| | | | | | | Looking for a boost in energy, passion, and a bit of extra bliss in your day?
Meet Fun Guy, your new favorite legal microdose. Fun Guy not only improves your mood and increases libido, but it also brings a sense of calm, making your workday just a bit brighter. | Whether you’re powering through tasks or winding down, it’s formulated to enhance your day naturally and effortlessly. | | | | Take a demo, get a Blackstone Griddle | Automate expense reports so you can focus on strategy Uncapped virtual corporate cards Access scalable credit lines from $500 to $15M
| Request a demo | Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here. |
| |
| | |
| | HOUSEKEEPING 📨 | It’s a cold, wet, winters evening for me over here in my home in Buenos Aires, Argentina right now. I write these final words through small slits on my very, very tired eyes. It’s 1 am right now, which Google tells me is … the hour of the eel. |  | You know what time it is. |
| Had a great day today. Breakfast with my partner, big session in the gym, and knocked out Animal Farm for the third time on Audible. I’ve been on a Orwellian dystopia spree these last weeks. I would have listed to 1984 actually but I started it on Spotify and the narration is done by AI, which I find incredibly disrespectful to one of the most impactful books in our lifetime.
Anyway, I’ll tell you what team, this might have been my favourite piece I have written yet. I am really happy slash proud of it and I think you’re going to really dig it. |
|
| | ZERO TO ONE 🌱 | Gone Hog Wild: PostHog’s Zero To One | Today’s story is one part ambition, one part thinking different, all stirred together in a big pot, with a dash of not taking yourself too seriously. This is the story of PostHog, the single platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features—and how they went from zero to one. | It’s quite the pleasure for me to be able to write this piece. The reasons for this are threefold: 1) we use PostHog at my company Athyna, 2) they might have my favourite brand in all of tech and 3) I have a strange, but somewhat wholesome fetish for hedgehogs. This will make sense later. | | In order to understand PostHog and where it all came from, I met with their co-founder, James, a lovely chap with a wonderful middle-English accent, Ian, the wild mind behind their excellent content strategy, and Lottie, oh Lottie, the first non-developer hire PostHog ever made, who in James’ words; “Sits in the back of the room drawing hedgehogs all day.” This one is going to be a fun one. | Neon Genesis Hegehogelion | Like all good startup Cinderella stories, PostHog went through many iterations before finding a shoe that really fit the market. In this case they had a starting-5 of failures, slash pivots, including one that was strong enough to punch them a ticket to the startup Superbowl, Y Combinator and their 2020 winter batch. You can find them from start to finish below. | What was it? | Why were they building it? | Why did it fail? |
|---|
Sales territory management tool. | To manage sales territories effectively. | Inadequate market demand and lack of interest from users (VPs of Sales). | CRM with predictive analytics. | Better up-to-date pipeline management using AI. | Users didn’t find it valuable; struggled with user adoption, again. | 1:1 tool with predictive analytics. | To improve 1:1 meetings with predictive AI insights. | In James’ words, it failed The Mom Test. | Technical debt monitoring tool (this was the YC idea). | Help companies monitor and manage technical debt, via post pull request surveys. | It worked well enough that they got 600 users quickly and a ticket to YC. They potentially could have made this work but decided they weren’t the best people to solve this problem. | Engineering retention tool. | Retaining engineering talent is hard. This one lasted 5 days. | Lack of a clear value proposition and interest from both users and the team. |
| The thing I like about the PostHog story is that they really follow the old adage of failing fast. It’s the best way to fail, second only to not at all. Every pivot they had in their early days happened within a six-month period. Launch. Kill. Launch. Kill. Launch. Kill. A vicious cycle of startricide (new word) that even Patrick Bateman would doff his cap to. What did James take away from the whole experience, well, the following: | Local vs global maxima: Always aim for the bigger picture rather than short-term wins. Sleep on it before pivoting: Consider all aspects thoroughly before deciding to change direction. Get a good night's sleep on it. Experts are just that: Listen to experienced voices, but balance with your own insights. Don’t be scared to build: Don't hesitate to create and iterate; execution is key. Have a user in mind: Always design and build with the end user in mind.
