I tried building a SaaS and here's what actually happened

I sent the same link to three Slack channels last Tuesday and realized I had zero way of knowing which one drove the 47 signups I saw that morning. Honestly, it was a bit of a panic - I had no idea if the link was even working correctly, or if people were just magically appearing on my landing page. I was using a basic curl script to send out the links, but it wasn't giving me any insights into who was clicking and from where. The Trouble with Manual Tracking I was doing what most people do - throwing links out into the wild and hoping for the best. My script looked something like this: curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"link": "https://example.com"}' https://example.com/api/links . It was simple, but it wasn't giving me any real data on how my links were performing. I was relying on my website's analytics dashboard to tell me what was going on, but it was slow to update and didn't give me any granular information about individual links. I was essentially flying bli