The Personal Struggle

Building a product is hard. Knowing if you're building the right thing is even harder. I learned this the hard way when I launched my own startup. I had users, I had data, but I didn't have clarity. What metrics actually mattered? Which features were users engaging with? Where were they dropping off? I spent weeks trying to build my own analytics dashboard, constantly questioning—am I tracking the right things? Is this insight even useful? The struggle to understand my own product's data consumed time I should have spent building features.

Background

I'm Nitesh Kumar, a software engineer with almost 7 years of experience at a single company, where I honed my skills building scalable systems. But the real education came from my startup journey—the late nights, the pivots, the harsh reality that passion alone doesn't build successful products. My startup didn't make it, but the lessons I learned were invaluable.

The Revelation

After my startup, I became obsessed with understanding what changed and why. Not building more dashboards—but finding the turning points: when did traffic drop? Where exactly do users abandon the funnel? How does this week compare to last? The kind of analysis that explains, not just displays numbers. Data analytics gives us the ability to understand our users, reason through complex patterns, and forecast what's coming next. If I had this clarity during my startup days, maybe things would have been different.

Working with Product Teams

Throughout my career, I've worked closely with product teams, and I kept seeing the same pattern repeat. Teams would ship features with great excitement, only to watch adoption fall flat. The worst part? They had no clue why. Was it a UX problem? Poor onboarding? Wrong target audience? Feature nobody needed? Without proper analytics, they were flying blind, making guesses instead of informed decisions. The pattern was always the same: they'd see a metric drop but couldn't figure out when it started or what caused it. They'd know conversion was down but not where in the funnel users were dropping. They'd compare time periods manually in spreadsheets because their tools couldn't just show them what changed. I watched talented teams burn months of effort on features that never got adopted, all because they lacked the insights to understand their users.

The Problem Everywhere

I realized this struggle wasn't unique to my startup or the teams I worked with. Across the SaaS landscape, product teams face the same questions: What should we track? How do we make sense of all this data? Why are enterprise analytics tools so complicated and expensive? The tools available either show too little (just page views and clicks) or drown you in dashboards. They track everything but explain nothing. You still can't answer simple questions: When did this change? Where are users dropping? How does today compare to last week?

The Mission

That's why I'm building VertexStats—delivered in two ways: a self-serve platform for teams who want to explore on their own, and expert consulting for founders who need help understanding what happened. Both share the same philosophy: highlight what changed, explain why, and make it clear what to do next. No dashboards that overwhelm. No complexity that requires a data team.

The Solo Journey

I'm building VertexStats alone. Every line of code, every feature, every decision—it's just me. No team, no co-founders, no investors pushing for quick returns. Just a solo developer with a clear vision, working nights and weekends, driven by the belief that every product team deserves to understand their users without the complexity and cost of enterprise tools.

The Hope

I'm building in the hope that one day, founders and product teams around the world will use VertexStats to gain the clarity I once desperately needed. If you've ever looked at a metric drop and thought 'what happened?', if you've needed to know where users get stuck without hiring a data team, if you've ever wished analytics would explain instead of just display—VertexStats is for you. Join me on this journey.