1. Just be yourself, proudly. Some people _will_ hate it, others will love it. Getting product market fit is so damned hard, you are way better off looking for a smaller number of people that love you.
2. I'd shoot for 5 reference customers (paying list price, using it as you'd expect and genuinely delighted). Along the way I'd track who you try to sell to in a spreadsheet (including those that just drag on and never close) and I'd score them across the behaviors/things you would expect your target audience would have in common. This will help you create an Ideal Customer Profile - which you can then target more and more heavily (where you do marketing / what you build next and so on in future). Be _very_ specific not just ie by industry. For example, paypal targeted ebay power sellers in the early days.
3. Absolutely not. I've more than 40K customers at my startup and I live in a village no one has heard of in the UK.
4. Don't worry about scaling up via marketing until you have 5 reference customers (and generally do more of what got you the first 5 as your first step)
5. Read Secrets of Sandhill Road to understand the VC model more deeply. If you bootstrap - you have total control, might make more if you sell (because of how preferred shares work) but it will probably cause you more personal financial stress. Decide what motivates you - lifestyle business or trying to build a $10bn company. VC is an irreversible door, more or less, whereas bootstrapping isn't. I'd default with bootstrapping if unsure.
> Absolutely not. I've more than 40K customers at my startup and I live in a village no one has heard of in the UK.
Haha this made me check your profile — don't know if it's quite fair to say PostHog is proof that you don't need to be in SV to succeed given that you guys went through YC and also started in a remote-first (mid-pandemic) world.
ok that is fair - going to SF frequently but not living there is something i should have been clearer on!
my cofounder and i go 3-4 x a year now, for 1 week at a time. it acts like an offsite - get out of usual routine, meet interesting people, do lots of meetings (we'd normally avoid this sort of thing), get ideas and up our ambition, then go home and build stuff for 3 months quietly. repeat!
in the early days, if you fundraise, then at least SF based firms are way better to deal with in general, of course with many exceptions
PostHog | Full-Time | Distributed systems engineer (and lead), full stack and ex technical founder engineers | Remote (all remote) | Hiring GMT-8 to GMT+1
PostHog helps engineers build better products. we launched on HN during a YC batch in 2020 and have been growing very fast ever since.
* 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 $10M ARR / profitability in sight / lots of capital
* we are growing through more autonomy and transparency not through process.
* we are under a ton of pipeline pressure due to how much we've grown usage (~5x per year at the moment) - we need help rewriting our ingestion for the next 2 years of scale whilst dealing with 1 million events/minute being ingested. this will be very hard, but it is the _biggest_ challenge our company faces. revenue and growth are coming easily.
* goal is to build a company worth $10s of billions, by building wide first (we are the all in one platform with lots of tools) then going upmarket way later (similar product and go to market to Atlassian). we grow entirely through word of mouth and content marketing, not from outbound sales.
* we need: a distributed systems engineer to lead our pipeline team, 1-3 other individuals to work in the same team. you'll be working alongside experienced people who've worked at places like datadog/meta/twitter in this small team (currently 3 people).
* we are also hiring: ex technical founders and front-end oriented full stack engineers!
I feel like a weird industry has popped up that makes you feel like you can validate everything in advance. I think this comes from Product Managers in large, risk-averse companies that excessively try to minimize mistakes.
However, if you want to start a startup, you aren't optimizing for mistake minimization! You are figuring out if anyone cares as quickly as possible. You will only get true validation of this by seeing if people use your thing, and then iterating from there.
My advice would be - you have to _both_ talk to people and _at the same time_ create whatever your MVP is to launch as fast as possible. It might be a spreadsheet. It might be you doing stuff manually for them before building the software. Get something into their hands as quickly as possible.
The vast majority of people aren’t good at being visionary, most aren’t technical, and many will give you a default culturally-aligned answer (eg positive to be nice and conflict-averse, or negative because they are tired of dealing with sales and bullshit, for example).
Therefore having some sort of MVP (even as said just a spreadsheet, or a storyboard) to help people understand what you’re even talking about and envision it in action, would be very useful.
I agree with this! I think its great that you're trying to ask people for advice but honestly you want to maximise your learning from your potential customers themselves! The book 'The Lean Startup' mentions "faster learning loops" where you try to build something as fast as possible, find out whats wrong, iterate. - Book summary here: https://tdevroome.medium.com/book-summary-the-lean-startup-2...
PostHog | Remote GMT -8 to +2 | (i) Technical Writer (ii) Senior Developer | Full Time | Salaries all visible at posthog.com/handbook/compensation (location-dependent)
Open source, 6x rev growth last year, heading for profitability soon, well paid experienced team of 37 today, 25k customers across free + paid products, 65k developers in community, 0 outbound sales - all inbound growth. Didn't raise a 2021 overpriced round - real (potential!) upside.
* Technical writer *
Looking to hire a developer who loves to write. We aim for each piece we produce to be the best on the internet for that topic.
Content marketing is huge for us - writing deep technical content is what we want! You'd be on our (small) marketing team, making a huge impact.
Previous blogging (especially personal/interesting!) and a few years of development experience needed.
If interested, james at posthog.com and charles at posthog.com for a chat.
* Full stack developer *
We are looking for someone to build the next generation of our analytics backbone. You'll be working on ClickHouse and Python to make sure all our queries are web scale and users are happy.
You will (probably) help us build HogQL https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/86 (our own wrapper around ClickHouse SQL), or whatever else you think makes sense to prioritize. We work in small teams of up to 6, and you'll have a lot of trust to pick what to work on.
