Indie hacker glossary: the terms that actually matter in 2026

A working glossary of the terms indie hackers, bootstrappers, and build-in-public founders actually use in 2026. Definitions are short, practical, and opinionated where opinions matter. Terms are grouped by domain: metrics, finance, product, growth, team and operations, and launch. Use the section links to navigate.

Metrics

MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)

The predictable, subscription-based revenue you can expect each month. Only counts active subscriptions, not one-time sales. The standard currency of SaaS health.

ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)

MRR multiplied by 12. Used for larger deals and fundraising conversations. A company at $10K MRR is a $120K ARR company, same reality, different lens.

LTV (Lifetime Value)

The total revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with you. Often approximated as average revenue per user divided by churn rate. Useful for pricing and acquisition decisions.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

The average cost to acquire one paying customer, including marketing, sales, and the fully-loaded cost of the people doing the work. A healthy business keeps CAC below LTV by a comfortable margin.

LTV:CAC ratio

Lifetime value divided by acquisition cost. A ratio of 3:1 or higher is usually considered healthy for SaaS. Below 1:1 means you lose money per customer, which is only sustainable if you are intentionally buying growth.

Churn

The rate at which customers cancel or stop using your product over a given period. Expressed as a percentage. Monthly churn above 5% is a warning sign for most SaaS; consumer products tolerate higher numbers.

Retention

The inverse of churn. The percentage of users who are still active at a given point after signup. Measured in cohorts (day 1, week 1, month 1) so you can tell whether your product is getting stickier over time.

Cohort

A group of users who signed up in the same time window, tracked together. Cohort analysis is how you see whether your product is improving for new users rather than just growing on top of a leaky base.

DAU / WAU / MAU

Daily, weekly, and monthly active users. "Active" needs a clear definition specific to your product (opened the app, completed a core action, etc.). DAU divided by MAU is a rough stickiness proxy. Ratios above 20% suggest genuine daily habit.

Activation

The moment a new signup experiences the core value of the product. Specific to each product: for a note-taking app it might be saving the first note, for a team tool it might be inviting a second person. Activation rate is the percent of signups that hit it.

K-factor (virality)

A measure of organic growth through referrals. If each user brings in, on average, 1.2 new users who stay, your k-factor is 1.2 and the product grows without paid acquisition. K above 1 is rare and usually temporary.

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

"How likely are you to recommend this to a friend, 0 to 10?" Promoters (9-10) minus detractors (0-6) equals NPS, scored -100 to +100. Useful as a trend, less useful as an absolute number. Above 40 is good, above 70 is great.

Finance

Runway

How many months of operation you can fund at your current burn rate. Calculated as cash on hand divided by monthly burn. Below six months is a stress zone; below three is an emergency.

Burn rate

How much cash you are losing each month. Gross burn is total expenses; net burn is expenses minus revenue. Net burn is the number that matters for runway calculations.

Default alive

A Paul Graham coinage: a company that would become profitable on its current growth curve without needing to raise more money. The opposite is default dead, which requires a fundraising event to survive. Most early startups assume they are default alive until they run the numbers and discover otherwise.

Bootstrapping

Building a company without raising outside investment. Funded by personal savings, revenue, and sometimes small loans. The indie hacker default. Trades growth speed for ownership and optionality.

Gross margin

Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering the product, expressed as a percentage. SaaS businesses typically have 70-85% gross margins. Marketplaces, hardware, and services companies have lower margins, which changes what you can invest in growth.

SaaS Magic Number

New ARR divided by sales and marketing spend from the prior period. Above 1.0 means you are efficiently buying growth; below 0.5 means you are burning cash with little to show for it. A standard metric in venture due diligence.

Product

MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

The smallest version of the product that can be used to validate a core hypothesis with real users. Not "minimum shippable." The point is to learn, not to ship quickly. A good MVP feels slightly embarrassing to the founder and useful to the user.

PMF (Product-Market Fit)

The state where your product is pulling rather than being pushed. Users recommend it without being asked, churn falls, usage deepens without marketing spend. PMF is not a number, it is a vibe you feel in the metrics. Most products never reach it.

Pivot

A substantial change to the product, target market, or business model while keeping the company entity. A pivot is cheaper than shutting down and starting over, but more expensive than most founders think. The best pivots keep one foot on the original ground.

