A smoke test is the smallest possible experiment to validate that a product idea has commercial demand — before any meaningful engineering investment.

Pre-seed is the earliest institutional funding stage — the round (or sequence of small rounds) raised before a company has the metrics required for a traditional seed round.

A pre-accelerator is a short program — typically 4 to 8 weeks — designed for very early-stage founders or teams who have an idea or early prototype but are not yet ready for a full accelerator (Y Combinator, Techstars).

Apportunity — a portmanteau of “app” and “opportunity” — describes a business opportunity created by the mobile app ecosystem: a problem worth solving as a mobile-first product, leveraging app-store distribution, push notifications, mobile sensors and on-device personalisation.

Low hanging fruit describes the easiest, fastest wins available — opportunities that require minimal effort or capital and deliver quick value. The agricultural metaphor: the fruit you can pick without a ladder.

Secret sauce is colloquial for a company’s proprietary, differentiating capability that competitors cannot easily replicate — technology, process, dataset, talent concentration or business model.

Greenfield describes an opportunity, market or project with no existing legacy infrastructure to integrate with, no incumbent solution to displace, and no prior decisions to work around.

Dogfooding — short for “eating your own dog food” — is the practice of a company using its own product in production for its own work, before or instead of relying on external alternatives. The phrase is widely traced to Microsoft in the 1980s.

Jumping the shark describes the moment a company, product or trend moves past its peak and starts a quality decline — usually marked by an ill-judged gimmick or strategic stretch that signals exhaustion of original ideas.

Alligator arms describes a person — usually a buyer, investor or partner — who shows initial enthusiasm but pulls back when it is time to commit, sign or pay. The visual metaphor is the cartoon alligator with arms too short to reach for the bill.