Analytics (Intro with Mixpanel)

The 1 Line Description

A quick view of the implementation roadmap & some of the key features on Mixpanel.

When to use it

As early as possible, to optimize conversions at every stage of the sales funnel.

Key Ideas

From a workshop run by Steve with an FFA cohort.

Full slide-deck here. (12 slides) 

Selected slides copied below, with some brief intro: 

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Step-by-step implementation guide: 

  1. Pick your analytics provider
  2. Map out your metrics that matter - eg. Mixpanel framework 
  3. Create a tracking plan - your single source of truth for your analytics events and properties
  4. Implement the custom events and properties
  5. QA and testing
  6. Build out the reporting dashboards
  7. Start making data-driven decisions about your product and growth!

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Author

Steve Waidelich
Growth Coach

Tools & Templates

If you’re planning on implementing a robust product analytics tool to track how users are using your product, you’re in the right place. 


Mixpanel, Amplitude and Heap stand out as the top tools out there. There isn’t much difference between them in terms of the insights you can gather from them, At least not for early stage startups 


Once you’ve selected a tool the next step is to define the most important metrics to track for your business. This framework from Mixpanel is a great tool to map out your metrics that matter.

Most Common Mistakes

  • Many startups make the mistake of implementing an analytics tool as the first step so they can quickly track every user interaction in their product, before they do the planning (see the framework above). This generally results in too much noise in their data, making it almost impossible to extract actionable insights. Failing to plan is planning to fail. So follow the steps.  
  • We see some startups assign the responsibility of the entire analytics project to the CTO, without including feedback from Design, Growth, Marketing or leadership. Assign a small cross-functional team to your analytics project.

Dig Deeper

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