There’s a frustrating truth that every founder eventually faces: pageviews don’t pay the bills. You can have thousands of visitors streaming through your website every day, but if you don’t know which of those visitors are actually becoming paying customers, you’re essentially flying blind. Marc Lou found himself in exactly this position about a year and a half ago. He was using Plausible Analytics and appreciated its clean interface, but something crucial was missing. The tool showed him traffic patterns, bounce rates, and session durations, yet none of these metrics answered the one question that actually mattered: where is my revenue coming from?
So he did what any resourceful founder would do. He built his own solution.
Fast forward to today, and that solution has become DataFast, the analytics platform that just claimed the top spot on Product Hunt for Week 5 of 2026. With over 700 upvotes and a rapidly growing community of followers, this revenue-first analytics tool is making waves among entrepreneurs who are tired of vanity metrics and ready to focus on what actually drives growth.
What makes DataFast different from the dozens of other analytics tools already crowding the market? The answer lies in its DNA. While traditional analytics platforms obsess over traffic volume, DataFast obsessively tracks the connection between that traffic and actual revenue. The setup is refreshingly simple. You install a lightweight 4kb tracking script on your website, connect your payment processor (Stripe, LemonSqueezy, Polar, or Shopify), and suddenly you can see exactly which marketing channels are bringing in paying customers rather than just curious browsers.
The real magic happens in the revenue attribution engine. DataFast doesn’t just tell you that a visitor came from Twitter or Google. It shows you how much revenue that specific channel generated, which customer segments have the highest lifetime value, and what behavioral patterns directly influence purchase decisions. This is the kind of insight that transforms marketing from a guessing game into a precise science.
Marc’s journey with DataFast hasn’t been the typical VC-funded rocket ship story. He spent the first 120 days grinding to reach just one thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. There were moments when he wanted to quit, competing against well-funded giants in what seemed like an impossibly crowded market. But he kept shipping features, writing code, and solving his own problems. Sixteen months later, the numbers tell a different story: seventeen thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue, nearly a thousand paying customers, and over a billion pageviews tracked through the platform.
The product itself reflects this bootstrapped philosophy. The interface is clean and purposeful, stripping away the complexity that makes traditional analytics tools so intimidating. Setting up goals and funnels takes minutes, not hours. The live visitor intelligence feature lets you watch potential customers in real time, identifying who’s likely to buy and giving you the opportunity to act on that information instantly. And for the data nerds who want to dig deeper, there’s a full analytics API with an interactive playground.
What really resonates with users, though, is the philosophy behind the product. Marc built DataFast because he needed it himself, and that authenticity shines through in every feature. The X integration is a perfect example. It doesn’t just track clicks from Twitter. It shows mentions and link attribution, helping founders understand which conversations and content pieces are actually driving revenue.
The timing of DataFast’s Product Hunt launch feels significant. In an era where every startup is chasing growth at all costs, there’s something refreshingly honest about a tool that cuts through the noise and focuses on the metric that matters most. Revenue isn’t just another data point on a dashboard. It’s the lifeblood of any business, and understanding where it comes from is fundamental to making good decisions.
For founders who have been struggling to connect the dots between their marketing efforts and their bank account, DataFast offers something rare: clarity. The kind of clarity that lets you double down on what’s working and quickly abandon what isn’t. In a world drowning in data, sometimes the most valuable thing is knowing exactly which numbers to pay attention to.
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