• Product
  • Pricing
  • Docs
  • Using PostHog
  • Community
  • Company
  • Login
  • Blog

Blog

AllInside PostHogProduct updatesGuidesStartupsOpen sourceCEO diaries

Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme

Nov 9, 2022 by Grace McKenzie

Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme

Nov 9, 2022 by Grace McKenzie
The best of PostHog. Delivered twice a month.
Recent Posts
Welcome to HogMail, our newsletter featuring the best of the PostHog blog, tutorials, product guides, and curated articles on building great products and companies. We send it every two weeks.  Signup here  so you don't miss it. #posthog-blog…
HogMail #16
Nov 8, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
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…
Tell me about features, not benefits
Nov 2, 2022 by James Hawkins
In  a previous product update  we announced a beta for a substantial change to the way we handle persons and events on PostHog. Today, after gathering your feedback and seeing the improvements to query performance, we’re rolling this change out as…
How we’re improving performance by combining persons and events
Nov 2, 2022
Want to know more about what we're up to?  Subscribe to HogMail, our newsletter , which we send every two weeks! 1.41.0 update guide for self-hosted users Due to changes in this update, it is important check  alias  usage before  upgrading PostHog…
Array 1.41.0: Improving performance by up to 400%
Nov 2, 2022
A growth loop is a series of actions that amplify each other to fuel perpetual growth. New inputs repeatedly power the series to exponentially grow the whole. Companies use growth loops to align their product and distribution to have the greatest…
How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
Oct 31, 2022 by Ian Vanagas
Honestly, it is a bit ridiculous to compare Postgres and ClickHouse. The two database solutions are as similar as grapes and grapefruit. ClickHouse was created for a specific purpose; PostgreSQL (aka Postgres) was designed to be flexible and all…
In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
Oct 28, 2022 by Mathew Pregasen
Welcome to HogMail, our newsletter featuring the best of the PostHog blog, tutorials, product guides, and curated articles on building great products and companies. We send it every two weeks.  Signup here  so you don't miss it. #posthog-blog 🙌  CEO…
HogMail #15
Oct 27, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
So, you're building a B2B SaaS product. Everyone knows you've got to measure stuff to succeed. This is not news.  What, why, and how? These are the questions that matter and the answers lie in the product metrics you track. In this guide, we'll cover…
The most useful B2B SaaS product metrics
Oct 26, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
The GDPR places significant restrictions on how you can use tools like Google Analytics to track and collect user data. And, while there is  no universal legal definition  of what constitutes "GDPR-compliant analytics", there are some fundamental…
The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
Oct 25, 2022 by Joe Martin, Andy Vandervell
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…
How we made something people want
Oct 20, 2022 by James Hawkins
In July 2023, Google will sunset Universal Analytics (UA), forcing users to switch to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or another provider. This hasn't proved a popular decision. Not only is GA4 a radical departure for existing users, it's very difficult to…
The best GA4 alternatives for apps and websites
Oct 19, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
At PostHog, we believe an open source approach doesn’t just lead to greater growth; it also leads to better products. That’s what inspired us to make our platform open source, to adopt  a transparent company culture , and also why we try to use open…
Building an open source data stack
Oct 19, 2022 by Joe Martin
Welcome to HogMail, our newsletter featuring the best of the PostHog blog, tutorials, product guides, and curated articles on building great products and companies. We send it every two weeks.  Signup here  so you don't miss it. #posthog-blog…
HogMail #14
Oct 17, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
It's no secret that some popular analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, have fallen foul of GDPR regulations in the EU. That's one reason why we've enabled users to self-host PostHog, or to anonymize user data in a way which complies with GDPR…
Introducing PostHog Cloud EU
Oct 11, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
While PostHog is obviously useful for product managers, engineers and analysts, there’s a lot it can do for other teams too — including customer success. Internally, for example, our CS team uses PostHog to track a variety of relevant metrics and to…
5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
Oct 10, 2022 by Joe Martin
One of the great things about PostHog is that it democratizes your product strategy by making analytics accessible to more than just analysts. There’s no need for old-fashioned SQL queries or complex business intelligence tools — marketing teams are…
5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
Oct 10, 2022 by Joe Martin
PostHog apps are a powerful, but hard to explain part of the platform. They’re powerful because they can do almost anything — and they’re hard to explain because they do almost anything. Want to import or export data into or out of PostHog?  There…
5 essential PostHog apps for new users
Oct 10, 2022 by Joe Martin
It can be tricky to know which events you should start tracking first if you haven’t used product analytics before. That’s why we recommend using PostHog’s autocapture. It's also why we give everyone their first million events for free, every month…
5 events all teams should track with PostHog
Oct 10, 2022 by Joe Martin
So, you’ve installed your snippet and started tracking data in PostHog. What’s next?  Before forging ahead into the heady world of  insights ,  session recordings ,  experimentation  and  feature flags , we suggest taking a second to invite your…
Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
Oct 10, 2022 by Joe Martin
PostHog may have been built for product analytics, but that doesn’t mean you can only deploy it on your core product — you can also use it to gather analytics from your marketing website too. Internally at PostHog this is exactly what we do, tracking…
How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
Oct 10, 2022 by Joe Martin
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…
What motivates me as a CEO
Oct 7, 2022 by James Hawkins
As an all-remote team, we know how important getting together in person is (we’ve  written about this before ). Our  product analytics team  (plus Luke, Annika, Cory, and Lottie) recently got back from an offsite in Rome – see also  how we plan a…
All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
Oct 6, 2022 by Ian Vanagas
We learned an interesting fact recently: only 20% of our users track their marketing website  and  their product using PostHog. This is our fault. We market to engineers at PostHog, so it's not a surprise we're less used for marketing. But here's…
How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
Sep 28, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
Want to know more about what we're up to?  Subscribe to HogMail, our newsletter , which we send every two weeks! Running a self-hosted instance? Check out our  guide to upgrading PostHog . PostHog 1.40.0 release notes Release highlights: New…
Array 1.40.0: Interface improvements and more!
