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  • Home
  • CEO diaries
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • How we made something people want
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
  • Company & culture
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
  • Comparisons
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
  • Engineering
    • Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • Frontend filters & backend SQL - A chat with Eric Duong, Sam Winslow, James Greenhill, and Buddy Williams
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • The state of plugins on PostHog
    • We ship whenever
  • General
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Why you may not need a sales team
    • A story about pivots
  • Guides
    • Introduction to self-service analytics
    • Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
    • 5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
    • 5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • The most useful B2B SaaS product metrics
    • The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
    • The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • 5 essential PostHog apps for new users
    • 5 events all teams should track with PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
    • The best GA4 alternatives for apps and websites
    • How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
    • Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Building an open source data stack
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Product engineer vs software engineer: what's the difference?
    • Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
    • 22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
    • What is a product engineer (and why they're awesome)
    • A simple guide to personal data and PII
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
    • What is SSO and why you should enable it for PostHog
    • The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
  • HogMail
    • HogMail #14
    • HogMail #15
    • HogMail #16
    • HogMail #17: The personal traits that can't be taught
    • HogMail #18: What can SaaS learn from the New York Times?
  • Inside PostHog
    • PostHog raises $15 million Series B for open source product analytics
    • A non-coders thoughts on ‘Everybody Codes’ - Part Two
    • A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • How PostHog uses Wren to offset carbon emissions during offsites
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • The importance of dogfooding - Why product managers should use their product as much as their users
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Using Gatsby and Puppeteer to create dynamic Open Graph images
    • Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • HostHogs - free drinks, free pizza and frequently asked questions
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • Introducing Phil Leggetter, our new head of Developer Relations
    • Using Google Analytics was deemed 'illegal' in some EU countries. We built a microsite in 48 hours to capitalize on the news.
    • Introducing Joe Martin - Our first Product Marketer
    • How we made something people want
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
    • An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • PostHog raises $12 million in funding led by GV and Y Combinator
    • What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • Building an all-remote company from scratch
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
    • Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
    • How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
    • How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
    • Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Why we ditched ‘talk to sales’ for transparent pricing
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
    • Why infrastructure is a competitive advantage for us
    • Why we raised a $15m Series B ahead of schedule
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
    • YC adds PostHog to top valued companies for July 2021
  • Launch week
    • Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
    • Introducing Data Management for PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
  • Open source
    • The Early Days of GitLab - A Chat with Sid Sijbrandij
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 6 best free and open-source feature flag tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • Give Back Friday with PostHog
    • Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Open source is eating SaaS
    • Building an open source data stack
    • Should open source projects track you?
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • Why open-source projects are essential for large businesses
    • Send love to open-source projects on Valentine's Day
    • Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
    • The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
  • PostHog Academy
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
  • Privacy
    • The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
    • The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
    • The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
    • Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
    • A new 'Privacy Shield' won't solve big tech's GDPR problem
    • Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
    • A simple guide to personal data and PII
  • Product analytics
    • Introduction to self-service analytics
    • Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
    • The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
    • How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • Is autocapture ‘still’ bad?
    • Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
    • How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • How to turn your engineers into product people
    • 22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
  • Product updates
    • Why we're giving away 100 times more cloud usage, free
    • Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
    • Introducing the Avo Inspector app
    • We just made PostHog Open Source 1000x more scalable via ClickHouse
    • Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
    • Introducing Data Management for PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • Group Analytics is now available in PostHog
    • You can now reverse ETL into PostHog with Hightouch
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
    • How we’re improving performance by combining persons and events
    • PostHog teams up with Altinity
    • Introducing PostHog Cloud EU
    • Restack joins the PostHog Marketplace
    • PostHog is now available on Segment!
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
    • Why we're removing the sessions page
    • Array 1.0.10
    • Array 1.0.11
    • Array 1.0.8
    • Array 1.0.9
    • Array 1.1.0
    • Array 1.11.0
    • Array 1.10.0
    • Array 1.12.0
    • Array 1.13.0
    • Array 1.14.0
    • Array 1.15.0
    • Array 1.16.0
    • Array 1.17.0
    • Array 1.18.0
    • Array 1.2.0
    • Array 1.19.0
    • Array 1.20.0
    • Array 1.22.0
    • Array 1.21.0
    • Array 1.23.0
    • Array 1.24.0
    • Array 1.25.0
    • Array 1.27.0
    • Array 1.28.0
    • Array 1.29.0
    • Array 1.26.0
    • Array 1.3.0
    • Array 1.30.0
    • Array 1.31.0
    • Array 1.32.0
    • Array 1.33.0
    • Array 1.34.0
    • Array 1.35.0: Introducing SAML, world map view and new plugins
    • Array 1.37.0: Cohorts 2.0 and event & property detail pages
    • Array 1.36.0: Introducing AND/OR filtering, timezone support and universal search
    • Array 1.38.0: Exports, subscriptions and session analysis
    • Array 1.39.0: Betas, persons, events and libraries
    • Array 1.4.0
