The latest articles on DEV Community by Xavier (@xavier_shipfit). https://dev.to/xavier_shipfit https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4027504%2F1895c554-8c56-4156-acf4-a8905784ea8e.png https://dev.to/xavier_shipfit en Xavier Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:04:03 +0000 https://dev.to/xavier_shipfit/i-wired-up-cloudflare-rudderstack-mixpanel-hotjar-and-ga-then-i-shipped-without-testing-the-4pm2 https://dev.to/xavier_shipfit/i-wired-up-cloudflare-rudderstack-mixpanel-hotjar-and-ga-then-i-shipped-without-testing-the-4pm2 <p>I've been a CTO, a CPO and a CMO. I know the stack matters. </p> <p>So for my first solo SaaS I set it all up properly: Cloudflare, RudderStack, Mixpanel, Hotjar, Google Analytics.</p> <p>Then I made a rookie mistake. I did not test the tracking before going live.</p> <p>For two weeks every "what's working" call I made was based on incomplete data. Some events firing twice, some not at all, attribution half wired. I was reading tea leaves and calling it analytics.</p> <p>Here's the one that stung. One channel converted five times better than everything else. I'd been spreading myself across eight places, thinking reach was the game. It isn't. One channel drove 80% of my signups. I would have known that in week one if my tracking had been solid instead of me spraying everywhere blind.<br> I also ran paid ads before the tracking was fixed. That is just burning money. If you take one thing from this: fix your tracking before you spend a penny.</p> <p>The fix was boring. Write the tracking plan first, name every event and its properties, fire them in a staging build, and watch them land in each tool before you point real traffic at anything. I have shipped analytics for products with millions of users. I still skipped it, because when you are solo, everything feels urgent.</p> <p>The hardest part of doing this alone isn't the building and it isn't the marketing. It's making decisions with incomplete information and shipping anyway. Broken tracking makes that worse, because now even the data you do have is lying to you.</p> <p>I'm 50, 25 years launching products for big companies, first time doing it solo with my own money. Watching session replays tonight, shipping a new version.</p> <p>If you're wiring analytics for a launch: what's on your pre-launch checklist to verify events fire correctly? What do you wish you'd caught before go-live?</p> analytics buildinpublic webdev