Sep 26, 2022
Successful products need actionable metrics and for many businesses this starts with identifying what many refer to as a 'North Star' metric. This article explores the different types of North Star metrics using examples from well-known tech…
Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
Sep 14, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
Today I’d like to  rant  talk about how non-engineering people at startups – especially execs – treat engineers like a fundamentally different type of human being. A whole new species, with a different set of personal motivations, goals, frustrations…
Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
Sep 12, 2022 by Charles Cook
What do Google Optimize, Optimizely, Convert, Webtrends Optimize and Splitbee have in common? They're popular A/B testing tools None of them are HIPAA compliant Anyone who develops a healthcare product or app will be painfully familiar with this…
The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
Sep 7, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
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…
How to run a transparent startup
Aug 31, 2022 by James Hawkins
The 2010s were marked by an explosion of tools focused on data. One of the biggest was session recording – a screen-recording-like service that tracked a user’s activity. Typically, session recording (SR) was popular with marketers and product…
Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
Aug 31, 2022 by Mathew Pregasen
PostHog 1.39.0 introduces a new beta for you to try, a new display chart and big improvements to our client libraries.
Array 1.39.0: Betas, persons, events and libraries
Aug 29, 2022
It's a truth universally acknowledged that every business reliant on a monolithic enterprise product has need of an open source alternative... probably. In this guide we're looking at open-source analytics tools, which we've split into two broad…
The best open-source analytics and data tools
Aug 25, 2022 by Joe Martin, Andy Vandervell
As a company born at the beginning of the pandemic, PostHog has been fully-remote from its inception. Our team is 30+ people distributed across 10 countries; we have no central office, but  we still value getting together  in person.  We give…
How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
Aug 17, 2022 by Grace McKenzie
Our CEO and co-founder, James Hawkins,  recently joined Y Combinator  to talk about the first five hires PostHog ever made, how we made them, and why. This is the story behind each hire, and the lessons we learned along the way. 1. Marius Andra James…
What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
Aug 16, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
PostHog recently swapped out Docker for Depot in their container image builds within GitHub Actions. The results are outstanding, taking the average build time from 16 minutes to 3 minutes. Building the PostHog images via  depot build  instead of…
Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
Aug 5, 2022 by Kyle Galbraith, Jacob Gillespie
The AARRR framework, also known as "pirate metrics" or the AARRR funnel, is a classic framework for understanding customer behavior. It's useful for marketers, product managers and growth hackers at startups. In this guide, you'll learn: How the…
Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
Aug 3, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
PostHog 1.38.0 introduces exports and subscriptions for dashboards and insights, plus improved feature flag persistence and much more!
Array 1.38.0: Exports, subscriptions and session analysis
Aug 1, 2022
Is autocapture bad? Has it ever been good? Earlier this year Amplitude posed these questions in a blogpost by Product Evangelist Adam Greco. Yes, he said, ‘ Auto-track is still bad ’ – and he went on to explain the four main reasons why. Unlike…
Is autocapture ‘still’ bad?
Jul 25, 2022 by Joe Martin
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…
Remote companies can be too asynchronous
Jul 20, 2022 by James Hawkins
PostHog is a growing platform. We used to call ourselves a product analytics platform, but product analytics is just one feature  among many  these days. And that got us wondering... what are some of the most useful things you can you do with PostHog…
22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
Jul 20, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
We're hiring  Site Reliability Engineers  (SREs). I'm biased of course, but I think it's worth explaining why we think PostHog is the most exciting place to be an SRE right now.  Building a product In most places, with the exception of outages…
Why infrastructure is a competitive advantage for us
Jul 20, 2022 by Tim Glaser
When developing software, there's no shortage of work: building new features, fixing bugs, maintaining infrastructure, launching new systems, phasing deprecated solutions out, ensuring security, keeping track of dependencies… Whew. And that's before…
Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
Jul 5, 2022 by Michael Matloka
Feature flags, aka feature toggles, turn specific functions on and off during runtime. Rather than maintaining multiple feature branches in your source code, feature flags hide code or behaviors and allow you to enable or disable features on demand…
The 6 best free and open-source feature flag tools
Jun 30, 2022 by Hanna Crombie
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…
The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
Jun 30, 2022 by James Hawkins
PostHog 1.37.0 introduces advanced filtering for cohorts, improved events and property pages, dancing hedgehogs and much, much more.
