Analytics for SaaS Startups: The Minimum Viable Setup
The analytics a SaaS needs from day one: acquisition, activation, revenue attribution — one tracker, three events, no data team.
SaaS analytics advice usually arrives sized for companies with data teams: warehouse pipelines, attribution modeling, sixteen-tool stacks. A pre-Series-A startup needs the opposite — the minimum viable measurement that answers this week's three questions without becoming a project of its own. Here is that minimum, concretely.
The three questions, and what answers them
- Where do signups come from? One cookieless tracker tag (two minutes) + UTM discipline on every link you distribute. First-touch capture is automatic; no banner needed, so the data is complete.
- Do they reach value? Three lines at signup (track, identify, persist visitor ID — the exact code) plus one activation event at your product's first value moment.
- Which channel produces revenue? One webhook handler posting payments server-side. The join to first-touch happens automatically; channel-attributed MRR becomes a filter.
Total instrumentation: one script tag, four events, one webhook. An afternoon, including the test payment.
The weekly ritual (15 minutes, founder-grade)
- Signups by source — which channel moved, and was it the one you worked on?
- Activation rate of last week's cohort — is onboarding improving?
- Revenue events and their sources — the eight-metric system grows from here when you are ready.
- Any friction streaks: errors or slow pages on the signup path — the leaks that compound silently.
What to deliberately not do yet
No CDP (you have one pipe), no multi-touch modeling (you lack the volume), no 40-event taxonomy (the graveyard pattern), no separate RUM/error/heatmap subscriptions — performance and errors should arrive on the same record as behavior, which is precisely the Clycyo design. Start free (10k events/month, forever), and let the questions — not the tooling industry — decide when you need more.