Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic.
This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants and or bots that will apply to any job listing thats posted, but still this is ridiculous.
I really feel bad for the 6 people who had to endure the technical interview AND THEN were given the honor of attending the "SuperDay" which sounds like a full day of at least 5 interviews, 2 - 3 being technical, and still got rejected. Not sure what the technical interview is like at posthog, but assuming this is just an hour phone screen those 6 people still probably had more than 7 hours devoted just to interviewing at this place just to get rejected. That's not including any time spent preparing for interviews or anything else either.
There must be a better way to do interviews. Posthog is not Google, Posthog (or any other startup) does not need to hire to the same standard that Google does.
Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige, or anything else really that Google offers then sure I will jump through as many hoops as you want for the interview. Until then, hard pass.
As someone who considered applying to PostHog but never to Google (even though Google recruiters reached out to me, while PostHog’s did not), I can explain why they attract applicants.
First, in several countries, working at Google won’t make you rich—they don’t always offer the highest salaries in the region. You’ll have a comfortable life, but you’ll still need to work for the rest of your career. Second, Google is not a remote-first company, which is a dealbreaker for some.
My (perhaps flawed) reasoning was that, in its early days, PostHog was a very small company with a great product that people genuinely enjoyed using. If you received stock options, the potential for a big financial upside seemed high. Plus, working at a small company is simply more exciting—your contributions actually make a difference.
Having attended a SuperDay, I can hands down state that their interview process is the best I've ever had (didn't get the job tho, which was probably for the best at this phase of life). Designed to perfectly lift signal and minimize noise, for what they're trying to achieve. Don't change a thing PostHog.
Interviews are a game of asymmetric information. The job seeker has much more knowledge of what they can and cannot effectively do than the job offerer. And the job offerer has much more knowledge of what is and is not required for true success than the job seeker.
Given that, no, there really doesn't have to be a better way than just "interview a lot of people and take your best guess". If you stop taking the time to do that you will eventually be outmaneuvered by someone who does.
I had a superday, which to their credit was paid. It was for a technical product role which they wanted to hire people with some baseline technical ability, but it wasn't a coding job. I was up front that while I can code, and do build my own projects, I'm not a app developer. The superday was an app development exercise, and they let me know I didn't pass because my app development skills were not up to snuff. Not really sure how or why that played out that way, but at least I was compensated.
The funny thing is that small companies that create a hiring process like this because they will only tolerate working with the best people actually end up selecting the best of the most desperate people, which was usually not the intention.
I've worked at many startups over the years and I've always been very involved in hiring, I call this the MDE (most desperate engineer) effect and it's something I always try to make founders, other engineers, etc... understand when the company starts to discuss hiring processes more.
The premise is simple, the difficulty of your hiring process needs to be directly corelated to the perceived future value of said company. If you are an OpenAI right now, you can have the most difficult, convoluted, time intensive hiring process in the world and the best engineers will still sit through it because they score very high in potential future value. Other companies cannot / should not have as difficult of a hiring process because you will end up selecting from a pool of people who are willing to endure anything just to get a job, get experience, get a job that pays in USD, renew their H1B visa, etc...
This doesn't mean these people are bad engineers or shouldn't be considered, but if I had a dollar for every time a founder or CTO at a startup said that this company is only hiring the best, most passionate people bar none I would be a rich man, and a lot of the people in this category just need a job to put food on the table (which seems to be exactly the kind of people the company wants to avoid at all costs funnily enough).
We had enormous success at the startups I worked at where we would talk to great engineers who worked at FFANG companies and explain the problems we wanted to work on, how we were thinking of approaching it, why it was interesting to us, where we saw the company going, and how they could help us get there as opposed to trying to squeeze them through a long tedious interview cycle. Granted these people did have previous work experience to help vet them, but again the process is something that can be adjusted depending on where the company is and what you are looking for.
Sheep mentality hard at work at companies. Just because Google does it (processes, technologies, systems etc), lets also adopt it without thinking whether its relevant in our context and use-cases.
