i can remember a discussion with Cory (who built this with Eli, the front end eng) on the topic of "why do all websites consist of a collection of long scroll-y pages / is that appropriate for our business?" and we concluded it wasn't optimal.
at the time, we were trying to figure out how to add more products in without it becoming messy, and we concluded we're trying to do a lot more than just what would work well for a 1 product company (we have very extensive content for example) - we feel quite multidimensional. thus a flatter design was proving hard to do. we wanted something that could enable us to offer a very wide variety of things (like 10+ products, handbook, job board, newsletter etc)
a lot of existing websites are trying to convey what they do in <3 seconds, and all of the internet is going for that. our company doesn't fit into 3 seconds, or if it does it's annoyingly vague "a whole bunch of devtools"...! so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do better. it will mean _some_ people bounce and that's ok, because those that stick will (sometimes!) love it.
as a project, it looked fun and we knew it'd stand out a lot as a way to justify it. it's much nicer and more cost effective for us to ship something 10/10 cool than go down the outbound-y sales route. we run at a 3 month cac payback period if you're into startup stats. the proviso is that only works if you go _really_ deep, so that your work actually stands out.
“as a project, it looked fun” - if that’s the rationale, I think it’s fine. The rest of it feels like a post-hoc rationalization though.
I’m not a super fan of this, and I kind of hated windows 3.x, so I might not be the target market. But I also hate many of the trends in modern website design, so maybe I’m just an old crank.
There could be a subset of this that is accessible, compatible, and doesn’t reinvent a browser in a browser. I might end up liking that better than the status quo - so I appreciate the experimental spirit!
This sounds like an expensive solution to a marketing problem re. the product. And if one digs even further, perhaps an issue with your product line - the benefits of it aren't immediately presentable in a simplified way to the extent it is differentiated relative to the competitors.
> so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do bette
Meh, currently doing just that. Trying to figure out what posthog is about, try to store some keywords in my brain if I ever need to return this product in future where it fits and just try to enjoy the site :) And I'm one of the folks that try to determine in seconds/minute whether this is worth digging in or not and whether I understand the offering.
Currently I enjoy the site alot. Not sure if that is the OS thing about it or just the way that information is presented and layout.
PostHog helps engineers build better products by combining product analytics, feature flags, session replay, a data warehouse, CDP and many more.
* open source, building a dev tool. We have a public handbook (posthog.com/handbook) if you want to learn how we work, pay and more in complete detail.
* we are a real business... nearly at $20M ARR / profitability in sight / lots of capital / grew revenue 4x last year but only added 3 people / just had first cashflow positive month in October this year!
* you decide what to build, and iterate with your users - we are growing through autonomy and transparency not through process.
* we have a ton of scale and a bunch of super interesting technical problems to solve
* we're building 50 more products over the next couple of years, so you could end up building one of those
* we need: product engineer, technical founder engineers, backend leaning full stack engineer
must say one of the most interesting applications I've had so far, even though I'm at the start. nevertheless, you made this process interesting and kinda even enjoyable. :)
hey (founder here), that shouldn't be happening, although this can take us some time (we get thousands of applications, although HN is a very high quality source) - could you email me james at our website.com? i'll double check what's going on.
We're an all remote company of just 50 with 8 products and significantly >$10M ARR. All inbound, no sales team. 70k companies have installed our software, 1,600 new companies install each week. Shipping tools to help developers build successful products.
We quadrupled our revenue, only added 3 people net last year, and now expanding as a result. We work in small teams, who fully own each product. Our engineers decide _what_ they will work on, not just _how_ to ship things.
See how our entire company works in a ton of detail at posthog.com/handbook, including how much we pay!
Hiring product engineers, a technical support engineer, a UX engineer, a distributed systems engineer, a site reliability engineer, and a community manager.
Please apply through our careers page on our website, or enter my email inbox lottery (james at you can guess it), but i would recommend the former!
Hi James, I applied for a full-stack role (focused on the backend), I just wanted to know if you are open to mid-level or if you're looking for a more senior. (I have ~3 years of experience)
Ah definitely email me then! If you are full stack but lean heavily front end and love taking pride in your craft / like working reactively based on what you think needs prioritising vs a more process oriented approach please email me!
(Founder) wanted to explain our intent behind the business… so here’s the origin story.
We tried to make the business work exclusively with self hosted and open source focus. I thought cloud would never work as we have so much competition. However we just couldn’t make hosting it at scale a good experience. We often have more data than customers production instances.
We wound up having to spend a ton of time debugging k8s in other people’s infra via screenshots. This wasn’t good for us or customers.
We kept having people hosting it themselves for no reason other than liking us so for the sake of a good experience for them, we made a cloud product. This represented the majority of users. It’s also cheaper for most people as we just have a big free tier and shared infra costs, so no hosting bill. Turns out cloud worked.
We didn’t want to abandon the OS project but we stopped trying to make money via an open core model. That means we call it a hobby instance because it just doesn’t scale very well.
> That means we call it a hobby instance because it just doesn’t scale very well.
