Why Every Founder Should Build a GTM Command Center

I normally love beehiiv, but yesterday it was driving me crazy.

I created a new lead magnet this week and wanted to see how effective it was at getting people to sign up for my newsletter, but beehiiv was making it unreasonably difficult to get the information I needed.

Then I realized I was doing things the old way, and I didn’t need beehiiv.

I jumped into Claude Code, and I typed:

The prompt

create a new section of Funnel called Lead Magnets and I want it to show all 3 forms from beehiiv and the number of people who visited the page the form lives on (from google analytics) and then the number of people who subscribed

A few more prompts, and less than 10 minutes later, I had exactly what I wanted: a custom dashboard that showed me the full funnel of all my lead magnets, including how much traffic my CTAs were sending to my website, how well each landing page was converting, with each funnel receiving a grade from A-F.

Once I had the data in a dashboard, I quickly identified the problem. The landing page for the new lead magnet was converting fine, but the CTAs weren’t performing very well. If I didn’t have my own GTM command center, I might never have discovered this and would probably have assumed the lead magnet wasn’t working well and moved on. Now, I know what to optimize.

In 2026, forcing yourself to use rigid, third-party dashboards to analyze your own marketing data makes no sense.

Google Analytics’ user interface is so bad; it is like they are trying to make you angry. And even if the UI was easy to use, there is no reason to use another software product to analyze your data when you can create your own GTM command center that pulls data from every marketing tool you use, and present the information in any way you want it, with almost no effort.

Marketing is just math. You create a series of steps and optimize them. But you cannot optimize them if you can’t easily get the data you need. When your data is scattered across 5 different platforms, each with a terrible UI, you will give up instead of diagnosing the problem. But when you can create any dashboard you want with a few prompts, you will always have the exact data you need, you will always know what you need to optimize, and your results will continue to improve every week.

I went from 0 views on social media in May to 700K in June to 1.8 million in July, and I am on track to do even better in August, with my email newsletter growing each month by meticulously analyzing all my marketing data in my GTM command center. This new dashboard I built is just one of its features.

Every founder should have their own GTM dashboard. You don’t need to know how to program to make one. You only need to know a few basics, like what an API is, and how to describe what you want to build with prompts.

If you have any questions about building your own GTM command center, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
I’m happy to help.