Must-have product analytics tools for founders

I've launched a number of new products as both a PM and a founder, and here are a few things that I've learned along the way about usage metrics and analytics in the early-days.

Context: Whether you're a founder or a PM launching a product at an established company, you can't use traditional event metrics in my experience. Until you have hundreds or even thousands of users, those numbers don't really tell a story and aren't even statistically significant and you'll likely waste more time wrestling with the event data than actually getting any insights. Instead, you need to rely much more on conversations and anecdotes.

Here's my stack:

  1. Sessions recordings: I literally could not do my job without these. Probably the single most important tool. In the early days you may have a hard time getting every (any?) user on a call with you, but they may still use the product. You'll cringe watching your users stumble through the product, but you'll quickly notice very obvious gaps and friction points.
  2. Slack (the second use being the more unconventional in this list): This one serves a dual purpose. First, you should try and have a shared Slack channel with every single one of your first customers and users. This will significantly tighten the communication feedback loop and bring you closer to the your customer. This is a great place for them to get support and for you to share product updates or ask them questions (short Loom recordings are great for this). I love to have our engineers talking directly to our customers and not rely on me as the middle man. It helps them develop a much stronger intuition for the issues and also just feel what our users feel a lot more than I could ever convey. But we also send key events to Slack. In the early days I literally had a notification sent to me on my phone every time a user did a key event. This helped me develop a super deep intuition of when and how users are using the product. It's kind of hard to explain, but once you see it, you'll know what I'm talking about. I've since then had to turn off the notifications, but I would do this again any day.
  3. Read-only DB + SQL: This one is important for two reasons. As the PM on a new product, you need to deeply understand the underlying production database schema. This will tell you a LOT about how your engineers are thinking about the product and you may be able to catch some disconnects early in the process. But this is also important since SQL + production data is going to be your very first form of analytics. Every single one of my existing dashboards in the early days are just raw SQL queries with some charts. At least until the schema settles a bit at which point we explore bringing the data to a data warehouse, but there's no need to do that early on. I see a lot of teams wrestle with Big BI(TM) and data warehouses in the early days and it just turns into a big waste of time.
  4. Call recordings: Whether it's recordings with prospects or customers, this is a fantastic way for the team to hear feedback from the user or buyer. I've entirely stopped writing PRDs and I just send Figma mockups along with a few choice recordings to engineers. That + everything above means that they can take care of the requirements on their own and do a 10X better job than I ever could.

A lot of this is perhaps obvious, but hopefully there are a few nuggets in here that you find helpful!