I bet the same devs from these firms who are asking to traverse a minimum spanning tree would fumble at even the slightest variation of the problem appearing in daily life.
This list mentions A/B testing a few times and it's worth noting that A/B testing is great but it's not free.
I've seen a nontrivial number of smart engineers get bogged down in wanting to A/B test everything that they spend more time building and maintaining the experiment framework than actually shipping more product and then realizing the A/B testing was useless because they only had a few hundred data points. Data-driven decisions are definitely valuable but you also have to recognize when you have no data to drive the decisions in the first place.
Overall, I agree with a lot of the list but I've seen that trap one too many times when people take the advice too superficially.
I think A/B testing is one of the most expensive ways of getting feedback on a product feature.
- You have to make good decisions about what you're going to test
- You have to build the feature twice
- You have to establish a statistically robust tracking mechanism. Using a vendor helps here, but you still need to correctly integrate with them.
- You have to test both versions of the feature AND the tracking and test selection mechanisms really well, because bugs in any of those invalidate the test
- You have to run it in production for several weeks (or you won't get statistically significant results) - and ensure it doesn't overlap with other tests in a way that could bias the results
- You'd better be good at statistics. I've seen plenty of A/B test results presented in ways that did not feel statistically sound to me.
... and after all of that, my experience is that a LOT of the tests you run don't show a statistically significant result one way or the other - so all of that effort really didn't teach you much that was useful.
The problem is that talking people out of running an A/B test is really hard! No-one ever got fired for suggesting an A/B test - it feels like the "safe" option.
Want to do something much cheaper than that which results in a much higher level of information? Run usability tests. Recruit 3-5 testers and watch them use your new feature over screen sharing and talk through what they're doing. This is an order of magnitude cheaper than A/B testing and will probably teach you a whole lot more.
Most A/B tests should not be done in a production like way. Grab some post-it notes and and sketch out both A and B: then watch users work with it.
For a lot of what you want to know the above will give better information than a 100% polished A/B test in production. When people see a polished product they won't give you the same type of feedback as they will for an obvious quick sketch. The UI industry has gone wrong by making A/B in production too easy, even though the above has been known for many decades.
(A/B in production isn't all bad, but it is the last step, and often not worth it)
It probably helps that one of PostHog's core products is an A/B testing framework, so it's much easier for them to iterate on it internally for what they need to A/B PostHog. Even when you already have a best in class A/B testing framework though, I agree—A/B testing too much or waiting too long for "more data" to make decisions can slow down momentum badly for features that should be no-brainers.
Most orgs should just be shipping features. Before starting an Experiment Program teams should be brainstorming a portfolio of experiments. Just create a spreadsheet where the first column is a one-line hypothesis of the experiment. Eg. "Removing step X from the funnel will increase metric Y while reducing metric Z". And the RICE (Reach-Impact-Confidence-Estimation) score your portfolio.
If the team can't come up with a portfolio of 10s to 100s of experiments then the team should just be shipping stuff.
And then Experiment Buildout should be standardized. Have standardized XRD (Experiment Requirements Doc). Standardize Eligibility and Enrollment criteria. Which population sees this experiment? When do they see it? How do you test that bucketing is happening correctly? What events do analysts need? When do we do readouts?
That's just off the top of my head. Most orgs should just be shipping features.
A/B testing is also high risk: a good test produces valuable data, a bad test produces harmful data. A company that does no testing is better off than a company that does bad testing. Many people treat product decisions made based on test results as unimpeachable, whereas they treat product decisions made on a hunch with a healthy skepticism that leads to better outcomes.
I know this is not related to the article, which is great, but I am wondering how long "posthog" is going to be the name of this company given what "post hog" means.
These are ok. They're great to highlight the surface area of product building. But the list is very biased from an analytics and testing perspective because posthog product is analytics and testing.
