Story
James started as a developer, then used to run a multi-million dollar monthly online marketing budget. Tim ran R&D, has deep development experience, and used to work with James. Tim can build stuff fast.
James and Tim decided to start a startup, so put together an initial product focused on technical debt. In doing this, they wanted a way to understand who was using the product, which parts of the product were being used, and to be able to understand where all these individual users came from in the first place. This would help improve retention and it’d reduce inefficient marketing spend.
James got frustrated at having to repeatedly add track(‘event’) to every element, especially when the product and funnel was changing so frequently.
Tim felt it was wrong to send so much personally-identifiable event data to third parties, yet knew it was necessary to grow the business.
In the process of building their own product’s tracking system, James and Tim fell in love with the concept of self-hosted product analytics, that you could deploy in one line, to capture every event automatically. They moved to San Francisco, raised some money, were joined by Aaron – to help run our marketing – and PostHog was born.
Why the name?
The ‘Post’ in PostHog comes from the concept of ex post facto laws – laws that are applied retroactively. The parallel is by auto-capturing event data, we can help you draw meanings after your users are long gone.
‘Hog’ comes from hedgehogs. Not only is the collective noun an array (and we’re the most developer-focussed product analytics provider), but they’re friendly whilst being able to protect what matters. In our case, this represents open sourcing parts of our platform and providing our users with control over their user data.