Growth & scale

◆TL;DR

Objective — Measure who uses what, fix onboarding drop-off, experiment safely, and scale infra before traffic spikes hurt you.

For beginners and agents

Pair this guide with Monitoring & analytics — that page explains Sentry vs GA; this one covers product analytics and growth loops.

The growth stack

Layer	Question it answers	Typical tool
Error monitoring	Is the app broken?	Sentry
Web analytics	Who visits and from where?	GA4 / Rybbit
Product analytics	Which features drive retention?	PostHog, Mixpanel, or GA4 events
Experiments	Did the change help?	A/B framework or feature flags

graph LR
  Traffic["Traffic"] --> Activate["Activation<br/>(onboarding)"]
  Activate --> Retain["Retention<br/>(feature use)"]
  Retain --> Revenue["Revenue"]
  Revenue --> Scale["Infra scale"]

Setup product analytics 💻

• Define north-star and 3–5 key events (signup, trial start, core action, upgrade).
• Instrument server- and client-side events consistently (user_id in staging only when safe).
• Build one dashboard: funnel from landing → activation → paid.

Enrich detail: see Monitoring & analytics and setup-new phases for Sentry/GA wiring.

Onboarding optimization 🔀

• Map first-session steps; measure drop-off per step.
• Remove optional fields; defer advanced setup to later sessions.
• Add in-app checklist or progress bar tied to activation event.

A/B testing 👤/💻

• Hypothesis → single change → pre-defined success metric → minimum sample window.
• Never run overlapping tests on the same page without segmentation.
• Ship winner; document in changelog.

Infrastructure scaling 💻

• Watch CPU, queue depth, and DB connections after marketing pushes.
• Enable opcode cache, horizon/queue workers, and CDN for static assets before vertical scaling.
• Load-test staging with 2× expected peak.

Verification checklist

• Core events firing in analytics dashboard
• Onboarding funnel baseline captured
• One experiment doc with metric + stop rule
• Staging load test recorded

Monitoring & analytics Sentry vs web analytics — read this first if instrumentation is missing.