Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms used across ExitFounder — Domain Rating, dofollow, MRR, provenance labels, llms.txt, MCP — each linked to the page or tool where it matters.
44 terms
Metrics
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue: the normalised value of active subscriptions for one month. Annual plans count as one twelfth per month; one-time sales and lifetime deals are not MRR. On ExitFounder MRR is Verified only when read from a connected payment provider.MRR & ARR calculator →
- ARR
- Annual recurring revenue, conventionally MRR × 12. Used for larger businesses and for valuation multiples.
- Churn
- The share of customers (customer churn) or revenue (revenue churn) lost in a period. Monthly customer churn of 5% means a median customer stays about 20 months.Churn calculator →
- Net revenue retention (NRR)
- Revenue from a cohort of existing customers today divided by their revenue a period ago, including expansion and churn. Above 100% means the base grows without new customers.
- CAC
- Customer acquisition cost: sales and marketing spend divided by new customers in the period. CAC payback is the months of gross margin needed to recover it.CAC payback calculator →
- LTV
- Customer lifetime value: average revenue per customer × gross margin ÷ churn rate. LTV:CAC of 3 or more is the usual bar for a healthy subscription business.
- Valuation multiple
- The factor applied to annual revenue or profit to estimate a sale price. Small SaaS businesses have recently traded at roughly 2–5× annual revenue depending on growth, churn, margin and founder dependence.SaaS valuation calculator →
- Traffic estimate
- A third-party model's guess at monthly visits, built from panels and clickstream data. Useful for ranking and trend, wrong in absolute terms for small sites. Always labelled Estimated on ExitFounder.
- Provenance labels
- The four labels on every ExitFounder value. Verified: read from a connected provider or proven by ownership. Estimated: measured by a third party. Reported: entered by the founder, unchecked. From website: extracted from the official site by our pipeline. The label never disappears, even on paid listings.
- Bootstrapped
- Funded by the founders and by revenue, without outside equity investment. The opposite on ExitFounder is VC-backed; unknown funding is shown as unknown, never guessed.
- Micro-SaaS
- A small subscription software business, typically one product, one to three people, and revenue from hundreds to low tens of thousands per month. The core of what ExitFounder tracks.
Links & SEO
- Domain Rating (DR)
- Ahrefs' 0–100 score for the strength of a domain's backlink profile, on a logarithmic scale. A DR 60 site has far more link equity than a DR 30 site. It measures links, not traffic, and it is an estimate. On ExitFounder every DR value says "by Ahrefs" and when it was checked.Domain Rating checker →Rankings by DR →
- Dofollow link
- A normal HTML link with no rel="nofollow", "ugc" or "sponsored" attribute, which search engines may treat as an endorsement that passes link equity. "Dofollow" is not an attribute; it is the absence of one.Directories →
- Nofollow link
- A link marked rel="nofollow" (or ugc / sponsored). Search engines treat it as a hint not to pass equity. Nofollow listings still send referral traffic and are read by AI assistants, so they are not worthless — they are just not a link-building tactic.
- Conditional dofollow
- A directory link that is dofollow only under a condition: while you display the directory's badge, on a paid tier, or after reaching a rank. Our catalogue marks these "badge / paid" and the note says which condition applies.Directory methodology →
- Referring domain
- A unique domain that links to yours. Ten links from one directory count as one referring domain; DR-style metrics care about the count and quality of referring domains far more than the raw number of links.
- Backlink
- Any link from another site to yours. Directory listings, launch pages, reviews and blog mentions are all backlinks; they differ in whether they are dofollow and how strong the linking page is.
- Canonical URL
- The <link rel="canonical"> tag that names the preferred URL for a page when several URLs show the same content. Missing canonicals split signals between www / non-www or tracking-parameter variants.AI readiness check →
- Structured data (JSON-LD)
- Machine-readable schema.org markup embedded in a page — Organization, SoftwareApplication, FAQPage, Product — that tells search engines and assistants what the page is about without parsing prose.Schema markup generator →
- Open Graph tags
- The og:title, og:description and og:image meta tags that social networks and chat apps use to render a link preview. Also the first thing many crawlers read to summarise a page.