Array 1.37.0: Cohorts 2.0 and event & property detail pages
Jun 27, 2022
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…
The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
Jun 22, 2022 by James Hawkins
When talking through our editions and pricing options with potential customers I'm often asked "How can I estimate my event count?" If you're not already using an analytics tool, or it doesn't readily give you a count of tracked events, it can be…
The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
Jun 21, 2022 by Simon Fisher
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…
Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
Jun 10, 2022 by James Hawkins
PostHog and Matomo are both  open-source analytics platforms  you can self-host on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over your data and unrivaled privacy compliance. However, there are some important differences between the two…
PostHog vs Matomo
Jun 1, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
"I wonder how much this SaaS product costs to..." "Contact sales!" 😤 Contact. Sales. Two words that embody everything we hate about modern SaaS products. And, when you see them, you know it's just the start of the sales dance. Even if you're deemed…
Why we ditched ‘talk to sales’ for transparent pricing
Jun 1, 2022 by Simon Fisher
PostHog 1.36.0 introduces AND/OR filtering, timezone support, universal search, multi-dashboard insights and much, much more.
Array 1.36.0: Introducing AND/OR filtering, timezone support and universal search
May 30, 2022
One of PostHog’s values is that everybody codes. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be a developer, but we do encourage everyone to practice the basics of shipping, no matter their role. Even site updates require GitHub and some basic knowledge of…
A non-coders thoughts on ‘Everybody Codes’ - Part Two
May 27, 2022
By Colin Wren, Co-founder of  Reciprocal.dev . It took me until I built my second product,  Reciprocal.dev , to really understand the value of analytics. I’d always thought of such tools as being an invasion of privacy and questioned the need for…
Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
May 26, 2022 by Colin Wren
Also known as split testing or multivariate testing, A/B testing is the practice of splitting your audience to test variations of a product design, new feature, call to action, landing page – anything you can imagine, really. Here, we’re sharing our…
The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
May 25, 2022 by Hanna Crombie
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…
Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
May 18, 2022 by James Hawkins
PostHog and Amplitude are both product analytics tools. That means they tell you where users are coming from and how they interact with your product, so that you can find ways to make it better. But we think PostHog is a more powerful tool for…
PostHog vs Amplitude
May 13, 2022 by Andy Vandervell, Joe Martin
Over the last few months, we’ve steadily grown the number of businesses offering services through  the PostHog Marketplace . We’ve added partnerships with teams such as  Altinity , Birch and, as of today,  Restack .  Restack  is a platform for…
Restack joins the PostHog Marketplace
May 11, 2022 by Joe Martin
On January 14, 2022, the world learned that Austria had declared Google Analytics to be illegal (in its default form), since it transmits IP addresses to the United States. The Netherlands declared the same view only days later. Given that PostHog is…
Using Google Analytics was deemed 'illegal' in some EU countries. We built a microsite in 48 hours to capitalize on the news.
May 9, 2022 by Cory Watilo
Ok, so you’ve read  Zero to One  and  The Hard Thing About Hard Things , but what are all the boring admin things that are actually going to drain 40% of your time which no one has told you about? More importantly, what is the ops stack you can use…
The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
May 4, 2022 by Charles Cook
We're excited to announce that we have launched a new app with  Avo , a leading data governance platform which enables you track data consistently and scalably across multiple platforms.  Connecting PostHog to Avo is great if, for example, you're…
Introducing the Avo Inspector app
Apr 27, 2022
PostHog 1.35.0 introduces activity logs and a brand new way of visualizing where your users are coming from with the World Map. Additionally we now support organization-level SAML login on both Cloud and Self-Hosted instances. Plus check out your Project Homepage for a few additional goodies.
Array 1.35.0: Introducing SAML, world map view and new plugins
Apr 25, 2022
Most analytics tools just give you the hard numbers: views, clicks, conversions. This is a good starting point, but statistics alone give you an incomplete picture – why did the user rageclick or fail to convert? Enter session recording. Why you need…
Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
Apr 7, 2022 by Hanna Crombie
PostHog 1.34.0 focuses on supporting collaboration. New features include a new default homepage for projects, smart names for all insights, an entire Data Management tool as well as support for horizontal scalability!
