Changelog

We took the opportunity to raise a $9M Series A, topping up our seed funding to a total $12M. The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and the Y Combinator Continuity Fund. Thanks for the support!

Lifecycle analysis enables you to dig deeper into your events with a breakdown of the users who performed an event into new, returning, and resurrecting users. In addition, it also shows you the churn on for the specified time period.

We added the first version of our session recording product, which is now known as session replays. The first version was rudimentary, enabling you to watch user sessions and automatically exclude sensitive information. Since then we've added a lot of new features!

ClickHouse is, in simple terms, a very fast database. Until this point we've been using Postgres, but we've now made the change to switch to ClickHouse for larger event volumes. At the time we made this change we were handling nine-figure numbers of events each day, and ClickHouse drastically sped everything up.

As an open core company, we have to reconcile our open source efforts with our ability to generate revenue. Generating revenue is how we're able to sustain our extensive work in the open source space.

Thus, after a lot of brainstorming and calls with the likes of Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, we settled on a business model that allows PostHog to be a sustainable company in the open source space.

This led to the creation of a new repository called posthog-foss, which is a mirror of the main repository without proprietary code. Want to run your own open source version of PostHog under a permissive MIT license? Now you can.

Who cares if GitHub stars are a vanity metric when they look this good? And you can still add more!

We added an integration with Segment, so you can use data from PostHog in other locations and platforms. This is the start of a beautiful relationship, and a new docs page.

Feature flags, so you can control which users have access to what features and safely manage roll-outs? From now on, PostHog does that.

Once a year, the entire company gets together for a week. For our first company offsite, we went to Italy and spent the week working hard, having fun and arguing about the merits of pineapple on pizza.

We added heatmaps to the PostHog toolbar, so you can visualize where users are clicking on your product with a visual overlay.

We added React Native to our growing list of support libraries. It remains one of our most popular libraries to this day!

We added iOS and Android to a growing list of libraries, all as we continued to build new features. We've added many more libraries since!

We've got many more stars since, but we're still accepting new stargazers!

We launched on Hacker News with our MVP, just 4 weeks after we started writing code.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. We had over 300 deployments in a couple of days. 2 weeks later, we'd gone past 1,500 stars on GitHub.

PostHog was founded by James and Tim on January 23rd, 2020. We got into Y Combinator's W20 batch, moved to San Francisco, and just a couple of weeks after starting realized that we needed to build PostHog!

James made our first public commit, updating layout to make it nicer. Thanks, James!