| These insights may seem simple, but some of the best is just that. Harder to follow, due to our human nature but often not rocket science. | The first big break: Y Combinator | Receiving a Y Combinator invite is like being asked to the prom by your long time crush. It’s a metaphorical forehead stamp of inclusion. Rumours are that some founders have actually gone as far as literally forehead stamps (tattoos), but alas, I am yet to see them in the wild. James and Tim got their foreheads tattoo’d officially in early 2020, in an extremely last minute dash to apply. |  | Y Combinahog / Y Hogbinator (hedging my hogs here). |
| It was 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. 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. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| Take a moment just now and re-read that passage from James once more. They pivoted on a Thursday and by Tuesday they had a marketing site, an MVP and 10 opportunities in their infantile pipeline. That ladies and gentlemen is what speed on speed looks like. | After the last minute sprint, and video pitch application, the boys received the news they’d been looking for. “Wtffffffffffffmsjsheh,” Tim would go on to utter in utter juvenile jubilation. | | Considering some of the founding teams in YC come in with thousands of users and some real pep in their step, James and Tim decided they needed to cover as much ground, and gain as much traction as possible in the handful of weeks before they met for their interview. “We asked ourselves how we could make as much progress as possible between now and then. Best case scenario, we'd get some paying customers. Worst case, we needed to show we had made a ton of progress.” | Progress for team, in such a short window came via: | Immediately starting runnings ads on every display platform they could find. Killing those that sucked, and scaling (with a small budget) those that didn’t. Continually optimising the site for signs up, experimentation Galileo would be proud of. Call after call after call after call with users. Pitch after pitch after pitch after pitch with YC alum.
| In the end our founder due had signed up 400 people in just three weeks. They also came equipped with user insights and dialed in pitch practice. The meeting went well, but not incredibly. It wasn’t until they received a call from YC’s Dalton Cadwell some days later that they were officially offered a spot in the batch. Jubilation ensued. |
|
| | | | | 💡 Note: To read James’, two-years post YC wrap up of their experience, you can see it in full here. |
| |
| | |
| The second big break: Hacker News | The Y Combinator experience helped the guys crystalise in their minds what they did want to go out and build. And after the five pivots they had landed on it: open-source product analytics. Their next big break with their new focus was when they launched the idea of Hacker News. | 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. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| While the launch on Hacker News wasn’t a runaway viral success, it gave them a real shove in the right direction. “Later on, Hacker News going well meant we got onto the GitHub trending main page, which got us more users,” James would say. “By the time we were at Hacker News, we had a minimum loveable product.” | | Startups are all about momentum. And building on small wins. By this point in time, the scrappy founders had tested and found a lot of things that didn’t work, and nailed one that did. They had gone through a tantalising triad of tiny triumphs; from YC, to the Hacker News launch on now onto some nice GitHub impressions. Momentum was building. | Building and retaining the core team | Like all good companies, PostHog is only is good as its people. And it was meticulous, while being creative when hiring their first five ‘hoggers’ (I don’t know if they call them that). In spring of 2020, they hired their first engineer Marius, off the back of a hobby project he’d posted on Hacker News. This was followed shortly after by Eric, who was the first employee to go through PostHog’s famed SuperWeek—a week long trial to ship code and vibe with the team. |  | Some (possible all) happy hogs. |
|
| |
| James, or ‘Jams’ came next. James was working at Uber when he left a GitHub repo star, and was promptly stalked, reached out to and closed to join. Lottie, the mastermind graphic design followed—we’ll talk more about Lottie in a moment—and finally, rounding out the Mt Hogmore +1 was Michael Matloka, an 18 wunderkind, who was still at school at the time, also sourced from Hacker News. | LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman once said; “The first ten hires set the culture and the DNA of your company.” And the team have been great at identifying who would enjoy their time and who wouldn’t. | “Fun isn’t just a cultural element; it’s woven into the very fabric of how we operate and innovate. It's also a critical factor we consider during interviews, as we believe it's key to ensuring new hires will enjoy their work here at Posthog,” James told me. | The incredible thing about the PostHog culture is that, all five of these employees are with the company nearly half a decade on. |
