I tracked every analytics tool my beta users actually opened. 4 out of 4 stopped using Google Analytics within 2 weeks.

$0 MRR. 4 beta users. 4,000 events per week. That's where I am right now.

Not a success story (yet). But I learned something in the last few months that completely changed how I think about product analytics — and I think it might save some of you a lot of wasted time.

Here's the backstory.

I was building a SaaS product and doing the "responsible founder" thing: setting up Google Analytics, configuring Mixpanel events, building custom SQL reports every Monday morning.

After 3 months of this, I sat down and asked myself a brutal question: "What decision have I actually made because of this data?"

The answer was zero. Not one.

I had 47 charts. I had session data, funnel visualizations, cohort tables. I could tell you that bounce rate was 62.4% and average session duration was 3m 12s.

But I couldn't answer the ONE question that actually mattered: "Why are users leaving, and what specific thing should I change to make them stay?"

So I stopped tracking everything and started tracking almost nothing.

The experiment:

I stripped my analytics down to 5 events:

1. Signed up
2. Completed onboarding
3. Performed the core action (the thing my product exists for)
4. Came back on day 2
5. Came back on day 7

Then I compared users who converted vs users who churned.

The pattern was embarrassingly obvious once I saw it.

Users who completed the core action within the first 48 hours retained at 5x the rate. The ones who browsed around, clicked settings, explored features but never did THE THING — gone within a week.

The problem wasn't my product. It was that my onboarding didn't push people to the one action that mattered.

What I built:

This insight is what made me start building Xora Analytics (analytics.xora.es). The whole idea is stupid simple:

• Track a handful of events, not hundreds
• AI analyzes what your successful users do differently from churned users
• You get a daily recommendation: "Users who do X convert 5x better. Here's how to get more users to do X."

That's it. No 50-tab dashboards. No SQL. No "figure it out yourself."

What happened with beta users:

I got 4 beta users to try it (all SaaS founders). Here's what surprised me:

Every single one of them had Google Analytics installed. Every single one of them stopped checking GA within 2 weeks of using Xora. Not because I told them to — they just said GA wasn't answering the questions they actually had.

One fractional CPO told me: "I used to spend Monday mornings building reports. Now I just check what Xora says I should fix and go fix it."

The feedback that keeps coming up: "I don't want to be a data analyst. I want someone to tell me what to do."

The uncomfortable truth about analytics:

Most analytics tools are built for data teams at companies with 50+ employees. If you're an indie hacker or early-stage founder, you don't need a tool that shows you data. You need a tool that makes decisions for you (or at least tells you what decision to make).

Think about it: when you check your analytics, you're really asking one of three questions:

1. Is my product growing or dying?
2. Where am I losing users?
3. What should I change next?

GA answers none of these directly. You have to translate charts into answers yourself. And most of us (myself included) are terrible at that.

What I'd tell every indie hacker tracking analytics right now:

Before you set up another dashboard or add another event:

1. Find your "commitment signal" — the ONE action that separates users who stay from users who leave. If you don't know what it is, pull your last 20 converted users and 20 churned users and compare their first 7 days. I promise the pattern will jump out.

2. Kill every metric that doesn't help you decide something. If you look at a number and your reaction is "cool" instead of "I should do X" — delete it.

3. Optimize your onboarding to push users toward that commitment signal as fast as possible. Everything else is secondary.

Where I'm at now:

Still at $0 MRR and figuring out pricing. My beta users love it but "love" doesn't pay rent. Working on converting free to paid and adding more users.

If you're an indie hacker or early-stage SaaS founder and want to try it, I'd love more beta users. Not trying to hard-sell here — genuinely looking for feedback on whether this approach clicks for other founders too.

analytics.xora.es

Question for the community:

How do you actually use your analytics today? Do you feel like your current setup helps you make decisions, or are you just... looking at numbers?

Curious whether this "drowning in data but starving for decisions" feeling is universal or if some of you have actually cracked the code.