- UTM parameters
- Query-string tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that attribute traffic to a source in analytics. Sponsor tiles on ExitFounder carry them so sponsors can see what the rail sends.UTM builder →
Listings & launches
- Startup directory
- An evergreen catalogue of products with categories, search and a page per product. Differs from a launch platform in that there is no time-boxed vote.Directories by DR →
- Launch platform
- A site where products launch on a date, collect votes for a day or a week, and appear on a ranked board. ExitFounder's board is weekly (ISO weeks).This week's launches →
- Review site
- A directory whose product pages are built around user reviews (G2, Capterra). Reviews accumulate slowly, so listing early matters more than the link.
- Listing
- One product's page on a directory. On ExitFounder the equivalent is a startup profile, which exists before any founder signs up.
- Claim
- Attaching an existing profile to your account. A claim is pending until you verify the domain or an admin approves it; then you become the owner and can edit.Submit / claim →
- Domain verification
- Proving control of the company domain with a DNS TXT record, a meta tag or a hosted file. It earns the Verified badge and can never be bought.Verification →
- Upvote
- One signed-in vote per person per product. Upvotes rank the weekly board and the -upvotes sort. Bought or ring votes are removed and the launch disqualified for the week.
- Weekly leaderboard
- ExitFounder's ranked board for an ISO week. Products claimed that week compete; the archive lives at /week/{year}/{week}.Launches →
- Alternative to
- A tag saying which established brand a product replaces. Read from the site by the extractor or set by the founder, it powers the /alternatives/{brand} pages.Alternatives →
- Use case (I want to…)
- An outcome a person wants — get my first users, automate workflows — mapped to products. A second taxonomy next to categories, because people search by goal more often than by category.I want to… →
- Badge
- A live SVG (Domain Rating + upvotes) a founder embeds on their homepage linking back to the profile. While it is there — we re-check weekly — the profile link to the site is dofollow on the free tier; paid tiers are dofollow without it. Details at /badge.
- Sponsor rail
- The tiles in the page gutters on wide screens. Slots are bought self-serve, rotate hourly, carry UTM links, and are always labelled Sponsored.Advertise →
- For sale
- A flag a verified owner can set on a profile with an asking price. ExitFounder is not a broker; it lists the intent and the metrics with their provenance.For sale →
AI & agents
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at /llms.txt that tells AI assistants what a site is, what it may be used for and where the machine-readable endpoints are (llmstxt.org). llms-full.txt is the long version with the full content.llms.txt generator →Our llms.txt →
- ai.txt
- A machine-readable usage policy for AI crawlers: what may be trained on, quoted or indexed. Advisory, like robots.txt, but read by the well-behaved crawlers.Our ai.txt →
- robots.txt
- The crawl-rules file at the site root. Modern robots.txt files list AI user agents separately (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) so training, search and user-requested fetches can be allowed or blocked independently.robots.txt generator →AI crawler access checker →
- AI crawler
- A bot operated by an AI company. They come in three kinds: training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot), search-index crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) and user-requested fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User) that open a page because a person asked. Blocking the first does not require blocking the other two.
- X-Robots-Tag
- An HTTP response header with the same values as the meta robots tag (noindex, nofollow, noai). It applies to non-HTML files too and is invisible in the page source, which is why access checkers read it.
- Markdown twin
- The text/markdown version of a page, served at the same URL with Accept: text/markdown, or by appending .md. Agents get the content without the layout, in one fetch.Markdown catalog →
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open protocol that lets an assistant call a server's tools (search startups, get a profile) instead of scraping. ExitFounder's MCP server runs over Streamable HTTP and needs no key for public tools.API & MCP →
- Agent Skills
- Discoverable SKILL.md files (agentskills.io) that tell an agent how to do a job with a site: which endpoints to call, what to confirm with the user, how to cite. Ours are listed at /.well-known/agent-skills/index.json.Skills index →
- AI readiness
- Whether an assistant can fetch, read and correctly summarise a site: crawlers allowed, readable text without JavaScript, structured data, llms.txt, a clear homepage. Measured by our checker; the model's own reading is shown alongside.What does AI think my product is? →