Capturing analytics is a no brainer. however, most data in most products at most companies starting out just fundamentally does not matter. It's dangerous to get in the habit of "being data driven" because it becomes a false sense of security and paradoxically data is extremely easy to be biased with. And even with more rigor, you get too easily trapped in local optimums. Lastly, all things decay, but data and experimentation runs as is if the win is forever, until some other test beats it. It becomes exhausting to touch anything and that's seen as a virtue. it's not.
18. Instead, forcing PRs into day of work unit, it is better to be minimum testable increment. Some features just need more work to be tested. Forcing everything into tiny tickets make both planning tedious and often introduce bugs in half finished features.
22. I saw design system fail in many companies. It is very hard to get right people and budget for this to succeed. For most startups are better to pick existing UI toolkit and do some theming/tweaking.
27. I disagree, If you put Product manager as gatekeeper to users you will transform the organization into a feature factory. Engineers should be engaged with users as much as possible.
27. I don't think you do disagree. Read point 29: Hire and rely on product engineers. They have full-stack technical skills needed to build a product along with customer obsession. Yes, this means they need to talk to users, do user interviews, recruit tests for new features, collect feedback, do support, and respond to incidents.
> Trust is also built with transparency. Work in public, have discussions in the open, and document what you’re working on. This gives everyone the context they need, and eliminates the political squabbles that plague many companies.
This seems prone to feedback loops; it can go both directions. If there are political squabbles, discussion may be driven private, to avoid it getting shut down or derailed by certain people.
I've seen this. Takes management vigilantly guarding the commons from excessive drive bys and divebombs.
It takes a lot less energy to throw shit than it does to clean shit. There's infinite signals. Big egos take a lot of energy to repel and redirect to maintain it. I think it's absolutely worth it when it's possible, but yeah.
You wouldn't think so until you've done it, but it's really hard to get 6+ adults together where everyone's primary goal in that team is to make a thing. Seems like there's always one or more people who want to peck others, build fiefdoms, hold court.
Process is important when work is handed off from one team to another team. Any company with a non-trivial product will have a non-trivial team size; and thus it'll need to standardize how people hand off work.
It doesn't have to be onerous: The best processes are simply establishing boundaries so lazy people don't throw their work over to the next person. (IE, "I won't work on a bug without steps to reproduce and an unedited tracelog that captures the failure" is a good boundary.)
> Your product is downstream from your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Do not start with an idea. Start with a problem, and then construct a solution. The solution is the product. The problem implies someone who has that problem: this is the customer. How much of a problem it is tells you how much they want it and how much they will pay for it. Because an idea doesn't necessarily have a problem, it results in a product that doesn't necessarily have a customer.
> As 37Signal’s Jason Fried says “You cannot validate an idea. It doesn’t exist, you have to build the thing. The market will validate it.”
Similarly, don't set out to change the world. Put your product into the world, and the world will decide whether to change as a consequence.
I just want to say this blog is one of the best engineering/product blogs out there. I’ve been an avid reader for a while and always learn something. Very inspirational.
The problem with having such a specific, prescriptive formula for success is that it never actually works out that way. Sure, there are high-level principles, the PostHog team executes brilliantly, and I love the product, but I think we're really bad at connecting the dots on what actually made something successful. Instead, we assign credit to random things just to make it all make sense. A lot of times, it's the equivalent of saying, "Bill Gates eats this cereal for breakfast, so if I do that, I should become a billionaire too."
Posthog's newsletter is one of the few I re-subscribed to after a general newsletter purge, top content.
Regarding the superday controversy: my best interviewing experience was a conversational technical interview followed by a paid-either-way-the-decision-went 2 week project. I did quite a bit of competitive programming so leetcode interviews are not a dealbreaker for me, but I feel there's just too much at stake for 1-2h coding exercise, and projects allow you to showcase all of your skills, not just speedcoding.
I was always very passionate about programming and startups or small team/co, but I never even got to the first round because of my undergraduate degree. I think I would have tried hard given an opportunity and worked with lot of discipline and passion. So now I have my own small team and I try to see if someone who doesn't have the right background but still willing to learn and is passionate about building stuff. It is probably not the idea of the author and he is right in his approach as it has been established, but I will test and see if what I am trying will work or not.