Array 1.34.0
Mar 30, 2022
PostHog is better with teammates. You only have to create a  dashboard  once, but it becomes more valuable every time you invite someone from your organization to view it. And this isn't just some vague truism: it's a measurable fact. Our data shows…
Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
Mar 24, 2022 by Paolo D'Amico
We just launched our Experimentation suite, and there's a ton we learned about running successful experiments. It was a no brainer product decision: Since you're already analysing your data in PostHog, and you're already using  Feature Flags  to roll…
What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
Mar 23, 2022 by Neil Kakkar
PostHog made huge strides in 2021. To name just a few landmarks, we:  Raised a  $15 million Series B ahead of schedule Became one of  YC's top-valued companies Rebranded our website  in just four weeks Migrated from  postgresql to ClickHouse Achieved…
PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
Mar 23, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
When PostHog was born in 2020, it was a simple Python application (Django + Celery) backed by a PostgreSQL datastore. Troubleshooting was easy, while the low barrier of entry meant fast adoption and more feedback on where to take the product. This…
How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
Mar 22, 2022 by Harry Waye, Guido Iaquinti
That’s right, we’re  teaming up with Altinity . It’s an exciting new partnership that also marks the launch of the  PostHog Marketplace . Double announcement! Going forward, the marketplace is where you’ll be able to find third-party services which…
PostHog teams up with Altinity
Mar 22, 2022 by Joe Martin
We want PostHog to become the first choice for product analytics at any scale. To do that, users should have a smooth experience exploring their product data - including not waiting minutes for queries to load. In this post, I’m going to break down…
The secrets of PostHog query performance
Mar 22, 2022 by Karl-Aksel Puulmann
PostHog is growing fast. In just the last year we've measured ~36.5B total events ingested in PostHog Cloud, and hundreds of self-hosted users reached the 1M total ingested events milestone. This is a sign of the superb growth we're seeing as a…
Introducing Data Management for PostHog
Mar 21, 2022 by Alex Kim
In this world nothing is certain except death, taxes, and database migrations. As your product evolves, your schemas evolve too, and you need migrations to update them. However, not all migrations are made equal. Some are simple, others are complex…
Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
Mar 18, 2022 by Yakko Majuri
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…
Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
Mar 17, 2022 by James Hawkins
The image preview you see when sharing a link is a great opportunity to get your brand’s message in front of people without them even clicking through to your website. Most sites just opt to display a logo and some brand elements.
Using Gatsby and Puppeteer to create dynamic Open Graph images
Mar 3, 2022 by Cory Watilo
Introducing a full multivariate Experimentation suite, granular permissions on dashboards, Altinity Cloud support for ClickHouse, configuring your instance from the PostHog UI and 290+ improvements/fixes.
Array 1.33.0
Feb 28, 2022
We're delighted to announce that  Hightouch  has released an integration with PostHog so you can sync modeled data from your data warehouse into PostHog. What is Hightouch? Hightouch is an alternative to Customer Data Platforms (CDP) like Segment…
You can now reverse ETL into PostHog with Hightouch
Feb 24, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, regulates how individuals and organizations are required to secure, handle and transmit protected health information (PHI) – and the stringent penalties for failing to…
Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
Feb 21, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
Engineers and product managers need to be vigilant when collecting user data. Punitive GDPR fines can run to €20 million or 4% of a company's global turn (whichever is greater) and that's after the expense, time, energy, and stress generated by the…
A simple guide to personal data and PII
Feb 21, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
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…
I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
Feb 18, 2022 by James Hawkins
HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a piece of legislation which was first introduced in 1996. Its main goal is to ensure that personally identifiable information is protected, with $1M+ fines and 1…
The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
Feb 16, 2022 by Joe Martin
As you may have heard, we’ll soon host our first ever meet-up for anyone who uses or is interested in finding out more about PostHog. It’ll take place in London, on February 24th —  we’d love for you to join us .  And if you haven’t RSVPed yet…
HostHogs - free drinks, free pizza and frequently asked questions
Feb 15, 2022 by Joe Martin
Session Recording  is one of PostHog's core features, and one of the few completely  open source ression replay tools  available. It allows you to see how real users use your website, mouse clicks and all. It's really cool and addictive (give it a…
Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
Feb 11, 2022 by Rick Marron
Valentine's Day is coming up and we'd like to share our love for the open-source community that helps power PostHog! Here's how: For every GitHub star we receive on  the PostHog repo  between now and the end of Valentine's Day, we'll donate $5 USD…
Send love to open-source projects on Valentine's Day
Feb 8, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
I recently wrote a blog post for my personal site about the  lessons I'd learned from leading my first two projects as a Software Engineer at PostHog  . In it, I lay out a five-step approach for how I own projects.   One common theme that stood out…
How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
Feb 4, 2022 by Neil Kakkar
PostHog 1.32.0 makes it easier to find what you want in the Persons & Groups page, introduces vertical funnels and sets the stage for the launch of Experimentation!
Array 1.32.0
Jan 31, 2022
The famous line from Marc Andreesen that  “software is eating the world”  has become part and parcel of modern technology’s canon and it continues to act as a rallying cry for the industry as a whole. But there is another phenomenon riding on those…
Why open-source projects are essential for large businesses
Jan 28, 2022 by Avi Press
Ten years ago today, the European Commission published the first draft of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But, as  the recent ruling in Austria concerning one website's use of Google Analytics  proves, how those rules are enforced and…
A new 'Privacy Shield' won't solve big tech's GDPR problem
Jan 25, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
PostHog is a self-hosted,  open-source analytics tool . Transparency is one of our  core values  and we believe self-hosting is the best solution for many businesses, especially large enterprises with complex needs. But, why? Why do we believe in…
The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
Jan 14, 2022 by Andy Vandervell
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…
Things I learned last year
Jan 9, 2022 by James Hawkins
User segmentation is a term which is thrown around a lot within product-led teams, but what does it mean? In this article we'll explain what user segmentation is, why it's important and give examples of how segmenting your userbase can uncover…
What is user segmentation?
Jan 5, 2022 by Marcus Hyett
Today, we’re excited to announce that PostHog has launched Group Analytics for both PostHog Scale / Enterprise users and those on PostHog Cloud.  Group Analytics are used for tracking and analyzing multiples of any event type within PostHog. Unlike…
Group Analytics is now available in PostHog
Dec 16, 2021 by Joe Martin
PostHog 1.31.0 introduces Group Analytics, improved Correlation Analysis, a revamped overall user experience on Insights and 350+ more improvements and fixes.
