Marketing attribution for founders

Marketing attribution for founders is usually one question: which of the things I did this week actually brought somebody in. Oetzi answers it with tracked links and an outcomes ledger that records clicks, signups, and customers against the thing that caused them. Both are free, so nothing about measuring your own work costs credits.

How do you track signups from Reddit replies?

Put a tracked link in the reply. When you answer a thread on Reddit, the link you drop is a tracked one, so the click that follows carries the reply with it. If that person signs up, the signup lands in the ledger next to the thread it came from, and if they become a customer later, that lands there too.

That is the whole chain: a thread, a reply, a click, a signup, a customer. Most founders can see the first two and guess at the rest. The ledger keeps all five in one row, which is what turns "Reddit felt like it worked" into something you can act on. Where the threads come from is covered on the Reddit monitoring page, and how the replies get drafted is on replies in your voice.

What does the outcomes ledger record?

Clicks, signups, and customers. Not impressions, not reach, not a score invented to look like progress. The ledger is deliberately short because those three are the only numbers that tell a founder whether an hour in a comment section was worth spending.

Reading it is free, and so are the tracked links that feed it. Reading has to be free, because a measurement you pay for is a measurement you avoid taking. The pricing page lists everything that costs nothing alongside what does.

Why does closing the loop change what you post?

Because it changes what you repeat. Without a ledger, the loudest post wins your attention, and the loudest post is usually the one that got argued with. With a ledger, you can see that a quiet answer in a thread of nine comments brought in three signups while the post that got 400 likes brought in none.

That feeds directly back into the work. The posting plan sets your cadence, the drafts come from your voice doc, and the ledger tells you which of those slots are earning their place. After a month you are not guessing at channels any more, you are moving your hours to the ones that showed up in the ledger.

Does this work outside Reddit?

Yes. A tracked link works anywhere you can put a link, so the same ledger covers a reply on X, a comment on Hacker News, a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, or a link you paste into a private chat. The ledger does not care which platform the click came from, only what happened after it.

Some conversations never show up in analytics at all. Somebody reads your answer, does not click, and searches for you two days later. No tool can honestly attribute that. What the ledger gives you is the measurable part, recorded properly, so guesswork is the only thing left over.

Questions

How do I know which reply brought in a signup?

Use a tracked link in the reply. The click carries the reply with it, and when that person signs up the signup is recorded in the outcomes ledger against the thread and reply that caused it. If they later become a customer, that gets recorded too, so one row shows the whole path from a comment section to revenue.

Does attribution cost credits?

No. Tracked links and the outcomes ledger are both free, along with the inbox, post metrics, reports, and reading generally. Credits are spent on work that costs money to produce, like a listening sweep, a drafting run, or a rendered video. Measuring what already happened is not that kind of work, so it stays free.

What counts as an outcome?

Clicks, signups, and customers. The ledger keeps those three rather than a wider set of vanity numbers, because they are the ones that tell a founder whether an hour spent in a thread was worth it. Each is tied back to the link, post, or reply that produced it, so you can compare a channel against another honestly.

Is this enough to replace analytics?

It is not trying to be a full analytics stack. It answers one question well, which is whether the conversations you joined and the posts you published turned into people using your product. Keep your product analytics for what happens after signup. Use the ledger for the part between a public comment and a new account.