We're an open source platform for product analytics that took off after a launch HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376732). Our mission is to increase the number of successful products in the world. We've raised nearly $30M since that post under 2 years ago, and have around 15K developers in our community.
There are two key roles open at the moment:
* A developer who likes to speak to customers. We are getting swamped dealing with inbound demand and are growing revenue by 50% month over month. I need our very first customer success manager - to help get customers what they need, and to ensure they're deployed and configured. This isn't a support ticket role, it's about making sure our customers, who are usually very technical, are successful, including (inbound) sales. We could see this fitting an ex-founder really well, but we're open. Our vision for customer success is a strong focus on tooling, documentation and automation, not on building a huge team. Above everything, you need to be proactive, smart, able to help solve technical problems, empathetic and someone that enjoys building relationships.
* A developer who loves writing - especially tutorial type content, and could own this for us. We've got lots of docs that detail what the product does, but we want to focus on explaining how to build a more successful product, and how PostHog can help achieve those. You might be writing about how to use our SDKs one day, or how to improve activation rates another. Bonus points for a data engineering background.
What it's like:
* Fast and direct!
* Focus is on written and asynchronous communication.
* Autonomous. You choose your quest. Small team structure to enable this.
* Transparent - almost all our work is open source, public handbook, public compensation, internally shared board meetings and investment updates before they happen.
Controversial take: We found that we get better responsiveness from our open source community on Slack at PostHog, probably as our users have it open for work already and are used to posting without too much thought, whereas making a post on a forum feels like a higher barrier to entry. This feedback helps us improve the product. Would love something that extracts all the content and pushes it somewhere indexable though, as we often end up manually taking conversations and converting into github issues etc.
The weird thing was that the people I'd helped with nothing in it for me ended up being the best place to start. It was often friends at startups who need a website building, or some friendly advice.
That's not super helpful if you've not already done that:
* Real life groups were pretty helpful. You can't go to these aiming to sell, but if you go aiming to learn and genuinely just get advice, they work well.
* LinkedIn was pretty good, looking for people that I knew through others and asking them really nicely if I could talk about something we wanted to build. When we had better ideas that solved pain points they had, that were more unique, the response rate was much higher. This doesn't work well for "recruiter-saturated" user profiles like developers, who just ignore a lot of what goes on there.
The MVPs weren't that bad - they'd work smoothly on the things that were new and special BUT they often totally lacked core functionality. We built with django so we could use django admin to do things like add users/change passwords.
We're about to change our deployment strategy actually!
We think the future for open source is offering private cloud, where we have some sort of control pane to manage upgrades without needing access to your data. That's a win for privacy reasons but mean we don't have to go at the pace of our users with the least powerful on premise servers.
That sounds interesting. Out of curiosity does AWS have streamlined support for vendor deployments? (I don't work in large organizations so have never seen how non-saas deployments work)
> Among the thousands of open source projects, the ones championed as successful open source business make up a tiny proportion i.e. the exception not the norm.
I think this is a correlation not a causation thing. Specifically, open source is a great place to put hobby or WIP projects - SaaS isn't, you wouldn't want to pay for others to use your stuff for free. Certainly, historically, your point is valid - SaaS has benefitted hugely thus far, but I think it seems rational this starts to change.
Open core feels like it has the advantage of the source-only approach yet also enables a community to use a free product on top, generating faster growth and user trust and feedback, all of which are harder to create with SAAS. The downside? You have to build two products. At least for those willing to do the VC route (not for everyone), it is possible to get funding to do this.
Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of a VC-backed open core company!
My company has been using Papercups since it launched. It works pleasingly well for such a new product, and we've found the team very responsive when we've asked for support.
I'm biased as my team built it, but github.com/posthog/posthog is probably worth a look. We can provide basic GA functionality and a lot of more product analytics focussed functionality + feature flags.
We're an open source platform for product analytics that took off after a launch HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376732). Our mission is to increase the number of successful products in the world. We've raised nearly $30M since that post under 2 years ago, and have around 15K developers in our community.
There are two key roles open at the moment:
* A developer who likes to speak to customers. We are getting swamped dealing with inbound demand and are growing revenue by 50% month over month. I need our very first customer success manager - to help get customers what they need, and to ensure they're deployed and configured. This isn't a support ticket role, it's about making sure our customers, who are usually very technical, are successful, including (inbound) sales. We could see this fitting an ex-founder really well, but we're open. Our vision for customer success is a strong focus on tooling, documentation and automation, not on building a huge team. Above everything, you need to be proactive, smart, able to help solve technical problems, empathetic and someone that enjoys building relationships.
* A developer who loves writing - especially tutorial type content, and could own this for us. We've got lots of docs that detail what the product does, but we want to focus on explaining how to build a more successful product, and how PostHog can help achieve those. You might be writing about how to use our SDKs one day, or how to improve activation rates another. Bonus points for a data engineering background.
What it's like:
* Fast and direct! * Focus is on written and asynchronous communication. * Autonomous. You choose your quest. Small team structure to enable this. * Transparent - almost all our work is open source, public handbook, public compensation, internally shared board meetings and investment updates before they happen.
Learn more about working here at https://posthog.com/careers
Email me and links to any relevant online profile personally - james@posthog.com, and cc in careers@posthog.com.