Insider Scoop: Our Founding Engineer's Take on PostHog 🦔🔥

The Helicone team has a suite of products that we absolutely love. This week, Stefan is sharing his favourite product PostHog, and the most counterintuitive principle he learned while working at a startup.

No BS, no affiliations. Just genuine opinions from a team of engineers and a designer.

An Intro

Stefan joined Helicone as a Founding Engineer in March 2024. Stefan has played a key role in developing key features like Experiments, Scores and uplifting the monitoring and logging experience in Helicone. Stefan’s favourite product so far is PostHog.

Why do you love PostHog?

For me, the appeal lies in the comprehensive features when it comes to product analytics, which cater to both individual developers and large teams. Plus, it’s open-source, which is really cool!

Share the backstory of how Helicone discovered PostHog and decided to use them.

Justin (CEO):

It was affordable, and a very fast growing company with a good culture. It’s also open-sourced, but mainly I like their mascot.

Scott (Cofounder):

PostHog had a great YC deal that made a lot of sense for us at the early stages of our company. We wouldn’t be where we are without having the clear product analytics understanding we get from PostHog.

How does Helicone uses PostHog day-to-day?

We use Product Analytics to monitor all events on our back-end and front-end, from auto-capturing to creating our custom events.

We also love the ability to create separate dashboards. For example, at Helicone, we created a custom dashboard for marketing purpose, and one for LLM Analytics.

The Session Replay feature is really cool! I love this feature because it helps us understand how users navigate through our product and spot any unusual cases!

Lina (Designer):

Session Replays helps us identify patterns in user behaviours, especially on the landing page when we’re optimizing for clarity and sign-ups!

How has PostHog transformed Helicone’s workflow?

PostHog has been instrumental in not only monitoring product performance but also in providing marketing insights. We track our marketing campaigns, conversions, and more all within a single dashboard. This setup allows us to easily view the intersection of product and marketing data.

It’s incredibly straightforward to trace a user’s journey, understand where they came from, and the reasons behind their engagement with Helicone.

What are your tips to get the most out of PostHog?

I think the best place to start for those with a LLM application, is to set up dashboards for your Web and Product Analytics, learn about Session Replays, and integrate with Helicone to capture your LLM queries. While the specifics might vary depending on your product or project, this setup will provide you with valuable insights from the get-go.

Who would you recommend PostHog to?

I think PostHog would be a good fit for absolutely all builders at any stage! If you want not just analytics and numbers but a complete set of tools to understand your users, PostHog is the way to go!

🌶️ What’s a hot take or a “hack” you’ve discovered that isn’t common knowledge to other devs?

If you’re building an analytics product, you can check out PostHog on Github to see tons of ideas to help you build much faster and easier, these guys know how to cook.

We have a similar tech stack as PostHog, so we do keep an eye on their updates. 👀

🌶️ What’s the most counterintuitive principle you’ve learned from being a developer at a startup?

Sometimes “good enough” is better than “perfect”. You can choose to focus on something and spend a ton of time building it, only for it to turn out irrelevant, or you can choose to make an MVP quickly and test it out.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We just launched an integration with PostHog for capturing your LLM Metrics! In PostHog, you can create a Helicone dashboard for your LLM Analytics. The process of integrating requires just a few lines of code.

Try it out and let us know what you think! Here’s the PostHog integration docs.