Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Dalton mentions in another comment on this thread that posthog was originally a different idea and so I'm super interested in knowing if you guys really started building this on Jan 23rd [0] and got the backend, frontend, integrations, docs, sdks ready for not a soft-launch but a Launch HN in 4 weeks? That is nuts. Congratulations, either way.

I am glad someone is tackling this problem.

A feature request (or perhaps an architectural direction) would be if you could accommodate the backend behind graphql instead of Django+MySql, there's a potential for it go full Serverless (frontend and backend) with JAM-stack frameworks like redwood.js [1] (backed by apollo-graphql) or using Cloudflare Workers [2].

Edit: Another question I have is, is posthog at 80% feature parity with mixpanel / amplitude / heap already? If not, what do the timelines look like (asking since you're OSS, though, it is understandable if you can't reveal just yet). May be there needs to be a page on competitor-matrix on the website?

[0] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/commits/master?after=9ae6...

[1] https://redwoodjs.com/

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/jamstack-at-the-edge-how-we-buil...

- We had a good view of what to do product-wise - the key thing that is different for us is the open source model.

- I'd stress how important it was feeling inspired by the idea. Ian from Mattermost was really helpful, as were Dalton and the YC partners. Enjoying what we were working on probably tripled our speed.

- I'm meh technically, so we focussed on making sure Tim (CTO) could focus on exclusively the development. We split it up pretty clearly to create the right environment. I did the design, product, website (Elementor/WP) and docs, Aaron focussed on getting user feedback.

- We spent $1k on marketing, to speed up user engagement early on, so that helped get some bugs out.

Will do a blog post if there's more interest in the journey.

Can you give more details about your Marketing spend? Where you spent it, how it converted, etc? If you are open to it

Would love to hear more about this and would definitely like to read a post launch blog post.

In case you missed it: https://posthog.com/blog/pivot-to-posthog/

Thanks! We really did start committing code on Jan 23rd -- but we had strong views on what a solution should look like as we experienced these problems first hand.

We've already had requests from people to store events into different databases, but I hadn't considered doing it with graphql/JAM. That could be a really nice way of having the storage abstracted from the database.

In terms of feature parity, our goal is basically 100% parity. Anything you can do analytics wise in those tools you should be able to do in PostHog. We're going to try to keep up the same pace we've had for the last 4 weeks.

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