This is a great point. I've seem teams apply lean startup by testing -> changing something -> testing -> changing something -> testing ...
The problem is that the changes are so small that statistically you end up testing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You need to make a significant change in your Persona, Problem, Promise, or Product to (hopefully) see promising results.
Story time. I interviewed for a job at posthog. I knew that I really loved their communication style. But I hadn't used their product and didn't know a ton about them except that their writing is fantastic.
The 'product for engineers' focus that they is cool but when I had an interview, it was clear that I wasn't a 'product for engineering' person.
When they proposed the Super Day. I was like, I'm not sure because it's awesome to get paid for a day, but it's also not an unstressful event. And I sort of said I had some more questions before we moved on to the Super Day.
And they basically just said: we don't think it's going to work out. It was actually a pretty positive experience. I think that they correctly assessed the situation pretty quickly and my hesitation was a real signal to them.
(This is my recollection - I could have the details wrong.)
But yeah, super day is a day of very structured work in the role that they setup. And its paid.
Wait, i wouldnt hire someone who is ok spending so many hours after the first few hours, it shows me that he or ave can't handle the sunk cost trap and will fall again and again. But ok, that's my wr9ng opinion about this
There are companies out there that probably do none of these things and are x1000 more successful from a revenue or market cap perspective. Seems like the biggest successes are simply being at the right place at the right time and not being a complete idiot. Nobody wants to hear that though.
Sure luck plays a role. There are techniques to increase your odds of getting lucky though.
Sam Altman argued a startup's chance of success is “something like Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck, where Luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand”
A lot of the success in startups is not due to getting the initial idea right, but what founders do once they realize that their initial idea is wrong.
Salespeople are what make a successful company, from a revenue point of view. There's only one company that I know of that's been successful at that level without sales: Atlassian. Everyone else has salespeople.
If you if you don't have salespeople then you need to make a product that works and fulfills user needs. And it has to be good enough for word of mouth...which is where posthog's experience comes in.
Yep, I really don’t want to read any articles from any company that built their success during the SaaS greenfield period from 2008-2016. Plus, you already have had the brand and market share to built even more upon that foundation.
Now if you’ve built something big that grew in the past few years organically, there’s more to learn from that success.
"Your website is the first impression your product is making" - unless your company does not operate in market where no one cares about your website.
We get serious leads only via networking of our C-levels and sales no customer cares about our landing page and leads when we cared about landing page were not serious and waste of time.
I always look for the post with the "success formula" in this situation and can never find it, but luck and timing are components. Also skill, resourcing, execution, and what I'll call "grit". The ratio is not defined but you need components of each.
Maybe a hot take, but I think it’s better to build a successful startup with developers of average skill, intellect, and competence. You don’t need to obsess over finding genius level savants, unless the startup is a serious deep tech company. SaaS products will be fine with normal developers. Set up a process so you’re iterating and learning quickly, and it will be ok.
I’d be surprised if any startup failures were due to a dev team not being absolutely cracked. It’s always something like poor sales, PMF, refusal to pivot, lack of focus, etc.
Posthog is pretty successful! But since it isn't strictly necessary, perhaps we can make this thread more meaningful by removing success from the title above.
On their homepage, they have their own logo in the section listing companies that use their products. I mean, if you dogfood it, great, but it doesn't exactly instill confidence if you have to reach for your own company to fill out the list.
I've used PostHog and it's pretty good. I don't know if I'd classify all of those as different products, you rarely want one of those without the other.
fdlaks|1 year ago
This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants and or bots that will apply to any job listing thats posted, but still this is ridiculous.
I really feel bad for the 6 people who had to endure the technical interview AND THEN were given the honor of attending the "SuperDay" which sounds like a full day of at least 5 interviews, 2 - 3 being technical, and still got rejected. Not sure what the technical interview is like at posthog, but assuming this is just an hour phone screen those 6 people still probably had more than 7 hours devoted just to interviewing at this place just to get rejected. That's not including any time spent preparing for interviews or anything else either.
