Software Glossary for Founders

Clear, practical definitions of product, MVP, SaaS, and AI software concepts to help you make better build decisions.

• What Is a Product Studio?

  A product studio is a team that contributes to product strategy, user experience design, and software engineering together — acting as a technical partner who shapes what gets built, not just a vendor who executes what you specify.

• What Is MVP Development?

  MVP (Minimum Viable Product) development is the process of building the smallest possible version of a product that solves a real problem for real users — deliberately scoped to generate learning, not to be a complete product.

• What Is SaaS Development?

  SaaS (Software as a Service) development is the process of building cloud-hosted software delivered as a subscription service — accessible via browser without installation, with a single codebase serving multiple customers simultaneously.

• What Is Custom Software Development?

  Custom software development is the process of designing, building, and deploying software tailored to a specific organization's unique workflows, data model, and business requirements — rather than adapting generic off-the-shelf tools to fit a business they weren't designed for.

• What Is AI-Powered Software?

  AI-powered software integrates machine learning models and large language models (LLMs) into a product to automate decisions, analyze data at scale, generate content, or enable natural language interfaces — replacing manual steps with learned, context-aware logic.

• What Is Technical Debt?

  Technical debt is the implied future cost of choosing a faster, easier software solution now instead of a more robust one that would take longer — like financial debt, it accrues "interest" in the form of slower future development and higher risk until it is paid down.

• What Is Product-Market Fit?

  Product-market fit (PMF) is the point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand — when you have built something a well-defined group of users genuinely want, will pay for, and would be disappointed to lose.

• What Is Product Discovery?

  Product discovery is the structured work of deciding what to build and why — validating that a problem is real, that a proposed solution will actually solve it, and that it is worth building — before committing engineering time to building it.

• How Much Does Custom Software Cost?

  Custom software typically costs from around 0,000 for a focused single-workflow tool to $80,000+ for a full-featured platform — with the price driven by scope, complexity, number of integrations, and ongoing maintenance, not by an arbitrary hourly rate.

• When Should You Hire a Software Development Agency?

  You should hire a software development agency or product studio when you have a clear business need for software but lack the internal team, time, or specialized skill to build it well — and when building it right matters more than building it in-house.

• What Is UX Design?

  UX (user experience) design is the practice of shaping how a product feels to use — researching user needs, structuring information and workflows, and designing interactions so that the product is useful, usable, and satisfying to the people it is built for.

Book a Discovery Call — Eduardo Diaz leads every AetherCraft engagement personally.