Analytics for Solo Entrepreneurs — See What’s Actually Happening, Not What You Hope Is Happening

A practical guide to analytics for solo entrepreneurs and developers. Learn which metrics matter, how to find broken funnels, and how to set up tracking that drives real decisions.

Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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Here’s a story I hear constantly from developer-founders: “I launched two months ago, I’ve got some users, but I have no idea what’s actually working.” They built the product. They set up a landing page. They posted about it a few times. Some people signed up. Some didn’t come back. Revenue is… unclear. And when someone asks “how’s the business going?” the answer is vibes. Good vibes, bad vibes, but always just vibes.

This is like driving at night with your headlights off. You might be on the road. You might be heading toward a cliff. Without analytics, you genuinely cannot tell. Let’s fix that.

Concept 1: Analytics Isn’t Vanity — It’s Visibility

Let’s start by redefining what analytics means for a solo entrepreneur, because there’s a toxic version of “analytics” that helps nobody. Toxic analytics: Checking your website visitor count 12 times a day. Obsessing over follower counts. Refreshing your Stripe dashboard hoping to see a new charge. Staring at a graph going up and feeling good, or going down and feeling terrible.

Useful analytics: Understanding which specific actions in your product and marketing lead to revenue, and which don’t. The purpose of analytics is to answer three questions:

1. What’s working? (So you can do more of it.)
2. What’s broken? (So you can fix it.)
3. What’s unclear? (So you can investigate.)

That’s it. Everything else is entertainment disguised as work.

Concept 2: The Only Metrics That Matter When You’re Starting

When you’re a solo founder with limited time, you cannot and should not track everything. Analysis paralysis is real and it’s a productivity killer. Here are the core metrics to focus on at the start, depending on your business model:

For a SaaS product:

• New signups per week — Are people finding you?
• Activation rate — Of those who sign up, what percentage complete the core action that delivers value? (e.g., create their first project, connect their first integration)
• Weekly active users — Are people coming back?
• Conversion to paid — Are free users becoming paying customers?
• Revenue — How much actual money is coming in?

For a digital product/course:

• Landing page visitors — How many people see your offer?
• Sales page conversion rate — Of visitors, how many buy?
• Revenue per visitor — Dividing revenue by visitors gives you the value of each visitor, which tells you how much you can spend to acquire one.

For any product:

• Where are customers coming from? (Traffic source)
• Where are they dropping off? (Funnel leakage)

Notice what’s NOT on this list: total page views, bounce rate, time on site, social media impressions, email open rates. Those can be useful later, but they’re lagging indicators — symptoms of deeper metrics. Focus on the metrics closest to the actions that matter: signup, activation, payment.

Concept 3: Finding Broken Funnels — Where Customers Disappear

A funnel is any multi-step process a customer goes through. Your entire business is a series of funnels:

• Marketing funnel: See ad → Click → Land on page → Sign up
• Onboarding funnel: Sign up → Verify email → Complete setup → Use core feature
• Revenue funnel: Free user → See pricing → Start trial → Enter payment → Become customer

Every step in a funnel has a drop-off rate. Some drop-off is normal. But when a specific step has a dramatically higher drop-off than the others, you’ve found a broken point — and that’s where your attention belongs.

Example:

• 1,000 people visit your landing page
• 100 click “Start Free Trial” (10% conversion — decent)
• 90 enter their email (90% — good)
• 15 complete onboarding (17% — something is very wrong here)
• 12 become weekly active users (80% — good for those who get through)

The bottleneck is onboarding. Not the landing page. Not the product. The space between signup and first value is where 83% of potential customers disappear. That’s where you focus. Without analytics, you’d be guessing. You might redo your landing page (which is fine), change your pricing (which doesn’t matter yet), or add features (which won’t help people who never get set up).

Analytics points at the real problem.