Well you guys almost certainly operate posthog in Kubernetes yourselves. You either use a cloud-provided database, or you use a Kubernetes operator to run it on top of someone's infrastructure. Clickhouse, Kafka, whatever. They all have operators. I don't know when you adopted Temporal. Whatever. I may not be 100% right, but this is true in general.
The hobby offering doesn't have to scale poorly. It could scale just as well as your core offering. I am not saying you should, you are entitled to monetize something. It also doesn't have to be hard to install. You could author a Posthog CRD instead of using Helm as a low budget CRD. Maybe you already have that. Maybe your CRD exists as rows in some database and not in Kubernetes's dataplane. The interesting part of all of this is that you had an intuition that Kubernetes obsoletes a lot of the value proposition of traditional SaaS. The problem is figuring out, well, what IS the value proposition? People will endure a lot of brain damage to save on recurring costs, it is totally rational.
Another POV is this shows the limitations of Y Combinator's offering. It's true that enterprise sales goes way faster when it's startup CEO to startup CEO. Until you guys are worth billions of dollars, and even then, it's not 100%, your counterpart at a Fortune 1000 might be some CTO, some managing director with no real decisionmaking power. But he asks his team to pay the contractors in Pakistan to take the brain damage of self hosting Posthog and reimplementing your premium features, all because he cannot get meaningful approval for unlimited, use-based pricing, and then if you acquiesce to fixed pricing, you leave so much money on the table, and you sign up to dedicate a whole engineer to their customization and problems. While Kubernetes isn't to blame for this, it did make the Pakistan BANTA possible, and probably brought down pricing by a lot, hurting everyone trying to make good software for money. Very, very tough situation.
Something I can't really figure out is why Posthog hasn't gotten on Bitnami's (VMWare's) radar. Piwik and Matomo are. Mirantis has a great Kubernetes distribution, maybe the most painless one for people who are willing to take brain damage, and they could wind up doing this too. As always OSS is a value for someone else's thing that that someone else didn't pay for.
I can only tell you my experience as a newcomer to PostHog last year. I went to try it out, and visited the documentation to figure out how to get it up and running. The documentation sent a very clear message of “You’d be a fucking idiot to put this into production. The open-source version is pathetic and can’t handle real traffic. Pay us.”. This immediately killed all interest I had in PostHog and I didn’t go any further. Your open-source version doesn’t have to scale indefinitely, but if you can’t stand behind your open-source version at all, I don’t trust your commercial version at all either. A closed-source product is preferable to an open-source product where the maintainers strongly warn people not to use it.
This is well said and I agree. It is disingenuous and raises cognitive dissonance to offer something but not stand behind it and in fact warn people NOT to use it.
(Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas.
In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team!
And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to submit blog posts and stuff all through the same login… community based things. This is all pie in sky at moment but we’re going to experiment with it.
It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.
we mainly do this because it can just help with getting PRs approved if we want to fix an issue in something we rely on (and it is nice / we can list as a perk), and a little influence can be very valuable if we want to give feedback on a project's direction. doesn't do much on the growth side as far as i'm aware, for us at least.
Yikes, I'm the founder of this company (one of my colleagues wrote this piece) - just saw it appear here. We shipped a rather huge change to the website recently (we're trying to let other people post stuff too), think we accidentally made it janky and missed this. Will fix when the right person wakes up - he's west coast US! Sorry for QA via HN :)
FWIW, fully a quarter of the screen is taken up by fixed position elements that are entirely irrelevant to a reader. When I see this on sites I want or have to use, I add cosmetic rules to delete the sticky elements. When I see it on sites I don't have to use, I close the tab.
I don't claim that this makes it a net loss for you from a money standpoint, nor that I'm representative of a majority of your market, but I _do_ suspect I'm the sort of potential customer that isn't easily studied in an A/B test.
If you're talking about that obnoxious left sidebar, I agree. The table of contents widget on the right too. The article itself is squeezed between a bunch of shit I don't want to look at. It makes the page feel crowded and like it's trying to get me. Please just let us read the content! If it's any good, it'll speak for itself.
at the time, we were trying to figure out how to add more products in without it becoming messy, and we concluded we're trying to do a lot more than just what would work well for a 1 product company (we have very extensive content for example) - we feel quite multidimensional. thus a flatter design was proving hard to do. we wanted something that could enable us to offer a very wide variety of things (like 10+ products, handbook, job board, newsletter etc)
a lot of existing websites are trying to convey what they do in <3 seconds, and all of the internet is going for that. our company doesn't fit into 3 seconds, or if it does it's annoyingly vague "a whole bunch of devtools"...! so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do better. it will mean _some_ people bounce and that's ok, because those that stick will (sometimes!) love it.
as a project, it looked fun and we knew it'd stand out a lot as a way to justify it. it's much nicer and more cost effective for us to ship something 10/10 cool than go down the outbound-y sales route. we run at a 3 month cac payback period if you're into startup stats. the proviso is that only works if you go _really_ deep, so that your work actually stands out.