|
| | OUR BEST STUFF 🥑 | Founders, investors & leaders in tech, that read Open Source CEO outperform their competition. These are our best tools. |  | “I came for the newsletter, I stay for the resources.” - A made up reader. |
| Business is hard. We want to build the tools we wish we had. Check them out here. | |
|
| Handbookification | Those of you that know me, know that I am a sucker for an open source company handbook. If you have a nice handbook, everything else is accoutrements. The GitLab Handbook was kinda the OG of handbook. And I have a lot of respect for it, but it’s dense. And impersonal. | PostHog on the other hand, have what might be the most exceptionally wondrous (triple superlative word score) handbook since Moses—or God, Google can’t decide—wrote down those ten handy rules for life on top of Mt. Sinai back in the day. |  | Source; The Internet. |
| James, and co-founder, Tim, actually built the first version of their handbook after their first hire, but before their second. The reason was twofold: it helped codify the way they wanted to do things as they grew, it meant they looked bigger than they really were at the time, and (ok, threefold) it really helped attract the right type of talent to the company. From the early stages, all way up until today. | | If you are an early-stage founder, or late stage for that matter, you should carve out a couple of hours this week and take a look through what they have built. It’s really quite incredible. I am skipping ahead here but not only did/does the team document everything inside of their handbook they also share every idea, tool, tip, strategy that goes through their head in what Andy from PostHog calls their community newspaper. |  | cyrilbhau @cyrilbhau |  |
| |
Highly bullish on @posthog
They're going to sweep the entire market with their approach towards building.
Been reading their community material and the 'Product for Engineers' newsletter for the past few months, and it's a goldmine. |  | posthog.com/community
Community News - PostHog
What's happening at PostHog |
|
| | | 10:01 AM • Aug 30, 2024 | | | | | | 7 Likes 1 Retweet | 0 Replies |
|
| And they have their newsletter, Product for Engineers. I asked James why he chose to build in public and he told me two things that were really interesting. The first was that building-in-public allowed them to build trust as two relatively unknown founders, entering a crowded space. But the second was just how effective this level of content marketing if for building pipeline. | As for the impact, transparency wasn’t just a nice-to-have; it was integral to our growth. Initially, about 70% of our growth came from recommendations, with the remaining 30% driven by content marketing. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| Why was it so effective I hear you ask… | Content marketing wasn't just about optimizing for SEO; it was about sharing who we are, what we’re doing, and the lessons we’ve learned, including concrete data. This strategy has fostered a strong word-of-mouth presence, allowing us to grow through entirely inbound methods. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| Finding product-market fit | In the early years of a new venture, the trickiest thing is finding that elusive feeling we all crave as founders, product-market fit. In order to edge closer towards the glory land, the team went out and started to detail their initial ICP. First, it was more of a shot in the dark. Your best educated guess on a handful of attributes you think your best users might have. | |  | When you don’t quite have it. |
|
|
| This process may have you end much closer, or much, much farther away from your ideal buyer—kinda like that ‘hotter/warmer’ game you play with your family when you hide something in your house—but the key is that you are learning. For PostHog in the early days it as pretty simple, if I were to summarise; they need to have budget, a need for better data and analytics and, not have a long, drawn out, enterprisey procurement process. | This is great. A super swell start. Luckily for the team, they weren’t far wrong. As they continued building, talking to customers, growing and learning they were able to narrow their ICP down even further. As of January 2020, this is what PostHog’s detailed ICP looked like. | Category | Details |
|---|
Description | Startups that have achieved product-market fit and are quickly scaling up. |
|---|
Their pain points | Struggling to understand their users and what they should build next, and/or have an overly complicated data stack they can’t manage. |
|---|
Revenue | B2B with $100k+ per month OR a B2C with a very large number of users. |
|---|
Size | 15-500 employees. |
|---|
Roles | The power users of the product team – i.e., product engineers, technical founders, and tech/data-savvy product managers. |
|---|
Needs | To deploy their first analytics tool, or replace multiple existing tools with one. |
