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CEO diaries
![Creating an Ideal Customer Profile is one of the most important things we've ever done at PostHog. You can see it in our revenue growth: I wish we had run this exercise sooner. Why should you care? If the revenue chart isn't compelling enough…]()
Nov 14, 2022 by James Hawkins
![Features tell, benefits sell. Well, they used to. What are you talking about? Benefits are why someone would use your product. Features are what your product does. An example of selling by benefit is Salesforce: Homepage title tag: Salesforce…]()
Nov 2, 2022 by James Hawkins
![It's one thing to build something , it's another to build something that people want . This principle, and the ones that follow in this post, applied at 0 users and are still relevant today at ~50K developers in our community. In fact, we have had…]()
Oct 20, 2022 by James Hawkins
![PostHog got pretty far (17k customers across all our products, went through Y Combinator, seed, series A and B raised, $MM revenue) before I really figured out what motivates me. Before we started – building the exact place I'd want to work I've…]()
Oct 7, 2022 by James Hawkins
![There really hasn't been a single situation where transparency hasn't been to our company's advantage. Most companies seem to share when necessary but not by default. I hope this post changes that because, as a startup, you've done something wrong if…]()
Aug 31, 2022 by James Hawkins
![Even when Tim (my cofounder) and I were doing a Y Combinator (YC) batch in 2020, we realized we got more work done when we worked asynchronously. Yes, even when there were just two of us, working in the same room as each other. It stopped us both…]()
Jul 20, 2022 by James Hawkins
![Imagine you're working on something for other developers that you really, really want to be great. Perhaps you're creating a new startup, perhaps you're creating a blog post, or perhaps you're working on a side project that you want to share with…]()
Jun 30, 2022 by James Hawkins
![Since we started PostHog, our team has interviewed 725 people. What's one thing I've taken from this? It's normal for candidates not to ask harder questions about our company, so they usually miss out on a chance to (i) de-risk our company's…]()
Jun 22, 2022 by James Hawkins
![The longer your strategy gets, the more useless it becomes. That's why, at PostHog, we communicate strategy as 'Nail X', where X is the thing we need to nail. It's simple and effective. We recently switched from Nail Enterprise to Nail Self Serve…]()
Jun 10, 2022 by James Hawkins
![Y Combinator (YC) is seen as the world's best, and most prolific, three-month accelerator program. Upwards of 7,000 founders have taken part. Yet, no one really talks about what happens afterwards. PostHog did Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. We…]()
May 18, 2022 by James Hawkins
![Imagine being able to grow twice as fast with just a few hours of work. Changing your pricing has a real chance to get you there. Here is a breakdown of the counterintuitive lesson I've learned as a cofounder at PostHog - the more we give away for…]()
Mar 17, 2022 by James Hawkins
![When PostHog was fresh out of YC last year, there were two things we focused on: (i) build and (ii) talk to customers. Hiring a product person felt like it would slow us down. Engineers on our team would speak to our users (also engineers) - surely…]()
Feb 18, 2022 by James Hawkins
![2021 went well for PostHog - especially given we're not even two years old yet. 7,014 customers across our range of products (!) 800% increase in organic traffic (!) 300% net revenue retention (!) 0.41 years CAC payback (!) Here's what we learned…]()
Jan 9, 2022 by James Hawkins
![I've been asked this three times today, so I thought I'd explain it from a founder's perspective. This is what I've learned so far. Figure out if design matters PostHog follows bottom-up adoption. This means our users find us online, install…]()
Dec 9, 2021 by James Hawkins
![It has been a dramatic month. Four weeks ago, our 16 month old daughter was diagnosed with retinoblastoma - a fairly rare form of cancer that affects the eyes. Update April 2022: we've finished chemo, she's now done with treatment and we're in…]()
Nov 12, 2021 by James Hawkins
![Last week we had an offsite in the beautiful Portuguese countryside, an hour's bus journey from Porto. We uploaded a highlight reel of the retreat to TikTok . One of the sessions we ran was a PostHog pre-mortem. This involved breaking up into teams…]()
Sep 10, 2021 by James Hawkins
![We are open source is literally our top value ... and what better way to be transparent than to share a diary? Late mover advantage Product analytics is a busy space. It reminds me of the front entrance to Liverpool Street station in London…]()
Aug 25, 2021 by James Hawkins
![As a founder, one of the most surprisingly important skills I've realized I have is hitting the front page of Hacker News . Out of five posts that I hoped would get there, four did. Look mom, lots of traffic: I don't claim to be a well-established…]()
May 20, 2021 by James Hawkins
How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
Mar 9, 2021 by James Hawkins
![PostHog has pivoted a lot . After 5 pivots in 6 months, we got into Y Combinator last year, pivoted again whilst we were there and have now gone from the first commit to thousands of deployments, a team across 10 countries and $12M raised, in well…]()
Jan 21, 2021
![Open source projects have long battled with how to finance themselves. PostHog is lucky to have significant funding and wanted to share what we did to help other cool projects take off. For those who've not met us before, PostHog provide open…]()
Jun 4, 2020 by James Hawkins
After the HN launch
Mar 1, 2020 by James Hawkins
Pivot to PostHog
Feb 25, 2020 by James Hawkins
Moving to San Francisco
Feb 24, 2020 by James Hawkins
The YC Interview
Jan 1, 2020 by James Hawkins
The time before YC
Sep 1, 2019 by James Hawkins