james_impliu

Thanks :) I actually find this a really interesting topic. This approach can have some merit - ie it leads to you not overspending and running out of money if you are reliant on new business targets being hit. However, the ideal situation is that your CFO manages the spending conservatively whilst the VP Sales goes out and pushes things as far as they can. There are some morale issues too with giving very high targets when you are a managing a team who are judged against those - for fast growth, you want to give people a sense of accomplishment (so constantly undershooting huge targets is a quick way to prevent that) but also for them to push the boundary of what is possible.

This book is incredibly helpful - I just wish they'd do a follow up book around how you interview users on your product once it exists.

I guess the same principle applies "tell me about a new feature you want for our product... Did you actually try to find a workaround? No" *X probably isn't a feature we should prioritize top then

I'd love to see more examples of ways to get good existing product feedback.

It's also definitely less windy than you think it is.

Ha! It is way harder than you'd think to write in US English.

Good point! Updated it :)

It's really tough - we had to get professional advice.

YC connected us with an immigration attorney the moment we got accepted and he helped greatly to make sure we approached this in the right way. It would have been a maze to do this without him. It's still not easy and it's a lot of extra stress.

Certain countries like the UK have ESTAs for up to 90 days, but the program is 3 months + then you generally will want to be here to raise afterwards, so you should get some advice on how to do this specific to your home country.

Even the VISAs are painful - for example, an O1 (even if you do manage to get it) means IIRC your spouse can't work even if you can.

Thanks - it's really nice to see the community sharing it!

To your point on "in a few seconds"... We're currently trying to build out more libraries as fast as we can so people working on apps in lots of languages can easily integrate it - we've done Python, Ruby, NodeJS, JS, Go and PHP, and an API for the rest. Feature requests for new libraries as issues in the repo (https://github.com/posthog/posthog) very welcome.

Hence this handy guide! It turns out you can get down not via the road... although it doesn't appear on Google Maps.

There's a mix, so you can request 1:1 office hours whenever you want to speak to a particular partner. The onus is on you to drive the agenda in these. We tend to use them to talk through what we're doing next. ie after our HN launch we wanted to discuss "we have some momentum, what should we do next". Basically, whenever we've too many ideas and need help being more focussed.

The group ones are a once every two weeks thing. The reason they're cool is that you hear about others raising issues you wouldn't have thought to raise yourself.

Hey, I'm James one of the founders of PostHog, a YC W20 company.

We noticed that lots of people blog about the application process, but few blog whilst they're actually going through the program.

We recently launched our company on HN as a current batch YC company. We decided to start blogging about our time here to give people a sense of what it's like.

If there's interest, we'll keep writing posts like this!

No affiliation, but I found Dash incredibly helpful for working offline: https://kapeli.com/dash. You can download the docs for most languages/frameworks AND you can download Stackoverflow by section in a way you can read and search.

This is a really cool idea.

You could add a tag to feature request issues that it'd read from, maybe as a github app or something. I run an OS repo and it'd be really cool to be able to get through them all faster with a bit of money to pay a freelancer, for example. I imagine the users-paying side would be very hard to find though.

I'd also love to be able to attach a bounty to PRs with this money, although quality control would make me worry it'd be hard.

I imagine Patreon is never an enormous sum for people because the money is goodwill - it isn't tied to receiving anything back. You could make it like this.

I'm surprised there wasn't some other way of doing this - clearly other crowd funding sites exists, what do they use?

We launched a 1:1 tool for sales managers that used predictive analytics to suggest which deals needed to be discussed (ie Deal X looks like it's stuck). The reason being, when I was a sales manager, I found people would naturally talk about positive stuff rather than easily giving the whole picture.

It failed because quite simply, when we tried to get other sales managers to use it for free (hoping it'd be popular), we found they wouldn't make the time to spend 2 mins planning a 1:1, probably as they're managed on 'selling deals, right now' in many cases, which is a bit sad!

Learning: I should have read the Mom Test.

With hindsight, I wish I'd built it for engineers based on Pull Requests (PR #181 had a ton of back and forth / NLP shows it got heated). It would have been fun if nothing else!

We have actually integrated Clickhouse already for this reason. We started with Postgres as it works well for smaller volumes, but we have this integration in a paid version.

The business model for OS has been really tough historically, which probably has made raising money harder, so growing as rapidly as the SAAS companies therefore really hard.

It's quickly becoming clear (GitLab/Mattermost/Sentry) that there are some great ways to build enormous companies like this though. And, that's of course assuming you want to build a huge company :)

At a personal level, we found that this kind of business is just more fun to build... making cool stuff in the open and if we do a good job, getting inbound interest from bigger companies that have developers who need to use our tech at scale.

I don't think it'd work for everything - if you are a tool that developers don't interact with much, then I'd imagine it's tougher to build a real community.

We were debating applying it at a framework or query level but were nervous about this being harder to "clean up" conceptually - what would the equivalent of the "PostHog UX toolbar" need to look like to make that possible do you think?

We have got the ability to do grouping in the backend at the moment, but the UI isn't quite there yet - we definitely want "team" level analytics as a good starting point as we've already had this question several times. We know that's important for B2B SAAS, a world we have come from before.