Array 1.31.0
Dec 16, 2021
Validating B2B product market fit is a common problem and the bad news is that there's no universal standard for validating product market fit.  But there are some great heuristics you can use to understand whether you’re on the right track - and…
How to achieve B2B product market fit
Dec 9, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
Understanding the needs of your users better than anyone else is critical for the success of any product. For years, taxis solved the primary user need of getting from A to B quickly. Someone would wait by the roadside until an available taxi drove…
How to work out what your users really need
Dec 8, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
Disclaimer:  This is intended as a short, tactical guide to getting your trademarks sorted out for the first time, on a minimal budget. This is  not  legal advice and we are not lawyers - this is just what has worked for us. Don't bother securing…
Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
Dec 1, 2021 by Charles Cook
There are lots of ways to do analytics. You can do SQL. You can do it in the cloud. You can not do it at all and hire an analytics agency or consultancy instead. But by far one of the most popular (and, we think, best) ways is  self-service…
Introduction to self-service analytics
Nov 30, 2021 by Joe Martin
Black Friday is normally an occasion to shop around for a new TV or mobile phone. But we wanted to do something a little different, something to celebrate and support the open source community which we both rely upon and are proud to be part of.  So…
Give Back Friday with PostHog
Nov 25, 2021 by Joe Martin
Product engagement is the most important factor when it comes to driving retention and revenue for your business. Though it seems easy to view success through a financial lens, revenue alone is rarely a clear indicator of a sustainable product.  In…
How to measure product engagement
Nov 23, 2021 by Hanna Crombie
Brand new and faster user interface, automatic conversion signal detection with Correlation analysis, saving insights for future use and a fully revamped recordings playback experience and more than 350 improvements/fixes more.
Array 1.30.0
Nov 17, 2021
Update (May 2022):  Plugins are now known as  apps ! The plugin server has become an integral part of PostHog, as it is responsible for event ingestion. However, it isn’t called “ingestion server” because it was originally designed to run plugins. So…
The state of plugins on PostHog
Nov 16, 2021 by Yakko Majuri
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…
Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
Nov 12, 2021 by James Hawkins
Recently, PostHog was invited to speak at  OSA Con 2021 , an open source analytics conference organised by Altinity. It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to the community, alongside other engineers and leaders from projects such as  ClickHouse…
How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
Nov 6, 2021 by James Greenhill
Customer retention metrics are some of the most important to understand and the most vital to the long term success of any product. In this article we’ll explain what customer retention is, why it’s important and some examples of tactics you can use…
An introduction to customer retention
Nov 3, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
ClickHouse supports speeding up queries using materialized columns to create new columns on the fly from existing data. In this post, I’ll walk through a query optimization example that's well-suited to this rarely-used feature. Consider the…
How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
Oct 26, 2021 by Karl-Aksel Puulmann
Fully revamped Paths experience enables you to better explore what actions your users take. New features include multivariate feature flags, private projects and DAU/WAU/MAU graphs.
Array 1.29.0
Oct 21, 2021
What is product analytics? At the most basic level product analytics refers to the process of gathering data about how a product is used, then analyzing that data in order to make decisions about improving it. Where it gets more complicated is in the…
An introduction to product analytics and how it works
Oct 21, 2021 by Joe Martin
This blog post explains why we're removing the "Sessions" page in PostHog. This page used to contain a daily list of all sessions by your users, separating them by periods where inactivity lasted longer than 30 minutes. In addition, this is where you…
Why we're removing the sessions page
Oct 11, 2021 by Paolo D'Amico
Creating mascots goes beyond just putting iPencil to iPad. It’s a long, confusing, and sometimes frustrating process which requires a lot of patience and tolerance for drawing hedgehogs 12 hours a day. A successful mascot should go beyond…
How we designed the PostHog mascot
Oct 7, 2021 by Lottie Coxon
Developer Relations exists and is executed in different ways at almost every company. Our Developer Relations journey at PostHog has just begun, and we still don't know exactly what it will look like in the medium term. But we can still assess what…
How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
Sep 30, 2021 by Phil Leggetter
We recently completed an entire rebrand of our website. From start to finish, it took less than a month. This sounds like an incredible feat of discipline - and in a way, it was. But the path to success wasn't linear; it took us more than six months…
How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
Sep 28, 2021 by Cory Watilo
Welcome to another episode of PostHog's Community Conversations, where we chat to our contributors and users. This time, we speak to Evan Sosenko, Co-founder and CTO of PureSkill.gg. PureSkill.gg  is an automated coach for Counter-Strike: Global…
Building the future of game analytics - An interview with PureSkill.gg CTO, Evan Sosenko
Sep 21, 2021 by Joe Martin
Understand your conversion rates better, PostHog 1.28.0 has launched! Significantly revamped performance for slower queries, advanced engagement cohorts, SAML support, and many more improvements and fixes.
