If it weren't for dashboards, I think I would have abandoned my product by now. It seems that's exactly how vibe-coded projects die.
(But mine isn't dead yet, so come and play.)
A product without users is like a plane without a pilot: cool, but useless
When building any product, even with AI, it's important to remember a simple thing: the most functionally impressive product without users is a waste of time, effort, and money. And the worst product that has paying users is already a successful product.
I set up dashboards so I wouldn't have to guess
To track the life of the product like a real product manager, I set up dashboards for metrics: retention, DAU, MAU, and a few more indicators. Technically, it's all built on events. The client sends a signal at every step of the player's journey: opened the site, entered a nickname, created or joined a lobby, started a game, finished it. The server aggregates this by day, and a separate admin panel turns the numbers into charts and a funnel. At one point the funnel showed more started games than players who entered the lobby. It turned out I was counting events, not unique players — and the same person could play several times a day. Now I try to make data-driven decisions, but without users and data it's still hard.
Dashboards save you from burnout
If it weren't for these charts, I think I would have abandoned the project already. But when you see that someone actually came in and played a game, you feel a surge of motivation.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has already come in and played!
This will probably resonate with many people who are just starting their product. Even one real user feels completely different from a big abstract number in someone else's case study.
One request to those who played
If you played "Growing City," please write in the comments where you played from: at home, at work, on the subway. I have a hypothesis, but I can't test it without feedback. If I get enough answers, I'll definitely share what came of it in one of the next articles.
And if you haven't played yet, come to https://rastushiy-gorod.ru and give it a try — it's free and requires no registration.
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