|---|
Has | Engineers or technical founders as the primary decision-makers. |
|---|
Doesn’t need / have | Formal procurement process. |
|---|
|
Liftoff, we have liftoff
| With your ICP totally dialed, and ambitious, product obsessed founders knocking on the inbound door to work with you, really really have the wind in your sails—or as someone in product would say, the code in your deploy. | | The strategic decisions that were made early on in PostHog’s journey laid the foundation for their success. One of the most critical decisions was to delay monetising in favor of building a strong user base, and refining the product. This allowed them to focus on growth without the pressure of immediate revenue generation. | Additionally, the launch of PostHog Cloud was a significant milestone that opened up new opportunities for scaling by making the product more accessible to a broader audience. But this post is not what got them from 1 to 100. It’s from zero to one. So that’s a story for another day. |  | PostHog Demo - Product Analytics, Session Replays, Feature Flags, A/B Testing, User Surveys + More |
|
| When interviewing James, I asked him what he knows now that he wishes he knew then. This what he said: | One of the key insights I've gained is that being more ambitious actually makes things easier in many ways. There's a lot of startup advice that suggests starting with a small, almost trivial project. It seems like VCs and online guides push for creating narrow point solutions because that's perceived as the safer or more approved path. This often leads to a pattern where startups build a minimal product, add a sales team, increase pricing, transition to enterprise solutions, and then, upon reaching a run rate of about $100 million, the founders often lose interest and move on.
What I've learned, however, is that expanding our scope from the beginning can actually be more advantageous. This wider scope has made it easier to excite customers and attract top talent who are eager to work on challenging projects. It also makes fundraising simpler if we choose to go down that path because investors are drawn to the ambition and scale of our vision. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| I really loved this, and I fully believe it. Aim for the stars always and forever. Now that we have reached liftoff, the next sections are going to highlight a few elements I found fascinating while profiling the company and it’s team. Let’s take a look. |
|
| | Hiring for ‘Product Engineers’ & ‘Ex-Founders’ | One of the things the team at PostHog did early was hire for two key roles: the first being a Product Engineer and the second being the obscenely broad Ex-Founder. Take a listen to this paragraph taken straight from their always open Technical Ex-Founder job opening. | There are a ton of ex-founders who love working at PostHog because they get to work autonomously and own a large set of problems. We're still super early stage and with each small team, it's a startup within itself which means defining a problem, talking to users, building a solution, and iterating on that. As a former founder, you might come from a background in Engineering, Product, Design, or Marketing (or all of them)! We'll always have a place for smart, motivated people and we will work with you to define your own role at PostHog! | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| My translation of this is as follows: If you are smart. And you are driven, and you think you can come in here and make shit happen. We will make room for you. | It’s a fascinating approach and one that makes sense. When I chatted with James on this, one thing he said really stood out to me; “As we scaled, we faced a typical decision: increase processes or grant more autonomy. Most companies opt for more processes, which can stifle innovation over time. However, we chose the route of autonomy.” | Autonomy is dead, long live autonomy. |
| |
| When writing this paragraph and referring back to my notes I had to really think which of the roles the quote applied to. Product engineer and founders who can make an impact allow the team to ship like crazy, which is the foundation their entire product ethos. | ”We structure small teams around each product, similar to how a YC startup would operate, focusing on growth, revenue, user engagement, and support for each segment. This structure works well with the founders who often have a technical background and are adept at running these teams like a small businesses.” The goal for PostHog is not only to operate an improved efficiency themselves but to “inspire our nearly 100,000 customer companies to adopt similar practices, enhancing their productivity and innovation.” | Let your freak flag fly | One of the things you may have noticed throughout the piece, or if you know PostHog from around the interwebs is their brand. It’s incredible. Bright, fun, playful, and it’s so unique that it lives rent free from the moment you lay eyes on it. Ones of those things you cannot unsee.