Array 1.28.0
Sep 15, 2021
Earlier this month, we finished our first PostHog offsite of the year near Porto, in Portugal. Team members travelled from America, Estonia, The United Kingdom, and Poland to spend a week living together and, in many cases, meeting for the first time…
How PostHog uses Wren to offset carbon emissions during offsites
Sep 14, 2021 by Joe Martin
One huge mistake some startups make is using titles to establish and reinforce hierarchy. This is dangerous for two reasons: Iteration and speed largely determine the growth trajectory of most product-led startups. Because of this, it's important to…
How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
Sep 14, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Product testing is essential, but your testing won’t always pick up the small sources of friction which build up over time and frustrate your users. This is where ‘dogfooding’ comes in - regularly using your product to get the full picture and build…
The importance of dogfooding - Why product managers should use their product as much as their users
Sep 13, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
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…
Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
Sep 10, 2021 by James Hawkins
We’ve talked before about  product-minded engineers  at PostHog. We don’t have PMs dictating a roadmap or solutions - it all comes from engineering. A PostHog engineer has complete autonomy to decide the 'what' (prioritization) and the 'how…
What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
Aug 26, 2021 by Paolo D'Amico
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…
Winning from the back - late mover advantage
Aug 25, 2021 by James Hawkins
Google  says  they intend to deprecate the use of third-party cookies in 2023. But why is this important, and how will this affect product analytics? What are third-party cookies? Cookies are small files stored on a user’s machine, helping you…
Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
Aug 23, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
We're excited to announce a major under-the-hood upgrade for PostHog Open Source! Over the past few weeks, our team have been hard at work moving over from Postgres to ClickHouse, the same database that powers PostHog Cloud. This means you can now…
We just made PostHog Open Source 1000x more scalable via ClickHouse
Aug 20, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Creating a product that people need and are willing to pay for is hard. At PostHog, it took us months to get to 10 paying customers — this after  pivoting  several times before we finally landed on product analytics. We tried a million things and…
How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
Aug 18, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Before joining PostHog,  Joe Martin  had never owned a Mac. The former tech and games journalist previously did everything on PC, but joining PostHog’s  Apple-dominated  culture came with a few… necessary adjustments. ”The first thing I did was have…
Introducing Joe Martin - Our first Product Marketer
Aug 6, 2021 by Mo Shehu
(Welcome to another episode of PostHog's Community Conversations where we chat to our contributors and users.) Unlike most tech founders, Leo Anthias didn’t study computer science at university. Instead, he took Persian History and Modern American…
Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
Aug 6, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Why you need content Developers are a selective bunch when it comes to what type of content they consume, and clickbait-y “Ultimate Guide To X” posts won’t fly with them. Your content needs to be detailed, thoughtful, and relevant to their problems…
Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
Aug 6, 2021 by Mo Shehu
PostHog 1.27.0 is here! Completely redesigned funnels experience will help you dive deeper to understand why your users aren't converting. Plus 400+ improvements & fixes.
Array 1.27.0
Jul 26, 2021
We’re proud to announce a new hire; Phil Leggetter will head up Developer Relations at PostHog. Developer relations sits at the intersection of product development, engineering, and marketing. The role serves communities of core and secondary…
Introducing Phil Leggetter, our new head of Developer Relations
Jul 21, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Y Combinator has  listed  PostHog as number 157 out of its top 159 companies by valuations and exits as of July 2021. "Um… what?" I know, I know. You'd think we merely post the link and keep it moving. After all, coming third-to-last on a list of…
YC adds PostHog to top valued companies for July 2021
Jul 2, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Ramping up fast in any senior product role requires understanding as much context as possible across 3 axes (Market, Product and People). I’ll talk you through my process of going from zero understanding in these three areas, to landing a clear…
How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
Jul 1, 2021 by Marcus Hyett
One of PostHog’s core values is that everybody codes. That doesn’t mean everyone needs previous experience as a developer or engineer, but we encourage everyone to learn and practice the basics of shipping, no matter their role.  When we’re hiring…
A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
Jun 25, 2021 by Joe Martin
Our main selling point as a company is transparency. Being an  open-source company , this isn’t surprising: our code, designs, and content are all largely available  online , for free, even while still a work in progress. This transparency also…
How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
Jun 23, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Thinner docs, better products The highest priority for support at any company is shortening the feedback loop between your customers and your product team. The fastest way to achieve this is by having your product builders interface directly with…
How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
Jun 15, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Last week we proudly announced we’d successfully raised $15 million in a Series B funding round, with support from Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV (formerly Google Ventures). You may have seen  the news on VentureBeat . What made this funding…
Why we raised a $15m Series B ahead of schedule
Jun 14, 2021 by Joe Martin
Jun 10th, 2021  –  PostHog , the open source product analytics company, today announced $15 million in fresh funding and major new free features for users of data warehouses. The company's Series B was led by existing investors Y Combinator's…
PostHog raises $15 million Series B for open source product analytics
Jun 10, 2021 by Joe Martin
Frontend filters & backend SQL - A chat with Eric Duong, Sam Winslow, James Greenhill, and Buddy Williams
Jun 4, 2021
Great engineers will either get autonomy at your company, or they'll get it somewhere else. Our engineers are encouraged to think about the  what  and  why  of what they're building - not just the  how . At PostHog, new people are usually surprised…
How to turn your engineers into product people
May 28, 2021 by Mo Shehu
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…
Writing for developers
May 20, 2021 by James Hawkins
Today, we're announcing that we're giving away 1 million ingested events/month on  Cloud , for free. That's up from 10k/month that we were offering before. More free stuff?! You're already pretty generous! Gee, thanks subtitle! The magic of an  open…
Why we're giving away 100 times more cloud usage, free
May 17, 2021 by James Hawkins
PostHog 1.25.0 is here! Read about our new features, why we're giving 1M events for free to everyone, and find out who are the 6 new team members we've onboarded.
