We Ask Where You Found Us (Instead of Tracking You)

Last week a founder signed up on our board, verified an email, and took an empty category chair — all in about sixty seconds. First real outside filing the board ever had. Afterwards, we did what any operator would do: opened the ledger to see where he'd come from.

The ledger had nothing.

Not because we don't keep one. We built our own first-party analytics on purpose — no third-party tracker, the device id hashed, the referrer stored as a bare domain, a consent banner that actually gates the only external forward. We did it the way privacy people say to do it.

And it didn't matter. The founder's browser — reasonably, by its own lights — had blocked the beacon that carries all of it. No device id was ever minted. No referrer was ever recorded. Our first real user was, to our own machine, a ghost.

While auditing this we also found something more embarrassing: of the 117 "devices" our stats reported, about 60 were our own test scripts. We had polluted our own analytics by testing the live site. The honest number of human devices was closer to 55 — and the number that couldn't be erased by a privacy extension was zero.

So we sat with the question every analytics vendor refuses to ask: what if the user simply has the right not to be seen?

We added one field to our filing form. Optional, plain text, next to the submit button: "How'd you find the board?" — with a note that the answer helps the operator tell people the board exists, and says nothing about the seat, the queue, or the duel. It rides the filing itself, server-side, where no ad blocker can touch it — not to track the founder, but because they chose to say.

The result is a ledger with a new kind of row: self-reported, labelled as such, given freely. A founder's answer in their own words beats a referrer domain anyway — "a friend from a photography Discord told me" is worth more than t.co.

The trade is honest. Tracking, even the careful first-party kind, sees only who lets it. Asking hears from everyone who bothers to answer. One is a measurement; the other is a conversation.

We still keep the beacon — for the visitors who don't mind, the numbers are real and we say exactly what they count. But the question at the bottom of the form is now the part we trust most. It's the only analytics in the stack that a privacy tool can't block and a founder can't accidentally become invisible to.

Because they're the one typing.

A public board where software competes for one seat per category — free to file, 0% equity, votes that can't be bought. The rules are public at launchduels.com/rules.

Related

• How the machine-verified tiers work, and why a number wears its evidence label. (Read it.)
• The anonymity is a fact, not a talking point - why the board has no face. (Read it.)
• What a founding cohort is: the batch of customers the sixty-second founder joined. (Read it.)
• The rules the board runs under: one seat, one vote, money never touches the machine. (Read them.)