Growth glossary
Plain-English definitions for the growth vocabulary used throughout Tour de Growth.
AARRR
The 5-stage framework used to evaluate a product: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue. Popularized by Dave McClure in 2007.
Acquisition
How new users or customers first discover your product.
Activation
The moment a new user actually experiences your product's value for the first time — not just where they sign up.
Retention
Your product's ability to bring users back over time, rather than a one-off use.
Referral
How your existing users bring in new ones, with or without a formal referral mechanism.
Revenue
How your product generates (or is meant to generate) money, and whether that model has been tested with real customers.
"Aha" moment
The precise instant a new user finally understands why your product is useful to them.
CAC — Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost: how much you spend on average to acquire one new customer.
LTV — Lifetime Value
Lifetime Value: the total value an average customer generates over their whole relationship with your product.
Churn
The rate of customers or users who stop using your product over a given period.
Viral coefficient
The average number of new users an existing user brings in through sharing — a coefficient above 1 means growth that feeds itself.
Onboarding
The journey a new user goes through between signing up and being able to use your product on their own.
Upsell / Cross-sell
Upsell: moving a customer to a more expensive plan. Cross-sell: selling them a complementary product or service.
Growth loop
A mechanism where using the product itself generates more usage — unlike a classic funnel that stops once a user converts.
North Star Metric
The single metric a team chooses to prioritize, because it best captures the real value delivered to users.
CAC payback period
How many months of one customer's gross margin it takes to earn back what winning them cost. A date, where the LTV:CAC ratio is a forecast.
NRR / GRR — Net and Gross Revenue Retention
Two ways to read what last year's customers are worth this year: gross revenue retention ignores expansion, net revenue retention counts it.
Cohort analysis
Reading a metric by group of users who arrived at the same time, instead of one blended average that can hide two opposite trends.
DAU/MAU — Daily and Monthly Active Users
The ratio of daily to monthly active users. Multiplied by 30, it gives the number of days a month the average user comes back.
Time to value
The median time between sign-up and the moment a user actually gets what they came for — always read next to the activation rate.
PQL — Product-Qualified Lead
A user who has crossed a usage threshold chosen because it predicts buying — qualified by what they do, not by what they downloaded.
Product-led growth
A model where the product itself does the acquiring and the converting. The honest test: what share of your customers pay without talking to anyone?
ARPU — Average Revenue Per User
Revenue over a period divided by active users. Not to be confused with ARPPU, per paying user, which can be twenty times higher.
NPS — Net Promoter Score
The percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, on a 0-10 question. It measures stated intent, never a referral actually made.
Win rate
The share of closed opportunities that are won: won ÷ (won + lost), over the same period. Deals still open stay out of it.
Sales cycle length
The time from an opportunity's creation to its signature, in days. Read as a median, because a few very long deals drag the average.
ACV — Annual Contract Value
What one customer contract is worth per year: the recurring part only, one-off fees excluded, a multi-year deal brought back to one year.
Lead-to-opportunity rate
The conversion rate of a period's leads into qualified opportunities within a set window. The sales-assisted number that depends most on definitions.