Background
Camille had been building MetricLoop for four months when she started raising a pre-seed. The product was technically sound but she'd been putting off building admin tooling because it wasn't customer-facing. When investors started asking about operational processes — 'how do you manage subscriptions, how do you debug user issues, how do you monitor your AI usage costs' — she realized she was describing things she'd do manually rather than through a system. That gap was visible.
The challenge
Camille needed operational tooling that would hold up under investor and customer scrutiny: user management with the ability to manage subscriptions, adjust plan limits, and review account history; usage analytics that showed AI cost and token consumption by user; a trace viewer for debugging AI response issues; and log access for production incidents — all in an admin interface she could navigate without running database queries.
How they built it
Admin panel with eight pre-built views
ShipAI ships with an admin console that includes eight operational views: user list and management, subscription overview and controls, usage analytics dashboard, AI trace viewer, application log explorer, payment history, plan configuration, and system health. All views connect to real application data — no mock data, no placeholder charts. Camille had a working admin panel on day one without writing a single admin-specific component.
Usage analytics for AI cost visibility
Investor questions about AI cost management were a recurring theme in Camille's conversations. The usage analytics view showed per-user token consumption, cost attribution, and trend data. She was able to answer 'what does your AI cost scale with?' with a screenshot from the admin panel rather than a spreadsheet calculation.
Trace viewer for production debugging
MetricLoop's AI features occasionally produced unexpected outputs that users reported. The trace viewer — built on OpenTelemetry — let Camille inspect the full request trace for any AI interaction: model used, tokens consumed, tools called, latency at each step. She could investigate and resolve a user-reported issue in minutes rather than parsing raw logs.
Subscription controls for customer support
When early customers needed plan changes, trial extensions, or limit adjustments, Camille handled them directly from the subscription management view without touching the database or Stripe dashboard. The admin panel's subscription controls were fast enough that customer support requests that previously took 10–15 minutes to resolve took under 2 minutes.
Outcomes
Pre-seed round closed with admin panel as evidence
Two investors specifically cited the admin panel — trace viewer and usage analytics — as evidence of operational maturity in their investment memos.
User support time reduced 80%
Handling subscription changes, plan adjustments, and account issues via the admin panel dropped average support resolution time from 12 minutes to 2 minutes.
Production incidents investigated in minutes
The trace viewer resolved three production AI response issues in the first month that would have required Camille to parse raw logs manually — estimated savings of 2–4 hours per incident.
Zero ops-specific engineering time spent
The admin panel is entirely from ShipAI's defaults. Camille has not written a single admin-specific component — all her engineering time goes to the customer-facing product.
In their own words
Investors expect solo founders to cut corners on operations because there isn't time to build everything. When I could show them a real admin panel with real data — not a mockup, not a promise — it changed the conversation. They stopped asking 'how will you handle X?' and started asking 'how are you thinking about scaling X?' That's a better conversation to be in.
“The admin panel is the thing I show investors when they ask about operations maturity. User management, subscription controls, trace viewer, and usage analytics — all there, all wired to real data. It makes a solo-led company look like it has a full ops team.”
— Camille Dupont
Frequently asked questions
What are the eight admin views in ShipAI?
User list and management, subscription overview and controls, usage analytics dashboard (by user and aggregate), AI trace viewer (OpenTelemetry-based), application log explorer, payment history, plan configuration, and system health indicators. All views connect to the live application database and Stripe account.
Can the admin panel be restricted to specific users?
Yes. The admin routes are protected by a role-based access check — only users with the admin role can access the admin views. Role assignment is managed from the admin panel itself or from the database directly.
Does the trace viewer require separate OpenTelemetry setup?
No. The OpenTelemetry integration is pre-configured in ShipAI — the trace viewer reads from the existing telemetry data. Camille used it from day one without any additional configuration.