    • Array 1.40.0: Interface improvements and more!
    • Array 1.42.0: Get beta features via our roadmap!
    • Array 1.5.0
    • Array 1.41.0: Improving performance by up to 400%
    • Array 1.6.0
    • Array 1.7.0
    • Array 1.8.0
    • Array 1.9.0
    • Array 1.0.0
    • The state of plugins on PostHog
  • Release notes
    • Introducing the Avo Inspector app
    • How we’re improving performance by combining persons and events
    • Array 1.0.10
    • Array 1.0.11
    • Array 1.0.8
    • Array 1.0.9
    • Array 1.1.0
    • Array 1.11.0
    • Array 1.10.0
    • Array 1.12.0
    • Array 1.13.0
    • Array 1.14.0
    • Array 1.15.0
    • Array 1.16.0
    • Array 1.17.0
    • Array 1.18.0
    • Array 1.2.0
    • Array 1.19.0
    • Array 1.20.0
    • Array 1.22.0
    • Array 1.21.0
    • Array 1.23.0
    • Array 1.24.0
    • Array 1.25.0
    • Array 1.27.0
    • Array 1.28.0
    • Array 1.29.0
    • Array 1.26.0
    • Array 1.3.0
    • Array 1.30.0
    • Array 1.31.0
    • Array 1.32.0
    • Array 1.33.0
    • Array 1.34.0
    • Array 1.35.0: Introducing SAML, world map view and new plugins
    • Array 1.37.0: Cohorts 2.0 and event & property detail pages
    • Array 1.36.0: Introducing AND/OR filtering, timezone support and universal search
    • Array 1.38.0: Exports, subscriptions and session analysis
    • Array 1.39.0: Betas, persons, events and libraries
    • Array 1.4.0
    • Array 1.40.0: Interface improvements and more!
    • Array 1.42.0: Get beta features via our roadmap!
    • Array 1.5.0
    • Array 1.41.0: Improving performance by up to 400%
    • Array 1.6.0
    • Array 1.7.0
    • Array 1.8.0
    • Array 1.9.0
    • Array 1.0.0
  • Startups
    • A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme
    • How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
    • How we made something people want
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Should open source projects track you?
    • An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
    • How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
    • Product engineer vs software engineer: what's the difference?
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • Why you may not need a sales team
    • Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
    • Building an all-remote company from scratch
    • All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
    • Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
    • Why open-source projects are essential for large businesses
    • How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
    • How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
    • Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • How to turn your engineers into product people
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What is a product engineer (and why they're awesome)
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
  • Using PostHog
    • 5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
    • 5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
    • 5 essential PostHog apps for new users
    • 5 events all teams should track with PostHog
    • Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
    • What is SSO and why you should enable it for PostHog
  • Home
  • CEO diaries
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • How we made something people want
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
  • Company & culture
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
  • Comparisons
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
  • Engineering
    • Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • Frontend filters & backend SQL - A chat with Eric Duong, Sam Winslow, James Greenhill, and Buddy Williams
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • The state of plugins on PostHog
    • We ship whenever
  • General
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Why you may not need a sales team
    • A story about pivots
  • Guides
    • Introduction to self-service analytics
    • Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
    • 5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
    • 5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • The most useful B2B SaaS product metrics
    • The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
    • The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • 5 essential PostHog apps for new users
    • 5 events all teams should track with PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
    • The best GA4 alternatives for apps and websites
    • How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
    • Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Building an open source data stack
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Product engineer vs software engineer: what's the difference?
    • Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
    • 22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
    • What is a product engineer (and why they're awesome)
    • A simple guide to personal data and PII
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
    • What is SSO and why you should enable it for PostHog
    • The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
  • HogMail
    • HogMail #14
    • HogMail #15
    • HogMail #16
    • HogMail #17: The personal traits that can't be taught
    • HogMail #18: What can SaaS learn from the New York Times?
  • Inside PostHog
    • PostHog raises $15 million Series B for open source product analytics
    • A non-coders thoughts on ‘Everybody Codes’ - Part Two
    • A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • How PostHog uses Wren to offset carbon emissions during offsites
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • The importance of dogfooding - Why product managers should use their product as much as their users
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Using Gatsby and Puppeteer to create dynamic Open Graph images
    • Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • HostHogs - free drinks, free pizza and frequently asked questions
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • Introducing Phil Leggetter, our new head of Developer Relations
    • Using Google Analytics was deemed 'illegal' in some EU countries. We built a microsite in 48 hours to capitalize on the news.
    • Introducing Joe Martin - Our first Product Marketer
    • How we made something people want
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
    • An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • PostHog raises $12 million in funding led by GV and Y Combinator
    • What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • Building an all-remote company from scratch
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
    • Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
    • How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
    • How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
    • Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Why we ditched ‘talk to sales’ for transparent pricing
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
    • Why infrastructure is a competitive advantage for us
    • Why we raised a $15m Series B ahead of schedule
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
    • YC adds PostHog to top valued companies for July 2021
  • Launch week
    • Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
    • Introducing Data Management for PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
  • Open source
    • The Early Days of GitLab - A Chat with Sid Sijbrandij
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 6 best free and open-source feature flag tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • Give Back Friday with PostHog
    • Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
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  • Inside PostHog

