I spent 25 years in marketing. I still launched my SaaS with broken tracking.

I was a CMO. I've run marketing budgets north of $100m. In one gig I burned $2m on Google Performance Max before I understood how much of a black box it is. I know this stuff.

And I still launched my first solo SaaS with tracking that didn't work.

Here's the embarrassing part. I did everything "right." I set up the whole stack properly before launch — Cloudflare, RudderStack, Mixpanel, Hotjar, GA4. Took my time. Felt professional. Then I went live without actually testing that the events fired.

So for the first week, every decision I made about what was working was based on incomplete data.

The two things that cost me:

One subreddit was doing 80% of the work and I couldn't see it. I was posting comments across 8 different subs, convinced reach was the game. It's not. One sub converted 5x better than all the others combined. If my tracking had been clean, I'd have known that in week 1 and put everything there. Instead I spent a week spraying.

I ran Reddit ads for a week before noticing my signup event wasn't firing in GA4. Paid traffic on top of broken tracking is just setting money on fire with extra steps. I was optimizing against numbers that weren't real.

I did avoid one classic mistake at least. Google kept nudging me toward Performance Max — that same $2m black box — so I refused and set up a plain search campaign instead. Which Google made deliberately annoying: I had to build it in the iPhone app before I could finish on my laptop, then they asked for ID three times, then approved it overnight while I slept and started spending. I woke up to $100 gone on 9 clicks. To be fair, all 9 registered. Thanks Google, I think.

30 registered users in, here's the lesson I'd tattoo on past-me:

Fix your tracking before you spend a single penny — or post a single comment.

Not because tracking is hard. Because without it you make confident decisions on bad data, and confidence on bad data is worse than admitting you're blind. The tools were the easy part. Trusting numbers that were quietly wrong was the expensive part.

The irony isn't lost on me: I'm building ShipFit, a tool that forces you to make idea-validation decisions on real data instead of vibes — and I launched it running on vibes for a week.

Now I've got clean data, session replays, and I'm shipping a new version tonight off what the first 30 users actually did instead of what I assumed.

Anyone else discover their tracking was lying to them mid-launch? What did it cost you before you caught it?