You need experience building high performance data systems, must be an expert at Django with deep SQL/database skills. Ideally, but optionally, you'd have worked in a high growth SaaS company / analytics product and have extensive experience with TypeScript-based React. We need someone ideally that has both worked in a very scrappy / early stage way _and_ ideally has seen a company scale.
This work will potentially extend into providing a full warehouse to our customers. It's a chance to work on the next Snowflake, but open source and product led, working with new companies from day 1 and staying with them as they scale - so get here in the first 40 employees before we are 100x the size.
If interested, james at posthog.com + careers at posthog.com and please mention you saw us on HN.
I work at PostHog, but didn't write the article. I'm guessing what we meant here is that we use a small, flexible agency that manages our paid ads. We didn't want any "optimized" landing pages or other stuff, we just wanted _any_ spend here to go on generating some relevant traffic (since often we think conversion rate optimization is harmful for brand/word of mouth, especically with a technical audience who in the long run respect companies that give you all the info up front etc, and we can do the other bits like SEO research).
We spend $5k/month with them + give them a monthly spend to do 99% of the work so we don't try to build any paid ads core competency in house. Continuously we've been trying to move spending from here to more organic content, and just leaving spend on the highest conversion paid campaigns (like our own brand name... which sounds stupid but it is broadly accepted as cost effective to boost CTRs for high intent traffic on Google's first page).
This is really impressive work. I’m the founder of posthog - James at you can guess it dot com. If you decide to get a dev job, and you think you’d learn a lot here, happy to chat!
hey, I wrote this piece and realised it was here! to respond to a few of these points...
> What do you plan to do if you run out of your current money without being profitable yet?
We maintain default alive status (there's a good Paul Graham essay on this), and visit our growth assumptions every couple of months so that we can track to profitability. We give ourselves a $4M cushion - ie our expected low point in capital before hitting profitability (last round was $15M to give a sense), which is a fairly conservative. Worst case scenario is that if this fails, our revenue has already grown a ton since our last fundraise.
> But once growths slows you'll probably get to know that side of them
Fair point. I guess it's less important but still not great though if you are able to get to default alive/profitable and if you've got good terms through the first couple of rounds.
To be blunt, we cannot guarantee not sharing data in the scenario that the US government forces us to transfer data to them from our EU Cloud. We have self hosting for those who want 100% certainty of GDPR compliance, as then we require no access to the instance.
The case law[0] as it stands today makes it impossible for US companies to fully comply in practice if providing cloud software like this - in order to comply with a request from a US agency to transfer data out of the EU, a US company would need to breach its obligations under GDPR today (and vice versa). However, recent changes[1] in the US may (or may not) enable legitimate transfers from the EU to US, but a ruling from the European Commission on this isn't expected until 2023.
For this reason, we've launched PostHog Cloud EU on AWS in Frankfurt for now (we've had many customers asking for this) as a first step. From here, we can iterate depending on the above or by changing our legal structure if we wind up with a ton of adoption and want to improve this offering.
We'll issue a few clarifications to the page and docs to help explain the above properly, as I think we should make the above points more clearly on our website. We didn't expect this to appear on HN front page so fast!
Has your counsel reviewed the GDPR surety claims of PostHog? The way it is described here suggests existing in a grey area being US run, running on US owned servers. Even with a self host option, which is noble, im worried by the statement "We have self hosting for those who want 100% certainty of GDPR compliance" which to me suggests this isn't clear yet whether it is GDPR compliant on the hosted product.
So you're saying you can't offer GDPR compliance because as long as US law isn't adjusted to restore the Privacy Shield guarantees, no US company can offer GDPR compliance, but you're providing best effort privacy guarantees and can offer GDPR compliance via self-hosting?
You should definitely adjust your messaging then because your announcement makes a big deal about your EU offering being GDPR compliant which it thus can't be. There's no such thing as "almost GDPR compliant". That's like "almost not getting fined". The customers asking you for hosting your service on AWS in Frankfurt were clearly misinformed if they did so because they thought it would provide them with GDPR compliance and it seems shady that you went along with it instead of informing them that only self-hosting with a non-US (and non-subsidiary) company can make them compliant.
I'm not a legal expert but this sounds like you're almost engaging in false advertising if you claim PostHog Cloud EU to be GDPR compliant.
At PostHog we've hired a bunch of people like this.
One word of caution - sometimes we get a contribution from people right ahead of applying for a job. The best applicants are ones who are existing users and who really are interested in the product, versus those who are doing a pull request to stand out. The latter is still a positive, but the former (depending on the quality of PRs!) is the home run!
2. I'd shoot for 5 reference customers (paying list price, using it as you'd expect and genuinely delighted). Along the way I'd track who you try to sell to in a spreadsheet (including those that just drag on and never close) and I'd score them across the behaviors/things you would expect your target audience would have in common. This will help you create an Ideal Customer Profile - which you can then target more and more heavily (where you do marketing / what you build next and so on in future). Be _very_ specific not just ie by industry. For example, paypal targeted ebay power sellers in the early days.
3. Absolutely not. I've more than 40K customers at my startup and I live in a village no one has heard of in the UK.
4. Don't worry about scaling up via marketing until you have 5 reference customers (and generally do more of what got you the first 5 as your first step)
5. Read Secrets of Sandhill Road to understand the VC model more deeply. If you bootstrap - you have total control, might make more if you sell (because of how preferred shares work) but it will probably cause you more personal financial stress. Decide what motivates you - lifestyle business or trying to build a $10bn company. VC is an irreversible door, more or less, whereas bootstrapping isn't. I'd default with bootstrapping if unsure.