So how did this come to be? It’s not as if the standard ‘branding workshop’ put on by a bunch of devs, building dev tools for devs, would usually end up with a hedgehog as their mascot. But there was some method behind the madness. | “We weren’t going to win by being the same. So we’re going to name ourselves after a hedgehog. We’re going to have a weird, unusual style because we are the weird and unusual one that's joined, and that's how we'll win,” James would say recalling the initial ideas for the brand. | | The moxie behind that weird, unusual style they knew they wanted was oozing out of a designer James/Tim found while scrolling Twitter. Enter Lottie Coxon. | "I joined in June 2020, right around the start of the pandemic. I had just left university about two weeks before securing this job. Interestingly, I got the job because I posted my portfolio on Twitter, openly begging for any job in graphic design due to the dire job market. James messaged me within 24 hours of my post. And I've been with the company ever since." | *Note: James does Twitter very, very well—my type of tweeter. |  | James Hawkins @james406 | |
| |
jeff bezos once said “who are you? security, get this man out of the lobby” and that really stuck with me | | | 7:00 PM • Aug 15, 2024 | | | | | | 57 Likes 0 Retweets | 6 Replies |
|
| Lottie’s joining is when operation hedgehog-ify the company began in earnest. "The hedgehog mascot was somewhat of a happy accident. Initially, I tried to reinvent what other tech companies had successfully implemented, but it didn’t resonate as it was lacking originality and sincerity. The idea for the hedgehog came from a discussion about our company culture, which is quirky and open.” |  | Hog wild. |
|
|  | Early hogs. |
|
|
| The first thing I asked James when we sat down to chat why the brand, why the hedgehog and what role fun played in PostHog. What he shared on the brand at a macro level I found super interesting. | This approach highlighted the importance of standing out, especially as each of our eight products now faces competition from billion-dollar companies. Initially, every competitor had websites filled with jargon and hidden pricing. We chose to be starkly different, aiming for simplicity and transparency—a breath of fresh air in a crowded market. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| What he told me about the serious side of fun was very heartening also, as a lover of brand and a culture. James told me that his executive coach, who coaches the founders of $40-50B companies, once told him the difference between the $1B dollar founders and those that have scaled much larger was that the founders of the larger organisations, really just enjoy what they are doing. | “Fun is not necessary if you want to build a big business, but if you want to build a huge business, it probably is.” | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| I thought that was super cool. And if you want the cockles of your heart warming a little further, I think Lottie things so too. |  | Lottie @LottieCoxon | |
| |
Having a job that you actually really enjoy is so refreshing | | | 10:04 AM • Jun 17, 2020 | | | | | | 3 Likes 0 Retweets | 0 Replies |
|
| "I continue to work at Posthog because of the unique freedom and autonomy I experience here. The culture allows me to bring even the most unconventional ideas to life, like using a puppet for educational videos, which not only showcases our brand's creativity but also enhances my personal satisfaction and engagement with my work." Amazing stuff. | James-isms | 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. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| It’s easier to beat unsexy, badly run, non-innovative companies than software companies with VC funding and using the latest technology. Do not be fooled huge fundraises by startups working in these areas: big funding rounds + press ≠ product-market fit. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
|  | How PostHog operates |
|