The time before YC

  • James Hawkins
    James Hawkins

I'm James, and I work with Tim. We are the co-founders of PostHog - a current batch YC company.

This is us (I'm on the right), just after we got now-redundant, pre-pivot swag:

James and Tim

We quit our jobs around August 2019, and put the last $8K of salary into a business bank account. We had both saved enough money to live on for at least 12 months without any income.

I went travelling with my wife for 3 weeks around Europe whilst we worked on our first idea.

Our product was 'a sales territory management platform, that uses predictive analytics so you stop wasting time on deals that won't sell'. I used to run a sales team, and this was something I'd have wanted to help me manage territories. Tim ran R&D and was very quick at building things.

Tim built the product and I started doing customer calls from the cheapest Airbnbs I could find around Lake Geneva, cafés in Venice and a hut in an olive grove in Tuscany:

Olive groves in Tuscany

Not only did I have slow wifi, but the idea was complicated and people didn't get it. We had just two customers start using it, and that's only because they were already our friends. One of those two was happy paying $200 MRR for it, but then his company pivoted. We ended up bringing Aaron on board as our first employee the following January.

If we explained the complex modelling, we'd watch people's eyes glaze over. If we didn't, they wouldn't believe it worked.

We decided to simplify it. We turned our 1-liner into "a sales 1:1 tool that uses predictive analytics to make sure you talk about the deals that matter". When I ran sales, I struggled to find time to do this, yet I felt it was important, and I felt that salespeople would want to talk about good news but not bad news. Our predictive analytics could keep 1:1s well organised and balanced.

I drove back to the UK from Tuscany. Sidenote: my ac broke and it was the hottest day of the year. It was a 30 hour drive.

