I asked a founder friend at dinner where her last ten signups came from. We're both running early-stage SaaS, both doing the manual GTM thing — Reddit replies, X threads, the occasional LinkedIn post, one Hacker News attempt that didn't go anywhere.

She thought about it. "Twitter, I think. Mostly Twitter."

I asked how she knew.

"It feels like Twitter is where I get the most engagement."

Engagement isn't signups. I knew that. She knew that. We both nodded at the table and changed the subject because the actual answer to my question was: she didn't know. She had a hunch. The hunch felt right because she spent the most time on Twitter, and the dopamine hits she remembered were from Twitter, and the people who DM'd her about her tool were on Twitter.

When I went home and looked at my own data, I had a hunch that LinkedIn was working. My LinkedIn posts were getting decent reactions. I'd written a few that I was proud of. I had a story about LinkedIn being underrated for founder-led GTM.

LinkedIn had produced one signup in eight weeks.

The two subreddits I was barely posting in had produced eleven.

This post is about the scoreboard nobody bothers to build, and why the data — once you have it — changes how you spend your week.

You're tracking the wrong unit

Most founders track signups in their analytics tool. That tells you a number went up. It does not tell you which conversation produced the signup, in which channel, on which day, with what voice.

The CRM is supposed to fix this. It doesn't, because the CRM was built for outbound sales — a structured pipeline where leads enter through a form. A Reddit reply that resulted in a signup three weeks later via three intermediate steps (the person bookmarked your tool, came back via a Google search, signed up under a different email) does not show up cleanly in a CRM. You'd have to enter every reply manually, mark every outcome manually, and run the report yourself. Nobody does that. Nobody has ever done that for more than two weeks straight.

The unit you actually need to track is the conversation. Not the signup, the conversation. Every reply you sent, every thread you started, the channel it was on, the topic, who you were replying to, what happened next. Once you're tracking conversations instead of signups, the math gets honest. A reply that didn't convert this week but did get a thoughtful follow-up DM is interesting data. A reply that got 30 upvotes and no clicks is interesting data. A subreddit that produces three conversations a week, each of which converts at 15%, is more interesting than a subreddit that produces twenty conversations at 1%.

The questions the scoreboard has to answer

There's a small list of questions every founder doing manual GTM should be able to answer in under thirty seconds. Most can't answer any of them.

Which channel is producing the most signups per hour spent? Not signups, not engagement — signups per hour. You have a finite number of hours. If r/SaaS is converting 4 in 10 conversations and LinkedIn is converting 1 in 10, and they take the same time to draft, then the next ten conversations should be 9 r/SaaS and 1 LinkedIn until LinkedIn earns its way back.

Which topics convert and which don't? You write about your product from many angles. Pricing, integrations, the technical decisions you made, the why-we-built-this story. Some of those land. Some don't. Without per-conversation tracking, the angles all blur together and you keep writing the ones that feel best to write, not the ones that actually move signups.

Which threads are waiting for follow-up? A common failure mode: you reply, the person responds, you mean to reply back, and the thread dies because you forgot. Threads going dormant after one round is the single biggest leak in founder-led GTM, and you don't notice it because there's no list of "open threads."

Where are you over-investing? The dopamine-loud channel is rarely the converting channel. The dopamine-loud channel is where you get fast feedback (a Twitter reply ratio, a LinkedIn comment thread). The converting channel is where you have a slower, lower-volume, but tighter exchange (a Reddit DM that turns into a Calendly link three weeks later). The scoreboard tells you which is which, and your gut almost certainly has them backwards.

What "outcome" actually means

The scoreboard is only as useful as your outcome marking. The trick is to make marking outcomes cheap enough that you actually do it.

Three outcomes is enough. Most tools try to give you eight; you stop using all eight after two days. The three I use:

Live. The conversation is still going somewhere. Maybe they DM'd back. Maybe you owe a follow-up. Stays in your active list.
Signup. They created an account. The chain of attribution doesn't have to be perfect; if a Reddit reply was the introduction and they signed up sometime after, mark it.
Dead. Polite ignore, off-topic, removed by mod, otherwise not going anywhere. Marking dead is what removes it from your list and clears the noise.

That's the whole taxonomy. Anything more granular is theater. Anything less doesn't generate the per-channel conversion rates that change behavior.

The behavioral effect: drop what isn't working

Once you have the data, the discipline of dropping is the actual win.

I cut LinkedIn time by 70% the week after I ran the numbers. Not because I disliked LinkedIn — I'd been enjoying the LinkedIn posts. I cut it because the hour I was spending on LinkedIn per week was producing about a tenth the result of the same hour on r/SaaS. The cut was an act of math, not taste.

The hours went to two subreddits I'd been ignoring. Within six weeks, signups had roughly doubled. Not because I'd worked harder — I'd worked the same amount — but because the time was now flowing toward the channels that worked, instead of evenly across the channels that felt good.

This is the part most founder-led GTM advice misses. The advice is usually "be consistent and the reps compound." That's true. But it's incomplete. Reps compound on the channels where they work. Reps on the wrong channel are entropy. The scoreboard is what lets you tell the difference.

What this is not

It's not the same shape as your analytics dashboard. Analytics tells you signups. The scoreboard tells you conversations, with signups as one of three outcomes. Two different views of the same business.

It's not a substitute for product. If your product doesn't convert when people land on it, the scoreboard will tell you "every channel sends a lot of clicks, nothing converts." That's a useful diagnosis but the fix is in the product, not the GTM.

It's not the entire answer to channel mix. Channels also have momentum and seasonality. A subreddit that's been quiet for a month might suddenly become the hottest place to post. The scoreboard catches that. But you still have to be in the channel enough to notice it; pure outcome-following would have you drop a channel before its real moment.

If you can't answer the last-10-signups question

That's the test. Pause for ten seconds. Where did your last ten signups come from? Which channel, which thread, which topic angle?

If you don't know, you're optimizing on hunch, which is to say you're optimizing on the channels where you get the most dopamine — which is rarely the channels where you get the most signups.

Thread Otter has a 14-day trial, no card. Connect a channel or two. Reply for a week. By the end of the week, the scoreboard will tell you the answer to the question. The first 100 Solo signups lock in $19/mo for life — the Founding 100 cohort, counter live on the pricing page.

threadotter.com/pricing

The dinner conversation that started this post happened in February. My friend kept posting on Twitter through April. In May she told me she'd signed up for Thread Otter to figure out what was actually working. She'd been spending nine hours a week on the channel that produced one signup, and one hour on the channel producing five.

The math is rarely kind. But once you have it, the next week is much easier to plan.