Problem
Scrolled Brain is a speed-reading and focus platform aimed at students and knowledge workers. The founder came to us with a marketing site that was technically functional but converting poorly, and an analytics bill on PostHog that was eating more than fifteen percent of monthly revenue. Worse, the data PostHog was collecting did not actually answer the questions the team needed to make product decisions. The brief had two halves: rebuild the marketing site as a serious conversion surface, and build a custom analytics stack that costs a fraction of what they were paying and tells them exactly which onboarding step is bleeding users.
Generic product analytics tools are priced for a use case most early-stage products do not actually have. They charge per event, which means you instrument less than you should because every track call has a cost. They give you a hundred dashboards you will never look at and none of the three you need. For a focused product with a small number of critical funnels, a custom analytics stack, built on Firestore and a small Next.js dashboard, costs almost nothing to run and answers the actual questions an order of magnitude faster. The marketing site was the same insight in a different shape: stop optimising for vanity metrics and start measuring sign-ups.