Your analytics calls them Direct

Open the acquisition report of almost any founder-led SaaS and the biggest row is the least useful: Direct, followed by Organic search. Those buckets hold everyone who arrived without a tracked click. That's most of the people you care about.

Where the clicks went

Think about how a typical buyer finds a small B2B tool today:

• They see the founder's post on LinkedIn on their phone. They don't click.
• A week later a podcast host mentions the product in passing.
• Then they ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what's a good tool for X that works with Attio?" and your name comes back.
• They type your URL, or google your name, and sign up.

Analytics records the last step. "Direct" or "Organic search, branded query". The three things that did the work are invisible.

The people who bought can tell you

Ask "how did you hear about us?" at signup as an open text field, not a dropdown. Dropdowns only offer the options you already believe in, and nobody picks "a ChatGPT answer" when it isn't in the list.

The answers are messy. Here are typical examples (illustrative, not from a real customer):

saw Jake's posts, then asked ChatGPT if you were legit

Lenny's pod I think? or a newsletter

my investor

That messiness is why it's so easy to collect the field and never read it.

Reading it properly

Three things turn the field into a number you can budget against:

1. A channel and a name. "AI assistant → ChatGPT", "Founder social → Jake", "Podcast → Lenny's Podcast". Channels let you compare against paid; names tell you what to do next.
2. Revenue, not responses. Ten answers from free users and one from a $2k/month account are not the same signal. Join answers to billing and look at MRR.
3. An honest denominator. Show how many paying customers answered, and how much revenue couldn't be matched. A report that hides its gaps won't survive the first budget meeting.

That's what we built Rumorly to do. If you want to see what your own field says first, create a free workspace and paste the answers in: the free plan covers 50 a month.