Tim and I managed to get cheap WeWork access. We spent $100/month each. If you're in the US, I would get a platinum AMEX card instead, it's an even better deal. It wasn't perfect, but working together and not in cafés helped our focus immeasurably.

Although I can code, I am too slow, but I have done a lot of sales and marketing before. We split our roles out clearly. Tim was to build the product, I was to book 2 meetings with heads of sales every day.

We did that for 3 weeks. We wrote lengthy notes and took quotes from every single meeting in a gigantic Google Doc. We hit our target. I got meetings by finding real life communities, making friends in those and asking around. I also used LinkedIn a lot, engaging in conversations and eventually asking to talk about our roadmap with people who might find it interesting. People are pretty helpful if you are just asking for advice and not trying to sell them. It was uncomfortable and hard work, but it helped us constantly "talk to users" - something YC preaches.

In the product, we focused heavily on the onboarding flow. We wanted each user to bring more than 1 extra user. Just like Facebook in the early days. When a user signed in, it would send them to a page that'd read their calendar to guess which meetings were 1:1s, and it'd ask them to invite those users. Once they were in the tool, it'd also integrate with Slack so it'd remind you to plan your 1:1s and it'd let you plan the whole thing through their UX.

The calls sounded like they were going really well. 15 people said they would use it for their team.

After the first week of building it, we started sending the link out to sign up after each call.

Almost no one even clicked the link in the email. Not a single person planned a 1:1 with it properly.

YC later told us, at the induction, that we should read The Mom Test. Now we know why. We think we failed because we didn't ask if sales leaders have ever planned their 1:1s in advance, and to show us what their agenda looked like. It turns out, they usually don't. If this really felt like a problem to them, they would.

It was around this time we thought about applying to YC. We had originally had visions of bootstrapping.

Sat in the bright lights and gentle noise of people cold calling from communal work areas, fuelled by a free oat cappuccino or four, Tim and I talked about what we would regret not doing when we were 80.

That turned out to be the most helpful way to clarify what we actually wanted. We decided that we could bootstrap and over 4 years get to the kind of job we already had with good pay and with financial stress along the way. That sounded slow, and dull.

We wanted to push for more. We wanted to go bigger. Getting fuel from VCs meant our success wouldn't come from owning a huge pie, we'd own a smaller chunk of a massive one, and we would get a lot more breadth of experience by doing this. Neither of us is particularly patient, and so we decided shooting for the stratosphere would be more fun.

We had a problem though. The YC deadline was looming, we had a product no-one cared about. That's not what the YC t-shirts say.

It was now a Thursday evening, the deadline was Tuesday.

We decided we wanted to focus on developers. They'd give a better signal:noise ratio when we asked them what they needed, and they'd be more willing to try new products out.

In our past, we both saw challenges with tech debt when organisations scale. It causes shipping to slow down and good engineers to get frustrated.

I did the website, Tim did the product. I started outreach to every developer I knew, interviewing them on pain points. The good news was that a bunch of our friends worked at big companies.

Tuesday swung around. We had an MVP working and we had developers at 10 companies saying they were interested.

We wrote the application form. We kept talking about benefits. My previous job was selling enterprise software to banks - that's how I write by default.

Each word had way too many letters, and it was boring. We chucked it away, at 8pm - the night it was due.

Everyone in the example application videos had thousands of users, revenue or had worked at impressive companies. We were intimidated by them.

The situation on paper was so bad, that it felt funny.

We relaxed, and wrote in natural language using very few, and very simple, words.

We put together a video of our MVP for the demo. We designed it to look so simple it felt tongue in cheek:

Neither of us has worked at a FANG company. Neither of us knew anyone at YC, and my only knowledge of the West Coast came from my wife making me watch the OC with her. We had no actual users, and we definitely had no revenue.

We got the interview email.

We just followed the instructions, and got in. They take people at any stage if they like the application.

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  • James Hawkins
    James Hawkins

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  • CEO diaries
  • Inside PostHog

Sep 01, 2019

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