Array 1.25.0
May 13, 2021
PostHog 1.26.0 is here! Read about our Series B raise, our new features, and find out who are the 4 new team members we've onboarded.
Array 1.26.0
May 13, 2021
How we monetized our open source devtool
Apr 30, 2021 by Mo Shehu
What could be worse than handing out 50% of your company's equity to a co-founder who doesn't understand the product as much as you do, and all they seem to bring is the ability to talk? Likewise, a sales-focused founder may be struggling to know…
An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
Apr 28, 2021 by Mo Shehu
Best practices for productive meetings at your startup Ever had one of those days where you do nothing but hop into one meeting after another? Even worse is the 30-minute break between meetings which seems like enough time to squeeze in some work…
How we do meetings at PostHog
Apr 19, 2021
Welcome to The PostHog Array 1.24.0! Quite a lot has changed since we last talked... Community MVP 🏆 This release cycle's Community MVP goes to... adrienbrault ! Adrien has been submitting PRs left and right, helping us improve the core PostHog…
Array 1.24.0
Apr 14, 2021
In this edition of the PostHog Array: Release 1.23 is out, and our 🔥 new  PostHog.com homepage  is live - amazing work from PostHoggers Cory, Lottie, and Mike! Community MVP The PostHog 1.23.0 community MVP is Sandeep ( samcaspus ) - a frequent…
Array 1.23.0
Mar 18, 2021
How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
Mar 9, 2021 by James Hawkins
PostHog 1.22 is out with awesome new features, usability and performance improvements, and the usual bug squashing. Community MVP The community MVP for PostHog 1.22.0 is  oshura3 , who did a  thorough review and edit of our website content  and…
Array 1.22.0
Mar 3, 2021
Release 1.21 is a big one, on top of exciting new features and improvements, we put extra time into the overall stability of PostHog squashing dozens of issues. Some highlights of this release: New: Our new navigation is out of beta and available to…
Array 1.21.0
Feb 17, 2021
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…
A story about pivots
Jan 21, 2021
We're back! 2020 was a hectic year for us and our team put in a whole lot of effort to get PostHog to where it is now. As such, we shut down PostHog for 2 weeks to give everyone a chance to recharge (with a rotation in place to make sure nothing…
Array 1.20.0
Jan 19, 2021
(Dec 17, 2020) – PostHog, the open source product analytics company, today announced $12 million in funding and major new features - including plugins, session recordings and  feature flags. The company’s Series A was led by GV (formerly Google…
PostHog raises $12 million in funding led by GV and Y Combinator
Dec 17, 2020
This new release is a great mix between old and new, with significant improvements to both our newer features, as well as our core analytics stack.  Once again, we were heavily driven by feedback, having done a bunch of calls with our users and…
Array 1.19.0
Dec 15, 2020
Our primary goals for this release were to iron out bugs and improve the user experience of our Beta features. As a result, we fixed  a whole lot of stuff . We merged dozens of PRs with session recording fixes and improvements, and a dozen more with…
Array 1.18.0
Nov 30, 2020
Having launched  major  features in our  previous release  such as  Session Recording  and  apps , over the past two weeks we worked extremely hard to improve PostHog's UX, enhance the new Beta features, and fix a bunch of bugs.   You'll notice…
Array 1.17.0
Nov 17, 2020
Following our largest release to date, we are now back on a more regular release schedule. And, given that scalability was the focus of the previous release, we thought it was time for some fresh new features.  So, without further ado, here they are…
Array 1.16.0
Nov 4, 2020
Hey there! It's been a while... With our last release being over a month ago, this new release has the largest changelog to date, with 175 PRs merged to  master  since the last time you heard from us. However, there is method to the madness: PostHog…
Array 1.15.0
Oct 15, 2020
Let the pull requests come in! We're happy to announce that PostHog has joined  Hacktoberfest 2020 . For those who don't know, Hacktoberfest is an initiative led by DigitalOcean to promote open source projects and foster the overall open 
source…
PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
Oct 1, 2020
Should open source projects track you?
Sep 29, 2020
Over the past three weeks, there was one word on everyone's mind: feedback. We did a bunch of interviews with users and had a lot of discussions with the community around one key question:  How can we make PostHog better for you? The result is a…
Array 1.14.0
Sep 3, 2020
Building an all-remote company from scratch
Sep 1, 2020
Open source is eating SaaS
Aug 25, 2020
Why you may not need a sales team
Aug 18, 2020
Quality was the name of the game over the last two weeks. We have a few user facing tweaks and a mountain of bug fixes and refactoring this week. We're not sure what the collective noun for a bunch of bug fixes and refactoring pull requests is - a…
Array 1.13.0
Aug 13, 2020
The Early Days of GitLab - A Chat with Sid Sijbrandij
Aug 3, 2020 by James Hawkins
Shared dashboards, global annotations, retention table improvements and a metric ton of bug fixes. This week's PostHog array has it all. If you're self hosting and want these features -  update your PostHog . Please also update your  posthog-js…
Array 1.12.0
Jul 29, 2020
We ship whenever
Jul 23, 2020
PostHog is now available on Segment!
