corywatilo

i have spent nearly half my life listening to the voice of John C. Dvorak on a nightly basis as i went to bed.

literally since i was in college – around 2008 – i started listening to the No Agenda Show. i'd play the podcast in one ear with the other on my pillow with a 30-minute sleep timer and play it over several nights until the next episode came out.

my outlook, my ideology, my perspective on life was partly formed by this man's words.

thanks for everything, John.

I'll consider a refresh button just for you. Thanks for the kind words.

Hi, OP here. I was employee #13 at PostHog, joining as a designer (who now moonlights as a design engineer). I'm responsible for the website. I've been part of crafting the brand for 4.5 years – joined when the company just started monetizing.

There are only two of us who work on the website, myself and a front end engineer. (He was hired to work on the website and doesn't directly work in the product.)

We've spent roughly half of the last six months on this site. Other than our incredible graphic designer, no other resources were brought in.

A lot of our time is spent on brand-related side quests – they're consistently a net positive for the brand. You can see some examples under "Some things we've shipped" at https://posthog.com/teams/brand

This was a passion project of mine. I'm the one who ultimately chose to spend time I did on it. I think what we built is really cool, and I hope it serves as inspiration for other designers to think outside the box when it comes to solving their unique challenges.

Every company operates differently. Yes, many companies do have employees with too much time on their hands. Others do waste a lot of money in advertising. And a lot of companies are stagnating.

But I can assure you, PostHog is none of those.

how do i learn more?

lol wow nice catch

We emailed back and forth several times. CEO was on the thread, was aware of my concerns, chose not to do anything. The result of the back-and-forth was the proposal I shared in the post.

I'm allergic to sales calls. =] Plus, when has jumping on a "quick call with sales"[1] ever resulted in paying less money?

[1] posthog.com/sales

We (at PostHog) have a very unique implementation of Inkeep in our community forums[1], and it's been a lot of fun working on a custom solution with the Inkeep team.

Our ultimate goal was to make our experience explicitly not feel like you're talking to AI.

So rather than trying to intercept questions from being posted to our forums, we trigger Inkeep _after_ a question is posted. If we're able to find an answer with a high degree of confidence, our "AI user" (Max) will show an answer within about 30 seconds.

The OP can then provide feedback that we're using to train further answers.

If the answer is marked as helpful, we display the answer publicly (and disclaim it as an AI response)[2]. If the answer is marked as _unhelpful_, the answer only shows to the OP and we review the feedback to figure out how we can improve (ie: do our docs need to be improved so Inkeep has better source material?).

It's been fun getting creative with the Inkeep team on a solution that worked for our specific use case. I'm planning on rolling out Inkeep more broadly in other areas of our site as we verify that our highly confident answers are genuinely useful to our users.

IMO Inkeep has been the first AI solution that hasn't sucked – and that's high praise coming from me!

[1] posthog.com/community [2] https://posthog.com/questions/autocapture-event-bubbling

Not seeing the first two but feel free to send screenshots to <firstname>@posthog and I'd be happy to take a look.

As for cookie banners, that's something we can both agree on. ;)

Alternate title: "How to scare an engineer in three words"

Same has happened here with our 2-year old, except we didn't get to it in time and have had the fire department show up on more than one occasion before we figured out what was happening.

There were also a handful of times we could hear a voice coming through the wife's phone where we narrowly avoided a few more visits.

This was all before we discovered how she actually calling 911. It's shocking to me Google didn't make more of a deal about this new "feature" when they rolled it out.

This definitely should have been opt-IN, not opt-out. Sure smells like a classic example of tech PMs making idealistic decisions that affect people in the real world without thinking through all of the consequences.

Will take a look, thanks for the heads up!

This is really well done. Paragraph view really helps to visualize it.

CSS Font Stack [1] used to be the place for this, but that site hasn't changed in decades.

The one piece missing for me is the percentage adoption by platform (like in the above referenced site). Regardless, this is still replacing CSS Font Stack for me.

The irony is that they were both created by people named Dan.

[1] https://www.cssfontstack.com

Which logo?

Some of it was sourced from posthog.com

Try to solve user problems? (Maybe they were, just not ours.)

IIRC they had recently added a user cap on self-serve customers which was new and led to this. The new pricing deck they sent was "It will be $3,500/mo, but until the end of the month, you can get it for only $2,500!" (Pricing approx.)

$2,500/mo to host a static site is ludicrous.

Netlify lost my trust a year ago when they tried to increase our company's pricing more than 10x. (We were paying ~$200/mo, then they tried to force us into a $2,500+ plan because we were 1 seat over their self-serve threshold.)

From my perspective, they were adding features just to find ways to grow revenue. (I get it, you don't have a huge moat by simply hosting static sites.) But their features seemed very out of touch with our needs, and I can't imagine we were the only ones.

As a Gatsby user on a large-scale website, I'm disappointed to see this acquisition because I'll now constantly be worried they'll try to pull a similar stunt with Gatsby.

Since then, I've been using Next.js + Vercel on side projects, and now with this acquisition, I don't see that changing going forward.

Trust and loyalty is everything in the developer community. It's hard to gain and easy to break. Hopefully other developer-focused alternatives will keep this first and foremost in their head so we don't end up in this situation with other platforms down the road.

Here's something I'm just starting on:

Find your dream RV. http://rvenvy.com

With more people than ever working remotely, many are interested in ending their lease and exploring America – even moreso now that Starlink is widely available.

At this point, it's a directory site, but I aim for this to be the Wikipedia of RVs.

But if you don't know RVs, it can be daunting to figure out what you need. That's why I also created a Bubble app (as a prototype) that offers a wizard to help you find exactly what you want. It asks a series of questions in a TurboTax-style wizard:

https://concierge.rvenvy.com

Right now results are shared manually, but eventually this will be automated.

Reminds me of isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com for some reason...

Upwork just doesn't care.

I was on the receiving end of one of these recently. I was looking for US-based contractor, found someone whose profile looked legit, and reached out. In the phrasing I got back via email, I knew this wasn't the native English speaker I was expecting.

Here's my thread: https://twitter.com/watilo/status/1561795264888901633

If PostHog sounds cool but you're a Product Designer and not an SRE, great news, we're looking for you too! See link above.

You gave me my start in 2009 when you let me build Posterous themes. That experience introduced me into the world of startups, pushed me to become better at code, helped me get my start in design, and ultimately changed my life forever.

I can't thank you enough for giving a nobody like me a shot, and I can't wait to passively watch as you continue to do this for countless others!

"which created confusion about which companies Brex would still serve."

Created confusion?? Brex literally sent out an email telling me my account was being closed. But yeah okay, let's call it "confusion". This is a non-admission of guilt.

Don't put it on your customers failure to understand what you mean when this is literally what you sent:

https://twitter.com/watilo/status/1537513616324415492

Italy is the 4th in a string of recent decisions across the EU.

(We're tracking these cases on isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com along with details for each.)

Note that it's not illegal to use GA entirely, just illegal to use in its default state which transmits PII to the US.