At a startup, you're supposed to be data-driven. But you've got no budget for analytics tools, no time to instrument everything properly, and no benchmarks to know what good even looks like.
I've been there. Early-stage companies are told to measure everything, but the reality is you're running on fumes and every hour spent building dashboards is an hour not spent talking to customers or shipping product.
Here's how I've approached it.
On time: pick only three metrics. Not ten. Not five. Three. These should be the numbers most directly tied to your mission. Everything else is noise. You can add more later when you have the bandwidth, but right now ruthless prioritisation is the only way to stay sane. If you're not sure which three, ask yourself what you'd check every morning if you could only look at one dashboard.
On tools: you don't need Amplitude's enterprise plan. Google Analytics and Mixpanel both have generous free tiers that cover most of what an early-stage company needs. For customer feedback, Typeform does the job. These tools take minimal setup and will get you 80% of the insight for 0% of the cost.
On benchmarks: this is where it gets creative. Industry reports are useful for market-level trends, but the real gold is in public pitch decks. Startups that have raised often share their decks on sites like Slidebean or in blog posts. These contain hard numbers on acquisition costs, retention curves, and conversion rates that are otherwise impossible to find.
The pattern here is the same as everything else at a startup. Start small, focus on what matters, iterate as you learn. You don't need perfect data. You need enough data to make better decisions than you made yesterday.