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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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How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks

  • Grace McKenzie
    Grace McKenzie

As a company born at the beginning of the pandemic, PostHog has been fully-remote from its inception. Our team is 30+ people distributed across 10 countries; we have no central office, but we still value getting together in person.

We give employees social and co-working budgets to encourage meetups and in-person onboarding. But the main way we facilitate in-person collaboration is through offsites – small team offsites for focused work, and one all-company offsite per year for high-level strategic planning and cross-team interaction.

In large companies, offsite planning is centralized within the People or Operations teams, but this isn’t possible in many early-stage startups. This guide is for those small to medium startups who need a little help, and includes a few tips and tricks I’ve learned over a decade of organizing team retreats.

Grace McKenzie is the Operations Manager at PostHog. She tackles any and all back office projects that help build the scaffolding we need as our company scales. In her spare time, you can find her on the rugby pitch playing flanker or at her local billiards hall practicing her 8-ball breaks.

It starts with a really good checklist

Here’s one we made earlier – feel free to use it.

Seriously, a comprehensive checklist is a must for offsite planning. We made this list to help team leaders organize their small team offsites independently. Our three person “Plops” (that’s People & Operations) team help where possible, but with nine small teams all organizing one or more meetups a year, we need people to take ownership.

The checklist is structured as an eight-week timeline with items to check off at eight weeks, seven weeks and so on. It also includes post-offsite items for collecting feedback – we’ve learnt a lot about running offsites from gathering feedback on them!

Here are some key items to highlight:

  • Centralizing flight booking is a huge headache, so don’t do it. We give all team members company cards for this reason – see our startup ops kit for more on this. This also means you don’t have to gather up lots of sensitive info (passport numbers etc.).

  • Decide in advance who is going to record the notes from offsites sessions. It is really easy for post-offsite follow-up to fall through the cracks, which means a bunch of wasted time and effort.

  • It’s good if the offsite organizer arrives a day early to prep for the team's arrival. Whether it’s grocery shopping or troubleshooting airport transfers, it just makes everyone’s experience smoother.

Choosing a location

Choosing where to host your offsite is one of the most subjective planning decisions you will make. When I’m thinking about where to host, I consider a few things:

  • Timing: Depending on the season, you can have wildly different experiences. For example, hosting an offsite in Reykjavik during Icelandic winter, or at the height of forest fire season in central Washington, can mean a fairly uncomfortable few days for your team. Check what conditions will be like in a given location before locking in your dates, and consider that seasons in your part of the world may not match those in different hemispheres or climates.

  • Novelty: Planning an offsite in an exciting or exotic location can really enhance the excitement factor for your event, but it’s important to take into consideration travel duration and jet lag. Even if you’re choosing somewhere less exotic, choosing a novel venue like a super cool AirBnB or a quirky hotel can spice things up without stretching your team too thin.

  • Affordability: An ideal offsite location depends on the stage of the company – a realistic budget for a five-person company won’t be the same as one for 100. Work out how much you can spend per person on travel and accommodation for your chosen location as soon as possible. And don’t go to Switzerland – it will bankrupt you.

Planning your schedule

It’s tempting to maximize your time together by packing the itinerary full of brainstorming, planning, and breakout sessions. Don’t overdo this. In reality, having a good balance between sessions, free social time, and fun activities is important to avoid burning your team out.

In my experience, planning for a majority of unstructured time can lead to really amazing brainstorming and ideation. People will inevitably discuss their work anyway as it’s something that everyone has in common.

One mainstay event that we do at every all-company offsite is a 24-hour hackathon, where our team comes up with the most outlandish ideas possible, and self-organizes into interdisciplinary teams to produce an MVP by the following day. Some core features of our product, like the ability to view your users on a world map; and some seriously silly things, like a children’s book focused on product analytics, have been born from this highly-rated session.

Pro Tip: Encourage people to use their company-sponsored travel for a lower-cost vacation in an interesting locale. After our Iceland offsite, my teammate Neil and I rented a camper van and traveled around the iconic Ring Road for a week! Other team members arranged their own excursions together. It’s a great way to create social connections.

Budget

I won’t sugar coat it – offsites will be some of the larger single expenses you will incur as a company each year. However, in my experience, the benefits of hosting a well-organized offsite greatly outweigh the cons if you budget effectively and manage costs as you go.

Budgeting doesn’t need to be the first thing you consider, but it should definitely be on the earlier side. I recommend coming up with a draft budget about a month and a half out, and finalizing it after a gut check with your manager or another member of your team by the end of the following week.

Numbers can vary wildly depending on location, accommodations, activities, team size, and a multitude of other factors. In my experience, the following benchmarks can be useful in initial projections before you’ve finalized any of the above factors:

  • Accommodations = $200/night/person
  • Intercontinental airfare = $1,000/person
  • Intracontinental airfare = $500/person
  • Ground transportation = $50/day/person
  • Food & drinks = $50/day/person
  • Contingency = 10% of total budget

As a reference, we budget $1,500 per person for a small team offsite and $3,000 for an all-company offsite. Our last all-company offsite with 20 people in Reykjavik (one of the priciest cities in the world) came in at just under $30k, or approximately $2,800 per person.

Final thoughts

Offsite planning can often be some of the hardest, yet most rewarding work you can do in a startup. I hope the information above helps you along the way, but be sure to check out our open-source guide for planning offsites. It includes our comprehensive checklist and some public templates you can use to make the process as efficient as possible.

Author

  • Grace McKenzie
    Grace McKenzie

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Aug 17, 2022

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