Concept 4: Events, Not Pageviews — Tracking What People Do

Traditional web analytics (like basic Google Analytics) tracks pageviews. That tells you what pages people looked at, which is helpful for content sites but nearly useless for products. What you need is event tracking — recording specific actions users take within your product. Events are things like:

• user_signed_up
• user_completed_onboarding
• user_created_first_project
• user_invited_team_member
• user_upgraded_to_paid
• user_cancelled_subscription

Each event is a signal. Strung together, events tell the story of a customer’s journey through your product. They show you where engagement is strong, where it dies, and what power users do differently from users who churn.

Tools for event tracking (solo-founder friendly):

• PostHog — Open source, generous free tier, built for product analytics
• Mixpanel — Powerful event analytics with a free tier
• Plausible — Privacy-friendly, lightweight web analytics (good for landing pages)
• Simple custom logging — If you’re a developer, you can log events to your own database and query them. Ugly but effective.

Implementation tip: Start with just 5-7 key events. You can always add more later. Track the events that represent the steps in your core funnel: from first visit to first payment. Don’t track everything or you’ll drown in data.

The mindset shift: You’re not installing analytics to have pretty dashboards. You’re installing a diagnostic system for your business. When something breaks or stalls, your analytics should tell you where to look — just like error logs tell you where a bug is in your code. Think of it this way: your product already has logging for errors. Your business needs logging for customer behavior. Same concept, different layer.

The Alert That Saves Your Business

Here’s a tactic almost no solo founder uses but should: alerts on key events. Set up notifications for:

• New signup — Feels good, keeps you connected to growth
• New paying customer — The most important event in your business
• Cancellation — Immediate signal to investigate and potentially intervene
• Onboarding drop-off — If activation rate drops below a threshold, something broke

Most analytics tools support alerts. If yours doesn’t, a simple webhook to Slack or email works.

The goal is to know immediately when something important happens — good or bad — without manually checking dashboards.

When you’re a solo founder, you can’t afford to discover a broken checkout page three days after it broke. An alert on “zero purchases in 48 hours” would catch that instantly.

Avoiding the Analytics Trap

A warning: analytics can become a procrastination tool. If you’re spending more time analyzing data than acting on it, you’ve fallen into the trap.

Rules to avoid it:

• Check analytics once per day, at a set time. Not every hour.
• Set a decision threshold. “I’ll change X if Y metric drops below Z for two consecutive weeks.” Without thresholds, you’ll overreact to random fluctuations.
• Never mistake correlation for causation. Your signups went up the same day you changed your headline? Maybe the headline helped. Maybe it was a Reddit post you don’t know about. Verify before assuming.
• Data informs decisions. Gut confirms them. Use analytics to surface problems and opportunities. Use your judgment to decide what to do about them.

Your Action Item: Set Up Your Core Tracking in 60 Minutes

Here’s your concrete task:

1. Write down your product’s core funnel. From first awareness to first payment. 4-6 steps maximum.
2. Choose an analytics tool. If you’re early-stage, PostHog (free, open source) or Mixpanel (free tier) is more than enough. If you just need landing page analytics, go with Plausible or even Vercel’s built-in analytics.
3. Implement tracking for these events:

• page_visited (landing page)
• signup_started
• signup_completed
• core_action_completed (whatever your product’s “aha moment” is)
• payment_initiated
• payment_completed

1. Set up one alert: notify yourself (Slack, email, SMS) whenever a payment_completed event fires. Celebrate every single sale. You earned it.
2. Schedule a weekly 15-minute analytics review. Every Monday morning, look at your funnel numbers. Find the step with the biggest drop-off. Write down one thing you’ll try this week to improve it.

This isn’t complex. It’s a few event calls in your code, a free tool, and a recurring calendar event. But it transforms you from “I think things are going okay” to “I know exactly what’s working and what’s broken.”

CTA Tip

Don’t wait for launch to set up analytics. Implement tracking on your landing page and waitlist today, even if the product isn’t ready. The data you collect pre-launch — where people come from, which messaging converts, what questions they ask — is gold for your launch strategy.

Track key success events like new signups and purchases from day one, and set alerts so you never miss a critical change.

Next up: You know you need tools for analytics, email, hosting, payments, and a dozen other things. But which ones? And when does tool-shopping become procrastination? Let’s talk about the tool trap.