PostHog

One of the great things about being open source is that we’ve grown a vibrant community around the project. Since launch we’ve accepted code from over 500 contributors and swapped ideas with thousands of users in our public Slack group. Now, though, we’re closing that Slack group in favor of creating a better, more scalable, and helpful PostHog community here on our site. In this post, I’ll explain why we’re doing this, and what comes next.

This handbook simply explains how we work. It is one of the most important things we've ever made.

The latest from the PostHog community Since starting PostHog in 2020, we’ve learned a bunch about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to marketing to engineers. Paid ads is a slightly scary area because it is very easy to waste a bunch of money doing stuff that doesn't work. And a lot of it doesn't work. This article shares specific, actionable advice for early-stage startups building dev tools in particular.

Welcome to Product for Engineers, a newsletter created by PostHog for engineers and founders who want to build successful startups. Every A/B test has four components: A goal A change A control group A test group You’re testing a change (2) on your test group (4) to see if it has a statistically significant impact on the goal (1) compared to the control group (3). But those are just the basics.

1. Including unaffected users in your experiment The first common mistake in A/B testing is including users in your experiment who aren't actually affected by the change you're testing. It dilutes your experiment results, making it harder to determine the impact of your changes. Say you're testing a new feature in your app that rewards users for completing a certain action. You mistakenly include users who have already completed the action in the experiment.

Elasticsearch and ClickHouse are both open-source frameworks with advantages over conventional databases like PostgreSQL for performing tasks over lots of data, but they serve very different needs. Elasticsearch, as the name implies, was designed to power better search. It can efficiently return search results, such as grocery items on a grocer’s website, accounting for things such as spelling mistakes.

Since starting PostHog in 2020, we’ve learned a bunch about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to marketing to engineers. There are plenty of articles about ‘developer marketing’ out there, but most of them are either generic or focused on later stage companies. In this intro article, my intention is to share specific, actionable advice for early stage startups building dev tools. I’ve bucketed advice into pre- and post-product-market fit.

It's no secret that some popular analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, have fallen foul of GDPR regulations in the EU. That's one reason why we've enabled users to self-host PostHog, or to anonymize user data in a way which complies with GDPR. Today, we're making a third option available: hosting PostHog Cloud in Europe so that user data never has to leave the EU.

Y Combinator is the world’s top startup accelerator, helping to fund, train and nurture the next generation of innovative businesses. Since 2005, thousands of successful companies have emerged from Y Combinator, including Dropbox, Airbnb, PagerDuty, Reddit, Amplitude... and PostHog. "Many people, including us, find Y Combinator to be the the most productive period of their lives,” said PostHog CEO James Hawkins in a blogpost he wrote about his Y Combinator experience.

Our CEO and co-founder, James Hawkins, recently joined Y Combinator to talk about the first five hires PostHog ever made, how we made them, and why. This is the story behind each hire, and the lessons we learned along the way. James and co-founder Tim (CTO) were frantically trying to hit their launch deadline, but there was a problem. They wanted libraries for mobile, desktop, and other programming languages, but they didn't have capacity to complete the work themselves.