by james_impliu on 4/28/22, 3:06 PM with 5 comments
by james_impliu on 4/28/22, 3:09 PM
Thanks HN: I'm James - I'm a cofounder of PostHog (popular open source project), which was born on HackerNews in 2020
Along the way, we created a Slack group that quickly grew to a couple of thousand users - mostly needing support with the product. At the same time, we saw signs that docs are critical. For example, people who searched our docs are 8x as likely to succeed with our product.
Then we asked ourselves - why not make it possible to ask questions, right in our docs?
Out of 100s of thousands of visitors, only a small percentage make it into Slack (and it'd be the same if we used Discord), so can we serve questions and answers in the context of what they're trying to do. As a bonus, this would also make everything searchable.
Then we asked ourselves - why not also make this open source for anyone to use?
This means that far more people can benefit, and it'll generate word of mouth growth about who we are - hopefully bringing some extra customers in the long run. Simple as that. We may charge if we get lots of usage and once the product is more mature for the cloud version. If it's not popular, we're going to be using and extending it ourselves anyway :)