Instrument an AI Startup in 14 Days
From analytics chaos to one trusted funnel view — visitor to revenue — in two focused weeks.
Who this is for
Founders and first marketers whose data lives in six disconnected tools.
What you leave with
Every lead carries a source, every deal traces to a first touch, and one dashboard tells the truth.
Map before you wire
Days 1–3
Instrumentation projects die from wiring first and thinking second. Spend three days deciding what deserves to be measured.
Draw the funnel on one page
Every step a buyer takes from first touch to revenue: ad click, page view, form, signup, activation, meeting, opportunity, closed-won. If a step matters to revenue and isn't on the page, it doesn't exist yet.
Name the four load-bearing events
Form submitted, meeting booked, opportunity created, closed won/lost. These four join marketing to money. Everything else is nice-to-have; these are non-negotiable.
Pick the spine system
Usually the CRM. Decide now: every tool must eventually write its identity (email or account id) into the spine. Tools that can't join to the spine get replaced or isolated.
Write the UTM constitution
One naming convention — lowercase, hyphenated, fixed vocabularies for source/medium. Document it, build links only through a builder tool, and treat bare links in campaigns as bugs.
Phase artifact
One-page tracking plan: funnel map, event definitions, owners, and the UTM convention.
Wire the spine
Days 4–9
Now connect the path a buyer actually travels, in order of revenue proximity — closest to the money first.
Forms → CRM with source attached
Every form submission creates or updates a CRM record carrying utm_* fields and referrer. Hidden form fields beat cookie archaeology — capture at the moment of conversion.
Calendar → CRM
Booked meetings must attach to the contact and preserve the original source. Pre-fill booking links from form data so no identity gets retyped (and mistyped) by a human.
Product events → accounts
Signup, activation, and 3–5 usage milestones, keyed to account and contact. Usage without identity is trivia; wire the join first, add event richness later.
Opportunities inherit their history
When sales creates an opportunity, the source must ride along automatically. Manual opportunity creation is where most attribution silently dies — automate the inheritance.
Phase artifact
A working spine: form → CRM → calendar → product → pipeline, all joined by identity.
Prove it, publish it, protect it
Days 10–14
Untested tracking is worse than none — it produces confident wrong answers. The last phase makes the system trustworthy and keeps it that way.
Run the end-to-end trace
Submit a test lead through a tagged campaign link. Follow it: form → CRM → meeting → opportunity. Every hop must preserve source. Fix every break before declaring victory.
Backfill the last 20 deals
By hand if needed. This gives you an immediate baseline attribution report and surfaces the historical gaps your new system just fixed.
Publish THE dashboard
One funnel view: visitor → lead → meeting → opportunity → revenue, by source. Present it at the next team meeting and retire every competing spreadsheet in the same breath.
Automate the QA
A weekly check for untagged campaign links, leads with no source, and event volume anomalies. Tracking rots silently — the QA job is what keeps day 14 true on day 140.
Phase artifact
The funnel dashboard + a weekly QA routine that keeps it honest.
Want this run for you, with you?
Every playbook here is a phase of the Growth Intelligence OS. We run them inside your team — your Slack, your stack, your numbers.
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