u/zeno_DX

been thinking about this for months while building my own tool

ga4, plausible, fathom, even posthog. all of them open with pageviews and unique visitors. that's a 2010 metric. for any saas, ecommerce, or content site with revenue, pageviews are at best a leading indicator and at worst pure noise.

the real questions are:
- which channel actually generates paying customers
- what does the path from anonymous visit to revenue look like
- which content pieces correlate with conversion not just traffic

i ended up building zenovay specifically because stripe attribution was missing from every privacy first analytics tool i wanted to use. plausible has goals but no revenue context. fathom is similar. posthog has it but the cookie consent stack adds 80kb to your page.

curious what others here use. is anyone happy with their current revenue attribution setup? what did you stitch together to get a real picture?

quick context. me and my buddy study cs. started a project on the side roughly a year ago, just for fun. it slowly turned serious as we saw the potential. we kept building, kept iterating, kept thinking about the people we were building for.

11 months in we have a product we genuinely believe in (zenovay). but we just hit the wall a lot of technical founders hit, just later than most.

we have no distribution. zero. and never learned it.

things we tried so far:

• reddit posts (no real traction)
• x.com posts (under 10 views per post, im not joking)
• blog content
• cold and warm personal emails

result so far: 0 paying customers. and the issue isnt conversion. the issue is that almost nobody even clicks through to look. we cant get attention in the first place.

we already burned a chunk of money building this. as students that hurt. throwing thousands at paid ads right now feels reckless when we dont even know if our messaging works.

so the genuine question for the people here who have been through this:

when you had 0 users, 0 audience, low budget, what actually moved the needle for the first 10 paying customers? not the polished case study version. the messy ugly version that actually worked.

also happy to hear what you wish you had skipped. we have plenty of energy left, just not infinite money

i built a "new" tool because my analytics stack was starting to look like a startup version of a crime board.

GA4 for traffic
hotjar for heatmaps
stripe for revenue
search console for keywords
github for deploys
then a spreadsheet trying to explain why none of the numbers matched

very normal founder behavior, obviously.

the thing that annoyed me most was that most analytics tools tell you what happened, but not what actually matters.

cool, 800 visitors came from a campaign.

but did any of them sign up
did any of them pay
did the conversion drop after the last deploy
which keyword brought someone who actually became a customer

so i built zenovay as one dashboard for traffic analytics, heatmaps, session replays, stripe revenue attribution, search console data and deploy context.

i do not want this to sound like i built it only to improve my own setup. i definitely saw business potential in it, but i also realized i did not think through some important things, so i could use your help.

my main problem is this: how do you get a developer who already trusts their stack and the tools they use to switch to a new analytics tool?

it feels a bit like trying to convince my cat to start talking because our relationship would be much more efficient.

so i am looking for honest feedback from other founders and builders.

what would make you switch from your current analytics setup
what is the one metric you wish analytics tools made painfully obvious
and what part of your analytics stack currently makes you question your life choices

not trying to do a hard sell here. mostly trying to learn from people who actually run websites and saas products

i built a "new" tool because my analytics stack was starting to look like a startup version of a crime board.

GA4 for traffic
hotjar for heatmaps
stripe for revenue
search console for keywords
github for deploys
then a spreadsheet trying to explain why none of the numbers matched

very normal founder behavior, obviously.

the thing that annoyed me most was that most analytics tools tell you what happened, but not what actually matters.

cool, 800 visitors came from a campaign.

but did any of them sign up
did any of them pay
did the conversion drop after the last deploy
which keyword brought someone who actually became a customer

so i built zenovay as one dashboard for traffic analytics, heatmaps, session replays, stripe revenue attribution, search console data and deploy context.

i do not want this to sound like i built it only to improve my own setup. i definitely saw business potential in it, but i also realized i did not think through some important things, so i could use your help.

my main problem is this: how do you get a developer who already trusts their stack and the tools they use to switch to a new analytics tool?

it feels a bit like trying to convince my cat to start talking because our relationship would be much more efficient.

so i am looking for honest feedback from other founders and builders.

what would make you switch from your current analytics setup
what is the one metric you wish analytics tools made painfully obvious
and what part of your analytics stack currently makes you question your life choices

not trying to do a hard sell here. mostly trying to learn from people who actually run websites and saas products.

i built a "new" tool because my analytics stack was starting to look like a startup version of a crime board.

GA4 for traffic
hotjar for heatmaps
stripe for revenue
search console for keywords
github for deploys
then a spreadsheet trying to explain why none of the numbers matched

very normal founder behavior, obviously.

the thing that annoyed me most was that most analytics tools tell you what happened, but not what actually matters.

cool, 800 visitors came from a campaign.

but did any of them sign up
did any of them pay
did the conversion drop after the last deploy
which keyword brought someone who actually became a customer

so i built zenovay as one dashboard for traffic analytics, heatmaps, session replays, stripe revenue attribution, search console data and deploy context.

i do not want this to sound like i built it only to improve my own setup. i definitely saw business potential in it, but i also realized i did not think through some important things, so i could use your help.

my main problem is this: how do you get a developer who already trusts their stack and the tools they use to switch to a new analytics tool?

it feels a bit like trying to convince my cat to start talking because our relationship would be much more efficient.

so i am looking for honest feedback from other founders and builders.

what would make you switch from your current analytics setup
what is the one metric you wish analytics tools made painfully obvious
and what part of your analytics stack currently makes you question your life choices

not trying to do a hard sell here. mostly trying to learn from people who actually run websites and saas products.

I kicked off Zenovay roughly 11 months ago. The first 5 months went into prototyping and research while I was still working at a startup. At some point I scrapped everything and rebuilt from zero, and the new demo came together in 3 days instead of weeks

It's been close to 4 months since the first public beta. Here's the rough story of how I grew it, what numbers actually moved, and what shifted along the way.

Goal one was landing a handful of real testers. Reddit did most of the heavy lifting. I ended up with around 6 early users across different traffic sizes, the biggest pushing roughly 400 to 600 events per day, which was the perfect stress level at that stage. I also got Better auth to run it for a day, which was huge for actually seeing the dashboard under heavier load.

After a lot of polish I started posting everywhere I could think of. Reddit, X, every small startup directory I could find. Betalist worked surprisingly well, most other listing sites barely moved the needle. I haven't shipped on Product Hunt yet, waiting until a site redesign lands first. As far as social goes, Reddit was clearly the strongest channel for both engagement and signups. I checked the conversion data inside Zenovay itself and Reddit had the highest signup rate by a clear margin

Dropping a live demo directly on the landing page bumped conversion by something like 25%. That took me from about 180 signups and 60 websites to roughly 520 signups and 320 websites, the biggest single jump I've seen so far. It also pulled in 6 paying customers sitting at around $140 MRR

X also turned into the place where I met other builders worth knowing.

So that's where things stand. Solo, about a year in, applying to YC with referrals from a few YC companies, which I'm hoping helps. We'll see how it goes