AMA w/ James & Tim (founders of posthog)
by•
hey! we run posthog, the toolkit for building successful products - a single platform for building products, talking to users and shipping new features. we are 5 years old, have 140k customers and are making multiple $10s of millions of revenue.
no question's too weird. we're super transparent so will probs overshare anyway. plg? fundraising? yc? working with your cofounder? why we publicly document all our bad decisions? our allergy to enterprise sales? we've an open book so ask us anything!
we'll be around 8am pt today for an hour to answer live!
2.1K views
Replies
Product Hunt
what's the worst, best decision that's been documented during PostHog's journey? And unrelated - how has AI impacted your workflow and the workflow within the Org?
PostHog
@gabe not really documented but the best decision was working with tim and running the company together (we're co-ceos today). it would have been way too much to have done it solo for either of us. "internal confusion" or whatever is non existent. i'm quite good at pushing on often stupid ideas that can have a lot of upside but sound nuts, he's exceptional at making it actually happen, especially in engineering when we're going slowly. it's a lot more fun with someone else.
a lot of our team use little bits and pieces of ai stuff. however, it has dramatically changed the products we're shipping. like we've shipped LLM observability, we have many more things to come here and we've shipped AI features like Max AI - chat to your analytics, session replays and soon much more. it has sped us up an awful lot and created a threat and an opportunity at the same time. we are leaning very hard into AI at the moment.
Product Hunt
@james_hawkins3 that sounds like an awesome partnership. I can totally relate to suggesting ideas that sound nuts 😅
Awesome to hear y'all are leaning in hard - I personally think the integrations that are being implemented totally make sense and am curious to see how PostHost will evolve in 3-5years. Right now, Max AI seems super powerful to better understand data. Going to dig in now to learn more about it!
Product Hunt
Was there a specific moment where you thought "oh shit...we have product-market fit"?
PostHog
@rajiv_ayyangar yep - we put the github repo on hacker news and from that moment just had inbound demand every day. super clear. it was the only time we'd ever gone from push to pull - "PLEASE USE MY THING!" on that day and since then has been "we need to keep up!". revenue did come later but it meant we just knew we'd figure that out as we had so much interest compared to what we'd experienced for the months and months before. best thing ever.
Product Hunt
I hear you on the allergy to enterprise sales :)
We've been building extensions to Product Hunt that go beyond launches, to try to solve the G2/Capterra/Gartner problem but in a higher-signal, more authentic, community-driven way (hence shoutouts/testimonials, forums). Is there one thing that you feel is slowing your growth the most that we could help unlock? Do you pay G2?
PostHog
g2 doesn't feel authentic / have minimal idea how much traffic it drives. i think we pay them defensively as all our competitors seem to have gone nuts there so we looked super weird to not have a good presence.
with product hunt itself, being really direct, b2b saas has felt painful to get as much traffic as productivity or hobby developer based stuff that we would typically compete with. what i'd really love is to launch new stuff here regularly and get some traffic if it's good enough. if we build up lots of reviews etc along the way, that'd be awesome. the "pay g2 to let us look mature relative to our competitors" model is lame.
for productivity or personal use type product i see it as a must post place. we have had 100s of times more traffic from hacker news and twitter for whatever reason. maybe PostHog isn't good at ProductHunt launches and we need to up our game and that's why we feel we send you more traffic than you send us basically. we have a new video person and a bunch of fun stuff coming here so i'll get us to try again :)
Product Hunt
Huge fan of what you guys do. I feel like you do enterprise software but play the enterprise game completely different than your competitors. Was this intentional? Are you ever pulled to be more "enterprise"-looking or is this now a badge of honor? I know so many founders that think they have to button everything up to and my personal take is that this waters down a market really quick and actually detracts from growth. Posthog is such a good example of how authenticity and uniqueness can be their own value statement for a brand. Just curious on how that came to be!
PostHog
@steveb i agree with your personal take. everyone seems to act enterprisey but i think this kills the chance to build something that spreads so much faster because it'd be interesting and fun.
Artefact
Since you're publicly documenting all your bad decisions (love this btw), what's the funniest or weirdest mistake you've made that somehow ended up helping your business?
My-legacy.ai
Love the transparency and focus on building for developers first. Your approach to multi-product strategy is inspiring—doubling down on what works rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Curious, as you scale, how do you balance shipping new products vs. refining the core experience for existing users?
PostHog
@mylegacy we monitor support numbers, churn, feature requests etc by product in our per product growth reviews. if we see things going sideways, then a potential cause is that the team is under resourced. these sessions have been incredibly helpful once a product hits a reasonable amount of revenue. i think we start them at around 100k arr.
if the teams all look good, we'll then go wider by default.
My-legacy.ai
@james_hawkins3 That makes sense! 100K ARR seems like a good point to start these reviews. How do you usually tell if a team is under-resourced—do you look at backlog size, velocity, or something else?
@james_hawkins3 Can you share the infrastructure expense cost to handle 140000 customers?
Hey! I love what you’re doing at PostHog—especially the surveys and live session replays. Those have been super valuable when launching new features.
That said, the analytics side can be a bit confusing at times. I really wish creating cohorts or tracking where users are coming from was easier. For example, in Google Analytics, I can instantly see all referrals, where visitors came from, and which ones converted. But in PostHog, I have to manually add each site to the panel.
If we're using only PostHog and an unknown site sends us traffic, there's no easy way to detect it. It would be amazing if this process was more streamlined so we could better evaluate our analytics.
JOOS©
I feel like a lot of founders get so caught up in building their product that they forget to really engage with their audience. How did you guys avoid that trap with posthog?