Jul 22, 2020
Annotations, filtering all functionality by cohorts, retention table filtering and many, many bugfixes. It's all in this PostHog update. If you're self hosting and want these features -  update your PostHog . Please also update your  posthog-js…
Array 1.11.0
Jul 14, 2020
This is our most exciting release to date. Here we go: 🎉 You  have  to try the new toolbar out - you can walk through your own website or app and see where users are clicking. We did it on our own site and immediately found out a lot of things that…
Array 1.10.0
Jun 25, 2020
First, learn  how PostHog raised $3M for our open source project . We could not have done it without this community - thank you for all your issues, feedback, usage and support! So, what have we been doing with the money? Since last time - AWS…
Array 1.9.0
Jun 18, 2020
Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
Jun 10, 2020
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…
How we raised $3M for an open source project
Jun 4, 2020 by James Hawkins
What's box-fresh in PostHog? Cumulative graphs, better paths, and an upgrade to our actions. If you're self hosting and want these features -  update your PostHog . Release notes Cumulative graphs This feature is designed for startups. We built it…
Array 1.8.0
Jun 3, 2020
This week's update brings a React Native integration, time comparisons, easy access to user data from graphs, better user friendliness, and much stronger frontend testing. Self hosting and want to upgrade?  Update your PostHog . Release notes…
Array 1.7.0
May 26, 2020
One of the most fun weeks we've had so far with our UX - resizable and touch-enabled dashboards with a new display mode, Microsoft Teams support, and paths for events. Plus, a ton of performance improvements. Want to try this out and self hosting…
Array 1.6.0
May 19, 2020
Another week, another PostHog Array. We're steadily working towards parity with other tools. This week's highlights include a new website, multiple dashboards, a sleek new design and breaking down by cohorts. Click here for instructions  on how to…
Array 1.5.0
May 13, 2020
Session times are here! They're a great way to help understand how engaged users are. The Array 1.4.0 brings plenty of improvements to our core functionality. Release notes Filter properties individually In both trends and funnels, you can now add…
Array 1.4.0
May 7, 2020
Another shiny new integration - PostHog now plays nicely with Android! Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your instance. Release notes PostHog Android Library In addition to the work Marius put into the iOS integration, this week you can…
Array 1.3.0
Apr 29, 2020
Big new integration - PostHog now has a library for iOS! Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your instance. Release notes PostHog iOS Library You can now capture events in your iOS app and send them to PostHog. It automatically captures…
Array 1.2.0
Apr 22, 2020
Major update time (hence the change to 1. 1 .0) - push-based integrations have been introduced! Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your instance. First our updates and new features. Release notes PostHog integrates with Slack This update…
Array 1.1.0
Apr 15, 2020
Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your instance. First our updates and new features. Also as you will see below we have added Celery workers, we’ll move tasks to workers to speed up a lot of actions in PostHog so we've updated the upgrade…
Array 1.0.11
Apr 8, 2020
Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your instance. First our updates and new features. Release notes Users in Trend Graphs Whilst we have progressively built in Total volume of users, DAUs and Stickiness into our graphs this change lets you…
Array 1.0.10
Apr 1, 2020
We’re in the thick of our release schedule this week! Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your instance. First our updates and new features. Release notes Stickiness Last week we made a lot of changes to actions but one important change…
Array 1.0.9
Mar 25, 2020
Welcome to our second PostHog Array which comes with a new naming convention. We’re going to be doing weekly tagged releases from now on so the PostHog Array will reflect our most recent version. Like what you see and self-hosting?  Update  your…
Array 1.0.8
Mar 17, 2020
This is the first of (what we hope are many) PostHog weekly roundup posts. We want to let the community know what we have been up to, a few of our favorite comments, issues, and pull requests as well as some key repos and projects we have noticed…
Array 1.0.0
Mar 9, 2020
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
  • Product

  • Overview
  • Pricing
  • Product analytics
  • Session recording
  • A/B testing
  • Feature flags
  • Apps
  • Customer stories
  • PostHog vs...
  • Docs

  • Quickstart guide
  • Self-hosting
  • Installing PostHog
  • Building an app
  • API
  • Webhooks
  • How PostHog works
  • Data privacy
  • Using PostHog

  • Product manual
  • Apps manuals
  • Tutorials
  • Community

  • Questions?
  • Product roadmap
  • Contributors
  • Partners
  • Newsletter
  • Merch
  • PostHog FM
  • PostHog on GitHub
  • Handbook

  • Getting started
  • Company
  • Strategy
  • How we work
  • Small teams
  • People & Ops
  • Engineering
  • Product
  • Design
  • Marketing
  • Customer success
  • Company

  • About
  • Team
  • Investors
  • Press
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • Support
  • Careers
© 2022 PostHog, Inc.
  • Code of conduct
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms