Dashboards should make founders decisive, not slow the release train. Here’s the minimalist analytics setup I’ve used across AfCircle, HOP VPN, and a handful of other early-stage Flutter teams.
1. Start with navigation breadcrumbs
Wrap your router so every screen push logs a page view. It takes under an hour and immediately surfaces retention leaks. We learned 60% of AfCircle signups never tapped the community discovery tab—fixed within a sprint.
2. Lock in three core events
I sit with founders to pick one activation, one engagement, and one monetisation signal. Everything else waits. One marketplace chose profile_complete, booking_created, and payout_success. Having a shared vocabulary kept marketing, product, and engineering aligned.
3. Lean on Remote Config for nudges
Flutter + Firebase Remote Config lets us iterate on onboarding copy or lifecycle timing without new binaries. We shipped three versions of a “finish setup” prompt in a week by tweaking JSON payloads consumed by a UserCoach service.
4. Give founders a live view
Supabase dashboards or Amplitude’s free tier both stand up in a day. Founders get real-time charts, investors get credible screenshots, and I stop being the bottleneck for “how are signups trending?”
5. Listen inside the product
Once activation stabilises, I trigger Typeform/Formbricks modals for power users only. The short answers handed us exact phrases for marketing copy and flagged confusing flows before churn did.
Keep the playbook visible
Everything lives in a Notion page titled “Signals” with links to dashboards, alert channels, and guidance on what to do when a number dips. No one has to DM the engineer to interpret the data.
Lightweight analytics like this keeps founders confident, investors curious, and the build velocity intact. It’s the balance every early-stage Flutter team should chase.