Swulinski: PostHog's unconventional website UI succeeds as audience pattern disruption
“That's like a pattern disrupt thing for them, and they know who their target audience is, and the target audience appreciates the weirdness.”
Tan: Developers adopt vendors like PostHog simply because Claude Code recommends them
“Now people are probably just making Architecture decisions about what to use directly in CloudCode. Like, they might not even know what, you know, what analytics to use. And it's like, oh yeah, as long as CloudCode says use PostHog, like, they're using PostHog…”
PostHog raises a $75M Series E at a $1.4B valuation
“James is here hot off the news of raising a seventy-five million Series E round of funding at a 1.4 billion dollar valuation, making PostHog the latest YC unicorn.”
PostHog has 160 employees and around 300,000 total customers
“Yeah, so we're about a 160 people around 300,000 customers across, like, free and a lot of free customers unpaid. We have several thousand paid. We have, I think, 16 or 17 products, kind of, in production or in development.”
PostHog is expanding product breadth rather than moving upmarket
“So instead of kind of going up market, we're going just across more of kind of the customer data that people are generating.”
Legacy analytics tools were built for product managers, not engineers
“We felt all the products were built for kind of product managers to force engineers to go implement, but it's like reasonably technical, especially my co-founder is a very technical co-founder was just getting annoyed at like, I can't, I want to write SQL.”
PostHog launched on Hacker News in the final weeks of YC
“We started with just open source products analytics on Hacker News. We spent like the last four weeks of the batch desperately trying to get that out of the door. And then we pivot, we iterated, I would say, afterwards, and now we're all cloud-based with multi…”
Friendly customers refusing to buy proves a product is just nice-to-have
“Because then kind of what happens when we started charging for all of these products, you would find that, oh, I'm not failing this because I don't have a relationship, or I'm like, I'm kind of friendly with this customer at this point, and they still don't wa…”
Selling a $50/month SaaS subscription takes as much effort as $100k deals
“Like in my previous job we used to sell, like, enterprise software for millions of dollars a year, and I can remember multiple times thinking I'm having to work kind of as hard to sell a, like, 50 dollar a month SaaS subscription, as I was to sell, like, a 100…”
PostHog had the most upvoted Hacker News dev tool launch of 2020
“I pull up the post hoc slide every now and then, and I believe according to the slide, and I think it's true, it was the most upvoted dev tool hacker news post of the year.”
PostHog pitched 160 seed investors versus 20 to 30 for later rounds
“I think the statistics are something like, I think we met a 160 different firms in the seed round. I think for like, if I added up the total number of people, number of firms I've met for the series A, B, C, D and E, Probably like 20 in total, like 30 in total…”
PostHog raised its $75M Series E by pitching just one investor
“We spoke to one investor for this round. We raised him in peak 15 this one called Shalendra that is the main partner, but also Arnav is involved as well.”
PostHog is building a desktop app that autonomously fixes bugs via PRs
“At the moment we're working on like a desktop app, for example, that ships pull requests based on your customer data. So we'll look across all your session recordings or your analytics or your error tracking, your LM traces, go, Hey, these are the issues we ca…”
Funny content generates 1,000x more reach than useful technical posts
“If I just write something I think is funny, it can sometimes go a thousand times further in terms of reach, so if I'm just trying to raise awareness, it has to be funny and that's actually the primary thing we want to get across”
B2B billboards compete with phones and radio, not rival software
“It feels like you're competing against B to B software because like there's all these like AI billboards that are quite similar to each other. But I think the reality is if you want people to pay attention, it's like, no, you're competing with like what they'r…”
B2B brands should be weird enough to polarize audiences intentionally
“Like, it needs to be so weird that it polarizes. Every day we'll get a whole bunch of people talking about that website, and we monitor all our brand mentions online, and it's going to be like either this is literally the best thing I have ever seen, and we al…”
Dessaigne: PostHog's sales leader is also the company's CTO
“Did you know the team, the CTO, is also their sales leader? Not a business leader. Their sales leader is also the CTO.”
Hariharan: PostHog converted only 30 of 30,000 signups when launching paid tier
“There's another company that went through YC called PostHog. It was one of the most successful open source product analytics launch that they did through YC. Top number one on Hacker News. 30,000 signups. James was extremely confident that when he turns on the…”