The day has come. You've finally built an MVP you feel happy with. You're ready to launch on Product Hunt and share to all of your social networks. Take one last look over your product roadmap and launch checklist. Do you see user analytics anywhere?
If the answer is no, slam the brakes on your launch for a minute and consider this: if we get users, how will we know?
The answer might be: someone manually checks the database every few minutes and lets the team know if anyone new has signed up. While that's an okay answer, it's not a particularly sustainable one. At the very least, you should look into setting up some kind of integration to post new signups to a Slack (or equivalent) room. Zapier is a common tool for something like this, but there are lots of options.
Okay, so now you and your team know as soon as a user signs up... but now consider: do you know if they've actually used the product?
Signups are great, but in the grand scheme of things, they mean very little. You need to know if your users are engaging with your product. If they're signing up and immediately dropping off, there's a problem. If they're signing up, using your product a little bit and never coming back, there's a problem. If they're signing up, using your product, and doing a bunch of stuff you never expected them to do, there's a problem. All of these are solvable problems, but you need to know which ones you have first (and you might end up with all 3, from different types of users).
The best way to achieve this is to hook up a comprehensive analytics tool from day 1. These tools CANNOT track events that happened before they were a part of your product, so you want to get them in place before you expect a big influx of users. Otherwise, you'll lose a ton of valuable data.
These tool also usually require a bit of planning. You'll want to know what actions you want to track your users doing, and you'll need to figure out what you call each action so that you understand it later. You'll also need to decide how anonymized the data needs to be, and who has access to it.
If you're a non-technical founder, you'll need to get your developers involved early. They may have a hard time understanding why a tool like this is necessary because they can technically go look up a lot of the information themselves if they want to. However, explain to them that this will let you self-serve and not bug them every time you need to know something. Technical founders: trust me, it's worth doing this up front - it may seem simple to pull data only when it's needed but it'll get annoying fast. You'll have higher impact things to do.
There are a ton of tools out there, and they all have their pros and cons. Some are friendly for non-technical users, some are tailored more towards a technical audience and require you to know SQL. Some are more focused on the user journey, some are more focused on aggregate data. Some are cheap, some are expensive.
Here are a few to research, but it's by no means a comprehensive list:
It's worth it to take a little bit of time to find a solution that will work for you and your team right now. Demo the products, talk to other founders, etc. No analytics tool is perfect, so keep that in mind. When you use it, you will find a few things frustrating about it - but that's okay, as long as it gets you the answers you need so you can figure out what problems you have and then solve them.
If you need help talking through your analytics strategy or figuring out what to do now that you know which problems you have, schedule some time to chat!