We don't aim to go "data science" deep with analytics, as we suspect you'd rather just integrate Metabase/Tableau/etc. We can see some cool ways to use it for attribution though - as you can host it we don't need to charge you enormous fees if your MTUs are very big... we see lots of B2C companies using product analytics on the product, but not the website, and struggling with tracking say UTM tags the whole way through.

There are two "out there" areas that we're really interested in right now...

1) We're thinking of focussing more on precisely what a developer (not product, not marketing) needs, as we think there is an underserved and enormous group here. Imagine when you're building something being able to run a command in your CLI, then being able to open a browser with a good understanding of which pages/features are being used as you work. The point being - give developers user data so they know how to build for impact.

2) We also want to explore integrations with other platforms to push stuff to them. I can't stop refreshing our own product, so I think pushing an Action to Slack, for example, would be helpful and would get it into everyday workflows a bit more easily. We don't want to do too much here and kind of hope the community spot these kinds of things and run with them :)

What's your reaction to the above? I'd love to know if you had a specific pain point in mind

- 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.

Whilst Matomo and PostHog both provide analytics, Matomo are more focussed on session-tracking, rather than user/event-tracking. That means they’re better at things like analytics for traffic sources.

The things you can do with PostHog that you can’t easily do with Matomo, are things like pulling up identifiable user event histories, or plotting trends in product usage over time.

The enterprise version is just a private repo we'd give you access to that's still self hosted. We can also provide hosted deployments of any version, but that's really just for people that can't set it up themselves... hosting it isn't our core focus.

At the moment, way more VC money is going into later stage deals as companies stay private longer... that is the chunk that if securitisation becomes mainstream , where VCs will have competition. The impact of this could be really fascinating - VCs would be forced to go even broader in their earlier stage investments, or VC’s own funding will start to reduce as it won’t be possible to deploy the capital at the same return. Maybe it’ll turn out that funding more pre seed companies will be successful - why stop at YC’s 200 every six months. The switchover period would be an entertaining time to be a founder, that’s for sure!

- First-principles based reading. I fell into the easy trap of just reading business books that cover tactics. Read biographies of people who've accomplished a lot. Read how computers and electronics work at a more fundamental level, not just how to code. Basically, just apply some conscious thought to the kinds of books you read, and don't think of books as an instruction manual for right now. They're part of your general education.

- If you're a developer, become friends with the sales team at your work. Seeing things through a less technical lens will make you much more effective.

- Learn the mental skill of endurance. If you can walk 2 miles, try 20. Once you can cycle 20, you can do 100. The difference is mental more than physical.

Sadly, no. The only thing was this: https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/us-startup-visa-delayed-fallin....

I increasingly just use google to search sites I already know have better content than the web at large, since it so often feels like it sucks for any depth of information.

Want to get in touch with someone? name job site:linkedin.com. Want to find how to solve a tech issue? "issue" site:stackoverflow.com, and so on.

Google's search of sites like this is pretty good (although the recency working well would be really good... but perhaps impossible to solve well), and often better than in site search. But that + very basic fact finding "how much is a lb in kg", "where is restaurant X" are pretty much all I feel it's good for. Then again, I guess it's not supposed to be an encyclopaedia (or it can be, site:wikipedia.org!)

I wrote this post because I struggled to understand why I was annoying my wife despite doing the hoovering.

A little bit of research into the very basics of mental workload made me hope someone builds a wearable that tracks how hard you are thinking.

Had the same response but then spotted that there's a practise tab at the top!

It is awesome seeing colours in context. I've so frequently rejigged the palette whilst building the website, so this would stop doing that.

I'd love to be able to pick my own colours and to see how they look, instead of being bound by the pre-set ones... better yet being able to pick a 'starter' colour then having it create a complementary palette and seeing how that appears.

Agreed - care is needed here!

Curious if you can see a way that an automated functional test could pick up on the quality of design?

I'm the founder of a startup that focusses on tech debt. (Context: mini survey app that sits in GitHub/Lab so the team can track what needs fixing)

To underline the importance of what you're saying - one of the most interesting learnings so far from the data we've seen (~400 developers using it for the last month to log issues in their code/processes, >1,000 survey responses) is that the average developer encountering an issue loses more than twice as much time in Planning and Deployment than in Writing Code. The reason the data shows for this is that when there is an issue in Planning it wastes a very larges amount of time.

The other trend we've seen is we ask developers how each Pull Request made them feel (Happy/Neutral/Sad). We have literally not yet had someone give feedback who felt sad! So you can make your team happy just by asking and listening :)

Two examples of rapid prototyping spring to mind:

* Twitch, started as one guy streaming his life then they realised lots of gamers were watching, and that they'd like to be able to stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBOLk9s9Ci4

* Segment, started as a thumbs up/down tool for professors in lectures to work out when students are getting confused. They realised everyone just went to Facebook instead, then they wondered why they couldn't tell this when they were remote! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-vfn97QTr0

I recently created ad campaigns on Twitter/Facebook and Google for our startup. The dark patterns like this were shocking. They really taste of short term metric driven growth that doesn't consider "now I'm paying for clicks that will never convert, I'm going to churn as an account totally".

For example, Adwords defaults into advertising on every device which now includes TVs. This channel would never work for our business (an app that integrates with GitHub), and I'm sure this would work badly for many other businesses. We only found it by digging into the campaign stats once it had launched.

It also strikes me how long the approval takes for new ads - 48 hours. How many advertisers drop off in that time? That feels like a real value add thing to focus on.