Your first week: the solo-founder action plan
Everything above collapses into a handful of moves you can make this week, alone, without buying anything. The whole point of this method is that it is available to a solo founder today, not a project for a team you do not have.
Today: add the field. Open your highest-intent form, the demo request or the strategy-call booking, and add a mandatory, multi-line, free-text field that asks "How did you hear about us?" with no helper text and no examples. That is the entire build. If you run a LinkedIn-led or community-led motion, you will feel the value almost immediately, because your analytics has been telling you "organic search" while your buyers are about to start telling you "saw your post about X" and "a founder in my Slack group sent me your guide". The tool was steering you toward more ads. The form is about to tell you to keep posting.
This week: wire the property and the workflow. In your CRM, create a "Grouped Self-Reported Attribution" property and a workflow that maps keywords to channel categories. You will not have enough data to group cleanly yet, so set the plumbing now and let it fill. The first thirty answers will arrive faster than you expect once the field is live on a form people actually complete.
Read the first thirty by hand. Resist automating the reading too early. For the first thirty submissions, read every answer yourself. This is where the surprises live, the channel you had written off, the podcast you forgot you went on, the community quietly sending you your best-fit buyers. No grouped chart will ever feel as instructive as watching the same unexpected phrase appear for the fifth time in raw text.
Make one budget move. Then do the thing the whole exercise is for: change one spend decision. Find the channel your form named that your tool never did, and move budget, or just your own time, toward it. One reallocation, made on evidence your dashboard could not produce, pays for the entire effort.
Where to go next. This field is one instrument in a larger tracking discipline. From here, tighten the measurable side with server-side tracking so the lower funnel you can see stays sharp as cookies decay, get your wider measurement house in order with the analytics setup playbook, and make sure the engine you are instrumenting is the right one by reading The growth machine, end to end. Build the growth machine, then instrument it honestly. The form is where honesty starts.