Building an analytics tool nobody asked for: month 6 honest update

6 months ago I decided to build an analytics platform. Not another dashboard tool. Something that tells you what's broken and what to fix first.

Today: 8 beta users, under $100 MRR, solo founder. Here's the honest breakdown.

Why I started this

I was consulting for a SaaS company. They had Mixpanel with 140+ custom events. Nobody knew what half of them tracked. The PM spent two weeks building dashboards before making any product decision.

The dashboards showed what happened. Never why. Never what to do next.

I thought: what if the tool just told you "users are dropping off at step 3, here's the likely cause"? No charts to interpret. No funnels to build. Just answers.

So I started building it. Alone.

What the numbers look like right now

• 8 organizations in beta
• Tracking thousands of events per week
• Under $100 MRR (most are on free beta)
• 4,000+ LinkedIn connections built from scratch
• $0 spent on paid marketing. Ever.

Not impressive by any standard. But 6 months ago almost all of these were zero.

How I got the first beta users

LinkedIn. That's it.

3-4 posts per week. 10 genuine comments on other people's posts every single day. Not "great post!" — actually engaging with the content, sharing my perspective.

Then direct outreach. I messaged around 50 people before the first one said yes. Two calls later, they were in.

The calls taught me everything. Nobody said "I need better analytics." They said "I don't understand analytics and I don't have time to learn." That sentence shaped the entire product.

My biggest screwup

• Early on I tried to scale Reddit with AI. Used AI to write posts. Used AI to reply to comments.

• The community destroyed me. And they were right.
  People can feel AI-written content immediately. It's hollow. It adds nothing. It destroys trust faster than anything else.

• I got called out publicly. Almost got banned. Had to rebuild from scratch — writing everything myself, being actually useful instead of promotional.

Every comment I write now is mine. Lesson learned the hard way.

What's actually working

LinkedIn organic content is criminally underrated for B2B. But only if you play the long game. I spent 3 months commenting before anyone cared about my posts.

Talking to users directly is worth 100x more than any marketing tactic. Every product decision I've made in the last 3 months came from a 20-minute user call.

Building in public gets you goodwill, not users. People follow the journey but they sign up when they have the problem.

What's not working

• Reddit and Threads for B2B SaaS — low conversion. Good for awareness, bad for signups.

• Cold outreach without warm-up — 0% response rate. Don't even try.

• Long technical blog posts — I've written several, they get 25 views. The audience for deep analytics content is smaller than I thought.

What I'd do differently

Start talking to potential users before writing a single line of code. I built for 2 months before my first user conversation. That's 2 months of assumptions that could have been validated in one call.

Pick ONE channel and go deep instead of spreading across 6 platforms. I was posting everywhere and getting traction nowhere.

Charge from day one. Free beta users give you polite feedback. Paying users tell you what actually matters.

What's next

Goal for the next 3 months: get to 20 paying users and $500 MRR. The product works. The gap is distribution, not features.

If you're building a SaaS product and your analytics setup is "we have Mixpanel but nobody looks at it" — I'd genuinely love to talk. Not a pitch. Just curious what your experience has been.

And if you're a solo founder in the first 6 months: it's slow. Painfully slow. But the compound effect of showing up every day is real. Month 1 felt like screaming into the void. Month 6 feels like a quiet conversation with people who actually care.

What's your experience with getting first beta users? Anything that worked that I'm missing?