Choosing an Analytics Stack as a Solo Founder

Founders love shiny analytics tools. They spend a week on Amplitude, another on Mixpanel, another wiring up PostHog, and by the end they have four dashboards, three of which they never open. What you need as a solo founder is not more data. It is fewer metrics, updated automatically, that let you see the shape of the business at a glance every morning.

The three metric groups you actually need

Acquisition

Where new signups come from, and which channel drives paying customers rather than tourists. You need at minimum: signups per day, by source. Bonus: signups that converted to paid within 30 days, by source.

Activation and retention

Percentage of new signups who hit your defined aha moment within 24 hours. Then: percentage of users active in week two, week four, week twelve. These four numbers tell you if the product is sticky or leaky.

Revenue

MRR (or ARR), new MRR added this month, churned MRR this month, and net revenue retention. That is the entire executive dashboard.

The tools that earn their place

Job	Tool	Free tier good enough?
Web analytics	Plausible, Fathom, or Simple Analytics	Small paid plans, no free tier
Product analytics	PostHog	Yes, generous free tier
Session replay (occasional)	PostHog or FullStory	Yes on PostHog free
Revenue tracking	Stripe/Polar/Paddle dashboard + one aggregation view	Yes, built-in
User feedback	Email or a lightweight in-app widget	Yes
Custom dashboards	A Google Sheet updated daily via cron	Yes

What to skip early

• Heatmaps until you have 200+ users on a specific page daily
• A/B testing tools until you have enough traffic for a test to complete within 4 weeks
• Funnel visualisation tools until you have a real multi-step funnel to visualise
• Cohort analysis dashboards until you have 6+ months of retention data
• Attribution platforms until you are running paid campaigns worth attributing

The daily-view discipline

Pick eight numbers. Print or pin them in one spreadsheet or dashboard view. Update them every morning, either manually with coffee or automatically via cron. The specific eight for most indie SaaS:

1. Signups yesterday
2. Signups by source yesterday (top 3)
3. Activation rate yesterday
4. Active users yesterday
5. MRR right now
6. New MRR this month so far
7. Churned MRR this month so far
8. Cash in the bank

Do not open ten dashboards. Open one. Anything not on the daily view is either monthly analysis or noise.

The one custom event that matters most

Instrument the moment a user reaches your aha state. That single event, tracked cleanly, is worth more than 200 events tracked poorly. Everything downstream — activation rate, cohort retention, upgrade probability — builds off knowing who hit aha and when.

Data privacy and analytics choice

EU visitors and GDPR-aware buyers care what you use. A cookieless option (Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics) removes the need for a consent banner on most implementations and signals you take privacy seriously. If you must run Google Analytics, run it alongside a cookieless tool for your own use because GA's sampling and delayed data make it a bad tool for a solo founder trying to make quick decisions.

Analytics for directory traffic

UTM everything. Every directory listing should link back with a UTM parameter that identifies the source. Without UTMs, you cannot tell which directory drove signups vs which drove passers-by. Launchstag is a weekly indie product hunt where every listing is a permanent indexed page with a dofollow badge, and adding a UTM to your Launchstag click-through link lets you measure directory ROI cleanly. tools.cafe is a curated tool directory with a badge-for-backlink model, and the badge itself carries a referrer that shows up in your analytics as a distinct source. LaunchBuff is a fortnightly bracket competition with 16 products across 4 rounds over 14 days, and the bracket period creates spikes in referral traffic that are easy to see when your dashboard is watching daily.

The monthly review

Once a month, sit with the data for 30 minutes and answer three questions:

1. Which acquisition channel produced the most paying customers this month?
2. Which cohort of users churned most and what did they have in common?
3. What is the one metric I would move next month, and what is one thing I could ship to move it?

Analytics mistakes that waste time

• Tracking 40 events before you have 100 users
• Building dashboards you check twice and abandon
• Running A/B tests with insufficient traffic to reach significance
• Obsessing over signup count without measuring activation
• Comparing yourself to public "SaaS benchmarks" scraped from Twitter

Get more measurable, source-tagged traffic into your analytics. Submit your product to launchstag.com for a permanent indexed listing and a dofollow badge that shows up cleanly in your referral report every day.