Tech stack

The combination of languages, frameworks, hosting, and tools you build on. Popular indie stacks in 2026 include Next.js plus Supabase, Rails plus Hotwire, SvelteKit plus Postgres, and variations involving tRPC, Tailwind, and Vercel. The right stack is the one you ship fastest on.

Roadmap

A plan of what is coming next on the product. Public roadmaps let users vote and comment; private ones keep strategy close. Public tends to compound trust, private preserves optionality. Neither is universally right.

Waitlist

A list of people who signed up to be notified when the product launches or opens access. Done well, waitlists double as a pre-launch marketing channel and a signal of real demand. Done badly, they become a vanity number that does not convert.

Build log

A public, chronological record of product development. Weekly or daily updates on what was shipped, what is stuck, what is next. The core unit of build-in-public work. Platforms like Shippin are organized around build logs as the primary content type.

Feature flag

A mechanism for turning product features on or off at runtime, often per-user or per-group. Used to ship to production before release, run gradual rollouts, and A/B test. A common sign of maturing engineering.

Growth

PLG (Product-Led Growth)

A go-to-market model where the product itself drives acquisition, expansion, and retention, rather than a sales team. Freemium, self-service onboarding, in-product invites, and usage-based pricing are PLG staples.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The practice of ranking in search results. In 2026, SEO is expanding into AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), which target how AI chat systems cite your content. Still slow to compound, still the most durable channel once it does.

Backlink

A link from another site to yours. The original currency of search ranking, still one of the strongest signals. Now doubly important because LLMs use linked sources as citations in AI chat results.

Compounding content

Content that keeps generating value long after publication: blog posts that rank, guides that get linked, build logs that get cited. The opposite of disposable content, which performs once and decays. Indie hackers optimize for compounding.

Moat

A structural advantage that makes your product hard to displace. Common sources: network effects, proprietary data, switching costs, brand, and regulatory capture. Most early-stage indie products have no moat; the moat is built over time if the product survives long enough.

TAM / SAM / SOM

Total Addressable Market (everyone who could conceivably use this product), Service Addressable Market (those you can actually reach), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (those you can realistically win). Fundraising slides love these acronyms. The real number that matters is the one you can reach this year.

Network effects

The property of a product getting more valuable as more people use it. Classic examples: marketplaces, messaging tools, social networks. Network effects are extremely hard to bootstrap and extremely valuable once running.

Funnel

The sequence of steps a user takes from first awareness to becoming an active, retained customer. Typical stages: visitor, signup, activated user, paid user, retained user. Each step has a conversion rate, and the funnel is fixed by improving the worst step.

Team and operations

Cofounder

A partner in the founding of a company. Covered in depth in the cofounder guide. The short version: look for demonstrated output, compatible working style, honesty under pressure, and shared picture of the outcome.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

A goal-setting framework: one qualitative objective, three or four measurable key results. Originally from Intel, popularized by Google. Useful for teams of 10+, usually overkill for solo founders and early teams.

Async-first

A team culture where the default is written, asynchronous communication rather than real-time meetings. Works well for distributed teams and for founders who think better in writing. Requires strong documentation habits.

Ship

To release code or a feature into production where real users encounter it. The operative verb of indie hacking. "Ship it" means release now, fix later; "always be shipping" is the informal motto of the movement.

Iterate

To ship a version, observe real usage, and ship an improved version. The standard alternative to long planning cycles. Assumes you will learn more from three cheap releases than from one expensive one.

Launch

Show HN

A post on Hacker News tagged with "Show HN:" that introduces a product to the community. High potential reach, unforgiving audience. Works for technically novel products, usually fails for run-of-the-mill SaaS.

Product Hunt

A daily launch platform where products compete for upvotes over 24 hours. Top-ranked products get significant traffic and press. Treated as a ritual by much of the indie ecosystem; effectiveness depends heavily on launch-day execution.

Soft launch

Making a product available publicly without a coordinated marketing push. Counter-intuitively often more sustainable than a big launch because it lets you fix problems before large-volume traffic arrives.

Launch arc

A sequenced set of launch events over weeks or months, rather than a single-day release. Covered in the launch playbook. Avoids the one-shot problem of a single launch and lets momentum compound.

Press launch

A launch coordinated with coverage from journalists, newsletters, or podcasters. Hard to run as a first-time founder; generally reserved for products with genuine news value (funding, acquisition, novel technology, celebrity users).