HogMail #14

Oct 17, 2022

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Welcome to HogMail, our newsletter featuring the best of the PostHog blog, tutorials, product guides, and curated articles on building great products and companies. We send it every two weeks. Signup here so you don't miss it.

#posthog-blog

👩‍💻 All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon: Behind the scenes of the Team Product Analytics offsite in Rome, where they completed a 24-hour hackathon. Must read.

🚴‍♂️ What motivates me as a CEO: James shares what motivates him and how that's changed as PostHog evolves.

🇪🇺 Introducing PostHog Cloud EU: Big news. You can now enjoy all the awesome features of PostHog and keep your data in the EU – perfect for GDPR.

#tutorials-and-guides

🍪 Building a tracking cookies opt out banner in React: How to build a cookie permission banner and handle permissions using PostHog.

⏳ How to calculate session-based metrics in PostHog: How to calculate average session duration, time on page, pages per session, and similar metrics in PostHog. 

#good-reads

Product Sense Demystified by Marty Cargan, where he argues:

  • "Product sense" isn't some mythical, innate talent – it comes from deep product knowledge.

  • You need to spend serious quality time with customers, immerse yourself in data (and your chosen industry) to acquire it.

  • You don't need years in an industry to develop product sense – innovation comes from people who don't have baggage.

Molly Graham on Scaling Startups and "The Phases of Scale". Takeaways:

  • Companies change a lot as they scale from 30 to 50 employees (things start to get harder here) through 50 to 200 (small enough to change big things) and so on. Plan for this.

  • "Hiring is a network effect. The first 100 people you hire will define the next 200" – we believe a lot in this one. See our first five employees.

  • Don't copy processes from FAANG – early startups need "design principles that tell them who they are, what they like, what they want to select for, and who they want to be."

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs, which makes some thought provoking points about communication:

  • People (broadly) are givers or takers – "Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations."

  • Givers tend to resent takers in conversation, but that doesn't mean takers are villains – this is giver propaganda! Takers are vital for successful multi-person conversations (e.g. team meetings, brainstorming).

  • "Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides’ insistence that the other side must convert or die."

#random

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