Originally posted on LinkedIn.

The curse of the technical founder.

A couple of days ago I was running a LinkedIn campaign. The page was prepared, visuals, messaging — all of that was super good!

When stats of the campaign were checked — it showed a huge number of impressions, but zero visitors in Analytics. Zero. Nada!

My first instinct? Fire up the terminal:

cat access.log | cut -d' ' -f4 | sort | uniq | wc -l

Turns out I had a huge number of visitors but most of them were bots and scrapers. Our campaign metrics looked great while we were essentially paying to attract robots.

Done. 30 seconds, zero cost, and actual truth.

But here’s the thing — while I’m proud of my CLI kung fu, I just spent 30 seconds on something a proper bot detection tool would have caught automatically. And what happens when someone non-technical needs the same analysis?

The founder trap

This is the classic founder trap: we’re so used to building everything ourselves that we forget sometimes the best solution is the one that already exists.

The irony? I’ll spend hours perfecting a bash one-liner to solve a problem, then hesitate paying $10 for a tool that would save me dozens of hours.

I’m learning that “scrappy” doesn’t always mean “from scratch.” Sometimes the most resourceful thing you can do is buy the damn tool.