Why isn't my startup growing?
You can't fix what you can't see: who comes, who pays, and what they want.
Free plan, no time limit · No card · Stripe stays read-only
The short answer
Usually because one of three steps is losing almost everyone, and you can't see which: not enough of the right people arrive, the people who arrive don't sign up, or the people who sign up don't pay. Measure where visitors come from, what users ask for, and which source brought the people who pay. The weakest step is where your next month goes.
Example data - Visitors, from one script tag on your site.
- Payments and MRR from your own Stripe, read-only.
- What one visit is worth to you.
- A spike in visits (a Hacker News post, in this example)…
- …and the days money came in. Which traffic paid?
Growth stalls in one of three places.
An early product has a short path: someone hears of it, visits, signs up, uses it, pays. When growth stops, one step is losing almost everyone. Without numbers every step looks equally guilty, so founders fix the wrong one: a new landing page when nobody arrives, more marketing when visitors arrive and leave.
Three numbers point at the step. Visitors by source: does anyone arrive, and from where? Signups against visits: do the people who arrive want it? Paying customers by source: which people value it enough to pay? Add what your users ask for, and you know why.
None of this needs a team or a data warehouse. It needs the numbers recorded from the start, because where a visit came from can't be recovered later.
Find the broken step this week.
- 01
Count visits, by where they came from
Add an analytics script and look at one week. If almost nobody arrives, it's an attention problem: work on being found (posts, communities, search) before you touch the product.
- 02
Compare signups with visits, per source
A source whose visitors sign up far more often than the others' is telling you who the product is for. A page almost nobody signs up from, whatever the source, is telling you the offer isn't clear.
- 03
Check who pays, and where they came from
Match your paying customers to the source of their first visit. Often one channel brings the people who pay and another brings people who browse. Put next month's effort into the first.
- 04
Read what users ask for
Collect feedback in one place, with the person on every message. Requests from people who pay tell you what to build next.
All three numbers, on one page, from the first day.
Nordva Launch records where every visitor and every signup came from, reads your Stripe account read-only to see who pays, and keeps each person's feedback on their record. The Insights page shows visits, signups and revenue on one timeline, and a table of sources shows which ones bring people who pay.
The free plan covers the start: web analytics up to 10,000 events a month, a waitlist of 100 signups, one Stripe connection with 30 days of history, and 50 feedback messages a month. AI sorting of feedback starts on Indie.
Set up in about five minutes.
- 01
Paste one line
About two minutes
Add the script tag to your site, or run npx nordva@latest init and let your AI coding agent wire it in. The first visit shows up within a minute.
- 02
Connect Stripe, read-only
About three minutes
Create a restricted Stripe key with read permissions and paste it. Launch can only read; disconnecting deletes everything it synced. Every plan, Free included.
- 03
See who pays, and why
From the first visit
Where visitors come from, which of them sign up, what they ask you for, and which source brought the ones who pay, on one record per person.
I spent two years building apps before I understood how much three things matter, and that they only matter together: who your users are and where they came from, what they ask you for, and which source and which ad brought the ones who pay.
Most people starting out don't know that yet. I didn't. Together, those three tell you what to build next and where to spend your time and money. Nordva Launch puts them on one record per person, from the first visit to the first payment.
We only get paid if you succeed, so this site teaches first.
When Launch is the wrong tool.
- You want to watch individual visitors click around (session recordings, heatmaps): Launch counts, maps and traces visits; it doesn't record screens.
- You already have a data team and a warehouse: their numbers will go deeper than any dashboard.
Questions, answered.
How many users should I have before I measure anything?
None. Measure from the first visitor, because where a visit came from can't be recorded afterwards. The numbers mean little at ten visitors, but the record of where your first paying customers came from is worth the most later.
Is it the product or the marketing?
Look at the steps. If nobody arrives, it's the marketing. If people arrive but don't sign up, suspect the page or the offer. If they sign up but don't pay, suspect the product or the pricing. The numbers tell you which conversation to have.
Do I need a cookie banner to measure visitors?
Not necessarily. Launch's script can count visits with no cookie at all, and in its default mode it recognises returning visitors outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, and inside them only after your consent banner says yes. Whether your site needs a banner is for you to decide under the law that applies to it.
What does it cost?
The free plan has no time limit and covers analytics, a waitlist, a Stripe connection and 50 feedback messages a month. Indie is $19 a month when you need AI-sorted feedback, the launch email and channel costs.
Find the step that's losing people.
Start free, add one line to your site, and connect Stripe read-only. The first visit shows up within a minute.