ones.

Lead scoring

Ranking leads by buying intent: explicit signals (what they told you) plus implicit signals (what they did), usually on a 100-point scale with a sales-ready threshold.

CAC

Customer acquisition cost: total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers. What each customer costs you.

LTV

Lifetime value: average revenue per customer multiplied by average lifetime. What each customer is worth. Keep LTV:CAC at 3 or better.

Nurture sequence

A short automated email series — typically 5 emails over two weeks — that educates leads until they're ready to buy.