>> By hosted, we mean charging customers for the hosted version of the open source product. The risk is that a cloud provider decides to compete with your hosted version.
An interesting approach is what cockroachdb did, which basically forbid this very specific use case, and is otherwise standard open-source.
First of all congratulations on this. It is nice to see Open Source being on the table for VCs. I am not sure how it pans out from a business point of view though.
If you truly want a product built with the community then you might lose some control - or give control to the community, at least voting. Unless you want a* "source available" type of thing. Open Source is ideology and tool.
The less control might mean that you prioritize what is good for the community, not necessarily for your VCs. I started working full time on an open source product, which like PostHog, I feel is going to be core infrastructure to any business that runs on data/software.
I want to build a sustainable business around it. I have enough money in bank to sustain product building and marketing with my cheap living costs and get traction. Once there, I will have to think of next steps, but I do not feel I want to get into accelerated growth that comes with VC money. Mentors are highly appreciated though.
*Edited typos.
>> "Going for VC means you are committing to an exit or a failure - you can't really change your mind later that you want to take things more steadily"
Exactly. And that is a huge reason NOT to use VC-funded opensource.
regarding this "you want to seem like you're having your * together":
My experience is this is bad advise. There are people who care a lot about this appearance stuff and people with skills, in any role, even as pure investors. You don't want to work with the appearance people because even the you-can-trust-them part often is just appearance. And the people with actual skills don't give a shit if you sit there with a 4k camera and a straight shirt or in your undergarments and a 3-day beard. They care about if you can deliver something useful, if you can stick to your goals+principles in tough times, and if your goals align with them well enough that they can believe you stay on board until they made their profit.
So not being well prepared for the video call part is actually not a minus point. It might even be a plus.
Kudos for the fundraiser. Keep posting, you guys are interesting!
I hope that they can put some of this funding to work by hiring a copywriter, as it's impossible to figure out what this software does from reading the homepage.
Really great to see they've raised money.
I wished the founders best of luck and have been watching from the sidelines since their launch thread here, super solid product.
Others covered a lot of aspects already,so I'll just add this: We are seeing the same story again and again.A few Europeans go to the US,pitch, and get funded. I can't imagine raising $3M+ on this side of the pond after only a few months of starting and without having some very good connections.
Congrats guys. It is always great to see other players bringing open source approach to product analytics. This will only bring more competition hence better products. (PS: I am one of the cofounders of Countly).
Been following PostHog along for a while and am super glad to see this! Congratulations and excited to see what happens in the future. Love this model!
Open source > SaaS is a hot take.
Congrats guys. Great progress in a very short time!!
We @RudderStack also raised a round recently. Glad to see investors putting money in Open-Source projects.
Congrats
For those not familiar with Posthog, it's open an open source product analytics tool. That means you install some javascript on your website. It then collects information on what features people are using on your website and let's people run charts and graphs to ask questions about feature engagement and product usage.
Product analytics is a pretty large space. The three main existing product analytics tools are Mixpanel[0], Amplitude[1], and Heap[2] (I used to work at Heap). Notably, Mixpanel was valued at $865MM as of 2014 and Amplitude was valued at $1B as of two weeks ago.
Posthog is an open source competitor to these tools that you are able to self host. This is interesting for several reasons. If you don't feel comfortable sending data to third party tools, you control the data yourself. In addition, existing product analytics tools can get expensive. After you get off the public pricing, you will likely find yourself paying >$12k/year for one of these tools.
There are also challenges I see for them going forward. In my experience, the person who makes the decision to buy a product analytics tool isn't in engineering. It's usually a product manager or sometimes a marketer. I imagine the fact that it's open source is less interesting to one of the traditional product analytics purchasers. Compare this to a company like Gitlab where the end users are engineers.
Scaling these tools is also a huge challenge. My job at Heap was to basically scale Heap. If you want to self-host a product analytics tool, you will basically be responsible for scaling the system. On top of that, because each Posthog instance is isolated from each other, Posthog won't be able to take advantage of the shared compute power. Imagine a product analytics tool that has 100 customers and 100 servers. If the compute power was shared, each query would make use of all 100 servers. If the servers were isolated from each other, each query would only be able to make use of 1 server. That's basically a 100x slow down in performance. Posthog does sell a managed version which in theory shouldn't have this problem. It will be interesting to see long term whether that's a big driver of revenue for them.
[0] https://mixpanel.com/
[1] https://amplitude.com/
[2] https://heap.io/