There must be a better way to do interviews. Posthog is not Google, Posthog (or any other startup) does not need to hire to the same standard that Google does.
Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige, or anything else really that Google offers then sure I will jump through as many hoops as you want for the interview. Until then, hard pass.
danielscrubs|1 year ago
First, in several countries, working at Google won’t make you rich—they don’t always offer the highest salaries in the region. You’ll have a comfortable life, but you’ll still need to work for the rest of your career. Second, Google is not a remote-first company, which is a dealbreaker for some.
My (perhaps flawed) reasoning was that, in its early days, PostHog was a very small company with a great product that people genuinely enjoyed using. If you received stock options, the potential for a big financial upside seemed high. Plus, working at a small company is simply more exciting—your contributions actually make a difference.
sibeliuss|1 year ago
hiAndrewQuinn|1 year ago
Interviews are a game of asymmetric information. The job seeker has much more knowledge of what they can and cannot effectively do than the job offerer. And the job offerer has much more knowledge of what is and is not required for true success than the job seeker.
Given that, no, there really doesn't have to be a better way than just "interview a lot of people and take your best guess". If you stop taking the time to do that you will eventually be outmaneuvered by someone who does.
rbaudibert|1 year ago
j4coh|1 year ago
enraged_camel|1 year ago
Yeah, at first I thought it was some kind of parody, then I realized it's a serious article and was astonished.
NotDEA|1 year ago
You’re almost 10 times more likely to be accepted to Stanford’s undergraduate program than to ever work as a hogger
throwaway_33333|1 year ago
I've worked at many startups over the years and I've always been very involved in hiring, I call this the MDE (most desperate engineer) effect and it's something I always try to make founders, other engineers, etc... understand when the company starts to discuss hiring processes more.
The premise is simple, the difficulty of your hiring process needs to be directly corelated to the perceived future value of said company. If you are an OpenAI right now, you can have the most difficult, convoluted, time intensive hiring process in the world and the best engineers will still sit through it because they score very high in potential future value. Other companies cannot / should not have as difficult of a hiring process because you will end up selecting from a pool of people who are willing to endure anything just to get a job, get experience, get a job that pays in USD, renew their H1B visa, etc...
This doesn't mean these people are bad engineers or shouldn't be considered, but if I had a dollar for every time a founder or CTO at a startup said that this company is only hiring the best, most passionate people bar none I would be a rich man, and a lot of the people in this category just need a job to put food on the table (which seems to be exactly the kind of people the company wants to avoid at all costs funnily enough).
We had enormous success at the startups I worked at where we would talk to great engineers who worked at FFANG companies and explain the problems we wanted to work on, how we were thinking of approaching it, why it was interesting to us, where we saw the company going, and how they could help us get there as opposed to trying to squeeze them through a long tedious interview cycle. Granted these people did have previous work experience to help vet them, but again the process is something that can be adjusted depending on where the company is and what you are looking for.
prosunpraiser|1 year ago
A general rant.
andrewmutz|1 year ago
Do you really choose your employer based on their revenue? or prestige??
coolThingsFirst|1 year ago
Delusional web slop companies strike again
After some googling turns out it’s an analytics company but they behave ad they do fission.
kevmo314|1 year ago
I've seen a nontrivial number of smart engineers get bogged down in wanting to A/B test everything that they spend more time building and maintaining the experiment framework than actually shipping more product and then realizing the A/B testing was useless because they only had a few hundred data points. Data-driven decisions are definitely valuable but you also have to recognize when you have no data to drive the decisions in the first place.
Overall, I agree with a lot of the list but I've seen that trap one too many times when people take the advice too superficially.
simonw|1 year ago
- You have to make good decisions about what you're going to test
- You have to build the feature twice
- You have to establish a statistically robust tracking mechanism. Using a vendor helps here, but you still need to correctly integrate with them.
