Track these three numbers first.
Visitors by source. What users ask for. Who pays.
Free plan, no time limit · No card · Stripe stays read-only
The short answer
Track three things from the first day: where your visitors come from (by source, not just a total), what your users ask for (every request, tied to the person), and which of your customers pay and which source brought them. Together they tell you where to spend your time. Everything else can wait until you have enough customers to compare.
Example data - The source that paid back best, and the worst.
- Signups and paying customers per source.
- What a customer is worth against what they cost.
Most metrics are for later.
Churn curves, cohorts and retention charts need many customers before they say anything. Early on they're noise, and setting them up takes time you don't have.
Three numbers work from the first week. Visitors by source tells you which channel reaches people. Requests per person tell you what to build. Paying customers by source tells you which channel reaches people who value it, which is often a different one.
The catch: sources can't be recorded later. A signup whose source wasn't written down on the day is unknown forever.
Set them up in an afternoon.
- 01
Record the source of every visit and signup
Keep the referring site and the UTM values with each signup, at the moment it happens. An analytics script or your signup form can do it.
- 02
Collect feedback in one place
One inbox, with the person's email or user id on every message, not scattered across email, DMs and chat.
- 03
Match payments to people
Match each Stripe customer to their signup by email or user id, so you can count paying customers per source.
- 04
Look once a week
Same day, same three numbers. Write down one decision each time: which channel gets more time, which request gets built.
The three numbers, recorded from the first visitor.
Launch records the source of every visit and every signup, collects feedback on each person's record, and reads Stripe read-only to count paying customers per source. The sources table on the Insights page puts it in one row per channel, with what the channel cost when you add your spend.
Visits, sources and the Stripe connection are on the free plan.
Channel costs and AI sorting of feedback need Indie ($19 a month).
Set up in about five minutes.
- 01
Paste one line
About two minutes
Add the script tag to your site, or run npx nordva@latest init and let your AI coding agent wire it in. The first visit shows up within a minute.
- 02
Connect Stripe, read-only
About three minutes
Create a restricted Stripe key with read permissions and paste it. Launch can only read; disconnecting deletes everything it synced. Every plan, Free included.
- 03
See who pays, and why
From the first visit
Where visitors come from, which of them sign up, what they ask you for, and which source brought the ones who pay, on one record per person.
I spent two years building apps before I understood how much three things matter, and that they only matter together: who your users are and where they came from, what they ask you for, and which source and which ad brought the ones who pay.
Most people starting out don't know that yet. I didn't. Together, those three tell you what to build next and where to spend your time and money. Nordva Launch puts them on one record per person, from the first visit to the first payment.
We only get paid if you succeed, so this site teaches first.
When Launch is the wrong tool.
- You already have many paying customers and need cohorts, forecasts and churn curves: a subscription analytics tool fits better.
Questions, answered.
Why not track everything?
Early numbers are small, and more metrics mean more noise to read. Three numbers you look at every week beat fifty you never open.
What's a UTM parameter?
Tags on a link that say where it was posted, like ?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=launch. Put them on every link you share, and every visit and signup from it carries the tag.
Are page views a good metric?
Only split by source. Total page views say little; page views from a post you wrote say whether the post worked.
Start recording the three numbers today.
Sources can't be recovered later. Start free and add one line to your site.