| Don’t just rely on job ads, especially early on. Your first users could be your best hires because they likely understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Many of our best hires have come from recommendations, communities, and serendipitous connections. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| Speed matters. You should aim to respond within 30 seconds if someone messages you back—yes, it's that extreme. Startups win on speed. Be glued to your messages. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| James and Tim knew they wanted to build a product that appealed to engineers. And, if they were going to win, they decided PostHog needed a unique brand. Everyone else has blue websites that are super boring. So we’re going to name ourselves after a hedgehog. | | | | - James Hawkins |
|
| Why we use PostHog | Not meaning to make this a bit, fat, sweaty ad for PostHog, but when I get the chance to write a deep dive on a company we/I actually use, well, I feel compelled to tell you. As for PostHog, and why we love it at Athyna, ‘Lucho’ Lombardi, one of our product managers says it best. | It’s great for us to have a one-stop shop for everything related to product optimization—analytics, ab testing, feature flags, surveys, session replays—in the past we used different tools and it was rather cumbersome. The integration with our backend data for BI is also a God send. | | | | - Lucho |
|
| Considering I don’t spend all of my days and nights in PostHog personally—I am only in and out of product—I’d say my favourite feature is Hedgehog mode. | It’s enabling Max, Hedgehog in Residence to accompany you during your experience. You even get to customise the little sucker. |
|  | Maximus Decimus Hedgehogius. |
|
|
| Summary | James, Tim, Max and the PostHog team have created something very unique at PostHog. They have done it by trusting their judgement, ziggy where others have zagged and most importantly, being unapologetically themselves. | | James Hawkins @james406 | |
| |
customer: so what makes you guys better than the competition cto: well, there’s a few facto- me: hedgehogs. ever heard of em | | | 3:00 PM • Aug 25, 2024 | | | | | | 23 Likes 1 Retweet | 3 Replies |
|
| Kinda reminds me of the famous words from Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead. "You do not merely want to be considered the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.” Remember, you only get one shot at this life, so get out there. Go hog wild. | Extra reading | | You can check out PostHog here, and if you wanted to follow along as they build in public, subscribe to their newsletter here. |
|
| | BRAIN FOOD 🧠 | Just caught an episode of The Startup Podcast with the uber impressive Yuhki Yamashita from Figma. It’s a deep dive into how AI is shaking up product design, unpacking whether AI is set to replace designers or just give them a turbo boost. Yamashita brings great insights on how tools like Figma are evolving with AI to make product development faster and more intuitive. |  | The Future of Product Design w/ Figma's Yuhki Yamashita (Bonus) |
|
|
|
| | TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 |  | The All-In Podcast @theallinpod | |
| |
Did @elonmusk get screwed by @OpenAI? @DavidSacks and @reidhoffman debate: x.com/i/web/status/1… | |  | | | 6:08 PM • Aug 30, 2024 | | | | | | 856 Likes 76 Retweets | 269 Replies |
|
|  | Wolf of X @tradingMaxiSL | |
| |
This thread will show you that nature always reclaims what humans leave behind 1. MS World Discoverer was a German expedition cruise ship. It hit a uncharted reef in the sandfly passage, Solomon Islands 29 April 2000. | |  | | | 2:52 AM • Aug 17, 2024 | | | | | | 161K Likes 14.2K Retweets | 627 Replies |
|
|  | Bill Kerr @bill_kerrrrr | |
| |
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” — Bill Gates
Great example is Hubspot's first decade.
Keep going. | |  | | | 7:05 PM • Aug 21, 2024 | | | | | | 5 Likes 0 Retweets | 5 Replies |
|
|
|
| | TOOLS WE USE 🛠️ | Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs. | PostHog: We use PostHog product analytics, A/B testing and more.
Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails.
Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence. |
| |
| See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here. |
|
| | | | | | P.S. Want to work together? | | | That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡
P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter. |
|
|
| |
| | |
|
|