- You have to test both versions of the feature AND the tracking and test selection mechanisms really well, because bugs in any of those invalidate the test
- You have to run it in production for several weeks (or you won't get statistically significant results) - and ensure it doesn't overlap with other tests in a way that could bias the results
- You'd better be good at statistics. I've seen plenty of A/B test results presented in ways that did not feel statistically sound to me.
... and after all of that, my experience is that a LOT of the tests you run don't show a statistically significant result one way or the other - so all of that effort really didn't teach you much that was useful.
The problem is that talking people out of running an A/B test is really hard! No-one ever got fired for suggesting an A/B test - it feels like the "safe" option.
Want to do something much cheaper than that which results in a much higher level of information? Run usability tests. Recruit 3-5 testers and watch them use your new feature over screen sharing and talk through what they're doing. This is an order of magnitude cheaper than A/B testing and will probably teach you a whole lot more.
bluGill|1 year ago
For a lot of what you want to know the above will give better information than a 100% polished A/B test in production. When people see a polished product they won't give you the same type of feedback as they will for an obvious quick sketch. The UI industry has gone wrong by making A/B in production too easy, even though the above has been known for many decades.
(A/B in production isn't all bad, but it is the last step, and often not worth it)
nightpool|1 year ago
pkaler|1 year ago
Most orgs should just be shipping features. Before starting an Experiment Program teams should be brainstorming a portfolio of experiments. Just create a spreadsheet where the first column is a one-line hypothesis of the experiment. Eg. "Removing step X from the funnel will increase metric Y while reducing metric Z". And the RICE (Reach-Impact-Confidence-Estimation) score your portfolio.
If the team can't come up with a portfolio of 10s to 100s of experiments then the team should just be shipping stuff.
And then Experiment Buildout should be standardized. Have standardized XRD (Experiment Requirements Doc). Standardize Eligibility and Enrollment criteria. Which population sees this experiment? When do they see it? How do you test that bucketing is happening correctly? What events do analysts need? When do we do readouts?
That's just off the top of my head. Most orgs should just be shipping features.
abxyz|1 year ago
baxtr|1 year ago
phillipcarter|1 year ago
somekyle2|1 year ago
drewbeck|1 year ago
apsurd|1 year ago
Capturing analytics is a no brainer. however, most data in most products at most companies starting out just fundamentally does not matter. It's dangerous to get in the habit of "being data driven" because it becomes a false sense of security and paradoxically data is extremely easy to be biased with. And even with more rigor, you get too easily trapped in local optimums. Lastly, all things decay, but data and experimentation runs as is if the win is forever, until some other test beats it. It becomes exhausting to touch anything and that's seen as a virtue. it's not.
Products need vision and taste.
Chyzwar|1 year ago
22. I saw design system fail in many companies. It is very hard to get right people and budget for this to succeed. For most startups are better to pick existing UI toolkit and do some theming/tweaking.
27. I disagree, If you put Product manager as gatekeeper to users you will transform the organization into a feature factory. Engineers should be engaged with users as much as possible.
scottishbee|1 year ago
the__alchemist|1 year ago
> Trust is also built with transparency. Work in public, have discussions in the open, and document what you’re working on. This gives everyone the context they need, and eliminates the political squabbles that plague many companies.
This seems prone to feedback loops; it can go both directions. If there are political squabbles, discussion may be driven private, to avoid it getting shut down or derailed by certain people.
MrLeap|1 year ago
It takes a lot less energy to throw shit than it does to clean shit. There's infinite signals. Big egos take a lot of energy to repel and redirect to maintain it. I think it's absolutely worth it when it's possible, but yeah.
You wouldn't think so until you've done it, but it's really hard to get 6+ adults together where everyone's primary goal in that team is to make a thing. Seems like there's always one or more people who want to peck others, build fiefdoms, hold court.
gwbas1c|1 year ago
Process is important when work is handed off from one team to another team. Any company with a non-trivial product will have a non-trivial team size; and thus it'll need to standardize how people hand off work.
