# Tom Belcher, Indie Developer / Part-Time Founder at Shelf & Code LLC — read of Solo Analytics, 2026-05-30

> 6 years building weekend SaaS, day job as a backend engineer at a 40-person logistics startup. Two products live. One makes $390/mo. One makes $0.

## How I got here

I searched "simple analytics indie saas no fluff" sometime around 9 PM after putting my daughter to bed. Plausible renewed last week and I second-guess it every time. I want something that shows revenue alongside pageviews without me stitching together a Retool dashboard myself. This came up on page two. Clicked it.

## What I clicked first

"You're juggling Plausible, GA4, and whatever else you've half-integrated, using 30% of what you pay for."

Okay, yes. That sentence is accurate and I felt it. That pulled me in. So did "$10 a month." I was ready to sign up in the first thirty seconds.

## Where I paused

Right around the Adoptability scorecard. The page says "73/100 Adoptability, $800 Year-1 take-home (Fermi), 1 in 5 Meaningful-success odds." I stopped and read that three times. I came here to buy an analytics tool and now I'm looking at a Fermi estimate for... building one? And then: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So this is not an analytics product. This is someone selling me the idea of building an analytics product. That's a significant bait-and-switch if you're coming in from a Google search. I literally had a tab open to type in my credit card.

## What I distrusted

The page runs two parallel pitches and never signals the handoff between them. Top half: "Start Free Today," "Paste one line of code," "Create Free Account." Bottom half: "Unlock the dossier, $5." Those are two totally different products and two totally different buyers, and they're sitting on the same page with no clear line between them.

"Core Dashboard. User behavior. Event tracking. Revenue reports. Cohort analysis. Funnel breakdown." That's a feature list for something that doesn't exist yet. Writing it in the present tense when there are no live customers is a choice. Not an honest one.

Also "No BS" appears in a sentence that ends right before a section selling me a business idea. That's a little ironic.

## What would convince me

If this were an actual product: one screenshot of a real dashboard from a real user. Not a mockup. The kind where you can see their actual numbers and a Stripe integration working. That would have kept me on the page.

If this is the idea-marketplace pitch: show me one person who bought the dossier and actually shipped something. Name, URL, MRR after six months. Not "Fermi estimates." A single live example outweighs any scoring model.

The 73/100 Adoptability score means nothing to me without knowing what it's being compared to. Is that good? Is everything above 60 worth doing? I have no calibration.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. Is there a working product I can actually log into today, or is everything on this page describing something I'd need to build from scratch after buying the dossier?

2. "Year-1 take-home $800" is a pretty grim number to surface as a headline metric. Is that intentionally conservative or is that the real expected case for most people who buy this?

3. The "Operator partnership" tier says "hire the team that built this to install, customize, and run launch with you." What does that actually cost and what does "run launch" mean week to week?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The opening third of this page is genuinely good. Someone thought hard about the actual pain. But the page doesn't know what it is, and I spent five minutes trying to figure out whether I was shopping for a tool or an idea, which is not how you want a potential buyer spending their time.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-30. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*