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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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    • Array 1.36.0: Introducing AND/OR filtering, timezone support and universal search
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    • Array 1.42.0: Get beta features via our roadmap!
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Pivot to PostHog

  • James Hawkins
    James Hawkins

YC has been running for 15 years, and getting bigger every year.

That means there are more than 2,000 companies in their network. Many are still small, many are dead, but many of them are huge – 102 are valued at more than $150M. The reason this is awesome if you are in the YC network is that it gives you a lot of customers that are slightly more likely to be friendly.

We focused on building pipeline, again – aiming for our 2 meetings a day routine. We went to as many of the meetings as we could in person.

A lot of these meetings went well – the product was getting stronger. We started talking money with people.

That’s when we realized, we had a problem.

We had 5 friendly companies in a row turn us down on price. We wanted to charge $39/month/user, but had clients telling us they’d pay just $5/month/developer. We could build a business like that, but it’d be tough to reach the kind of growth we wanted.

The final straw was when we dropped to $300/month for a team of 30 with one of the teams that was the most positive in the meeting (all based in SF, where the average software engineer salary is around $150K) and got told there was “no chance” of that working. Refusing to pay $10/month to power a $150,000 employee meant to us that our solution wasn’t good enough.

We came to the next group office hours saying we thought we needed to pivot – we couldn’t see a way to make the product more valuable. At the time, we decided we would produce a roadmap for tech debt – created by the engineering team, using surveys. The group convinced us to focus on using the surveys for engineering retention.

We used the rest of the meetings in our calendar to validate these ideas, but received little enthusiasm. We were starting to feel like a solution in search of a problem. We just stopped feeling excited about what we were doing.

Tim and I went to a YC dinner. It was an excellent talk by Mathilde, the CEO of Front. We decided in the car that we needed to start over.

Since we started in August, we kept a list of every single problem and startup idea that we’d had. It’s a long list – 3 pages. The reason we wrote them down is that writing them down stops you wasting time talking about them in more depth when you need to focus on something else.

One of the things that struck us was implementing product analytics was really frustrating – we wanted to be able to auto-capture all the front end events. We also, crucially, didn’t like sending user data to 3rd parties.

The last pre-booked meeting I had was with the founder of Sentry. They have a BSL license – their paid and open source versions are identical. I went to the meeting to talk about engineering retention, but it fell flat. Then I asked what they do about product analytics. “We would never send all our data to 3rd parties, we have a bunch of people who run our own data platform”. That was all the encouragement we needed to go with our gut.

We decided to build open source product analytics.

YC also let you book office hours with one partner at a time. This lets you go into more depth in whatever issue you want to talk about.

We spoke to our partners about the idea. They felt that auto-capture wasn’t really the highlight – it’s just a feature, but that the open source thing was pretty exciting. When Dalton described it as a 10/10 idea, his enthusiasm was infectious, and out we went to build it. Like, that evening.

We went home, and rebranded to PostHog, and got a new website live. Tim started the product. Aaron started booking discovery meetings. We were up until 3am.

What followed was the most intense 3 weeks of work of our lives. We started working from around 9am to anywhere between midnight and 3am, 7 days a week.

Our only break each day would be a 10 minute walk to the local sandwich shop, and a single episode of Parks and Recreation.

A PostHog lunch break

We kept exercising and eating healthily, but we had to make up for lost time to make the most of the opportunity of demo day.

We decided there would be two major goals. The first would be a Hacker News launch. The second would be landing a large paid pilot.

Our partners encouraged us to speak to the best people in the world at running open source companies – we reached out, and every single one of them said yes! In general, we’ve found that people are really helpful when you’re seeking advice and not trying to sell them something.

We emailed or met the founders of GitLab, Mattermost, and Docker, on top of the meeting with the folks from Sentry we’d already had. They helped us understand how open source business models work. They also made us realize that we needed to work on the community before anything else – that with a lot of usage, and a vibrant community, what follows is inbound interest.

In parallel, we took $1K, and spent it on some paid ads on a few display networks online. We wanted to get the product in more people’s hands to iron out some bugs. We got really positive feedback from the developer community, and a few constructive ideas, which we put into the product before the Hacker News launch.

January 23rd was when we started writing code for PostHog. We set a deadline for the Hacker News launch of February 20th. We had one day off in this period – we went hiking at the hills around Stinson Beach with friends:

Hiking at Stinson Beach with friends

We wanted to have complete documentation, SDKs, and the product all in existence for that date. Surprise, surprise, after a 3.45am finish the night before, it was done.

We put the post live and told a couple of early users. It immediately started getting upvotes and made it to the front page.

We got significantly over 100 sign ups (and may have had more – we let users opt out of our tracking), and within a week of the repo going public, we were at 800 stars. We had a bunch of inbound demand ranging from indie developers through to multinational corporates who liked our product from a data privacy perspective.

More pleasingly, we had a bunch of GitHub issues raised, and even a PR or two from people we didn’t know. That was a good sign that we could build a community.

We were off to the races!

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  • James Hawkins
    James Hawkins

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  • CEO diaries
  • Inside PostHog

Feb 25, 2020

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