It doesn't have to be onerous: The best processes are simply establishing boundaries so lazy people don't throw their work over to the next person. (IE, "I won't work on a bug without steps to reproduce and an unedited tracelog that captures the failure" is a good boundary.)
cjs_ac|1 year ago
Do not start with an idea. Start with a problem, and then construct a solution. The solution is the product. The problem implies someone who has that problem: this is the customer. How much of a problem it is tells you how much they want it and how much they will pay for it. Because an idea doesn't necessarily have a problem, it results in a product that doesn't necessarily have a customer.
> As 37Signal’s Jason Fried says “You cannot validate an idea. It doesn’t exist, you have to build the thing. The market will validate it.”
Similarly, don't set out to change the world. Put your product into the world, and the world will decide whether to change as a consequence.
thesurlydev|1 year ago
bilater|1 year ago
GoToRO|1 year ago
tmarice|1 year ago
Regarding the superday controversy: my best interviewing experience was a conversational technical interview followed by a paid-either-way-the-decision-went 2 week project. I did quite a bit of competitive programming so leetcode interviews are not a dealbreaker for me, but I feel there's just too much at stake for 1-2h coding exercise, and projects allow you to showcase all of your skills, not just speedcoding.
srameshc|1 year ago
light_triad|1 year ago
This is a great point. I've seem teams apply lean startup by testing -> changing something -> testing -> changing something -> testing ...
The problem is that the changes are so small that statistically you end up testing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You need to make a significant change in your Persona, Problem, Promise, or Product to (hopefully) see promising results.
skyyler|1 year ago
Is this like a trial day where you're invited to do a day of work for free?
adamgordonbell|1 year ago
Story time. I interviewed for a job at posthog. I knew that I really loved their communication style. But I hadn't used their product and didn't know a ton about them except that their writing is fantastic.
The 'product for engineers' focus that they is cool but when I had an interview, it was clear that I wasn't a 'product for engineering' person.
When they proposed the Super Day. I was like, I'm not sure because it's awesome to get paid for a day, but it's also not an unstressful event. And I sort of said I had some more questions before we moved on to the Super Day.
And they basically just said: we don't think it's going to work out. It was actually a pretty positive experience. I think that they correctly assessed the situation pretty quickly and my hesitation was a real signal to them.
(This is my recollection - I could have the details wrong.)
But yeah, super day is a day of very structured work in the role that they setup. And its paid.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
nestoras_design|1 year ago
biglost|1 year ago
abc-1|1 year ago
light_triad|1 year ago
Sam Altman argued a startup's chance of success is “something like Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck, where Luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand”
A lot of the success in startups is not due to getting the initial idea right, but what founders do once they realize that their initial idea is wrong.
mannyv|1 year ago
If you if you don't have salespeople then you need to make a product that works and fulfills user needs. And it has to be good enough for word of mouth...which is where posthog's experience comes in.
AznHisoka|1 year ago
Now if you’ve built something big that grew in the past few years organically, there’s more to learn from that success.
ozim|1 year ago
We get serious leads only via networking of our C-levels and sales no customer cares about our landing page and leads when we cared about landing page were not serious and waste of time.
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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giancarlostoro|1 year ago
pklien|1 year ago
ungreased0675|1 year ago
I’d be surprised if any startup failures were due to a dev team not being absolutely cracked. It’s always something like poor sales, PMF, refusal to pivot, lack of focus, etc.
unknown|1 year ago
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hk1337|1 year ago
zabzonk|1 year ago
And I have to say that "Technical Content Marketer " is one of the most dubious job titles I have ever seen.
dang|1 year ago
Etheryte|1 year ago
tene80i|1 year ago
dlisboa|1 year ago
I've used PostHog and it's pretty good. I don't know if I'd classify all of those as different products, you rarely want one of those without the other.
seasluggy|1 year ago
anastasiapenova|1 year ago
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hackburg|1 year ago
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DonCalloway|11 months ago
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bleuwa3|1 year ago
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sebastianowen|11 months ago
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