What motivates me as a CEO of a startup
Money, fame, pride... hedgehogs?
Welcome to Product for Engineers, a free newsletter created by PostHog for engineers and founders who want to build successful startups.
Motivation is delicate, but important – especially in a startup.
Your motivations, whether they’re extrinsic (money, fame, influence) or intrinsic (enjoyment, satisfaction, pride), strongly influence what you value, the kind of products you build, and the outcomes you care about.
In this issue, PostHog’s CEO, James Hawkins, shares what motivates him as CEO of PostHog – please leave a comment about what motivates you, too.
This week’s theme is: Motivations
1. Building the exact place I'd want to work
I worked worked at a bunch of startups before Tim and I built PostHog. I learned and did some cool things at each, but they all had many flaws – usually through a lack of organization design.
It is a lot of fun getting things right, and this motivated me early in the company. These specifically stand out:
Writing stuff down in a handbook rather than handling everything 1:1 in meetings. So much win.
Sharing everything internally and most of it externally too. And seeing how this helps people work autonomously.
Working on something for end users. I wanted to make something that people buy rather than something that we sell.
Having a board that is focused on the long run.
Hiring people that we are excited to work with. No matter how well you manage stuff, 90% of problems can be avoided by getting the right people in the first place.
Paying everyone according to a system versus random bargaining. This cuts down churn and politics.
Dealing with customers totally transparently. For example, when we launched, none of our competitors had pricing on their pricing page. It's a lot of fun having a community weigh in on what we build.
Neither Tim (my cofounder) nor I can imagine working anywhere else.
2. Being grateful that anyone cares
In the early days, we pivoted many times, mostly without any funding. I spent most of my day trying to get anyone to talk to us about our bad ideas, and building new websites for the latest pivot. Tim built entire products every few weeks like it was nothing. All while our savings were dwindling.
The feeling when it started working was magical.
After we successfully launched PostHog on Hacker News, we were flooded with people to talk to. Companies were getting real value out of the product. Since we grew a lot, we more or less went from no code existing, through Seed / Series A and B within 12 months.
3. Pride in building a business that does stuff properly
After that launch, we had a lot of hype, but we hadn't focused on revenue yet.
In the summer of 2021, we got a lot of requests for a paid product (extra features or people wanting us to host it for them). At the same time, lots of investors were interested and my daughter was very ill. Since I had to look after her, we felt we had to choose either revenue or fundraising.
We picked revenue.
By the summer of 2022, it meant the business was real. We got to default alive, with conservative assumptions. Revenue was growing very quickly. Our goal is $100M ARR by 2026 and we're on track. We got different and helpful product feedback, which we acted on. Our open source and free user growth sped up too as an indirect result.
We've been more mindful of spend for the last year, despite all of our fastest growth coming in this time, including revenue. We're getting leaner and fitter over time.
Something else changed too. For me, I felt a new wave of confidence – because I know that PostHog is now in our control, versus that of a VC.
It is incredibly motivating to reach this point. I'm getting more and more proud of what we're working on. Being lean has forced us to prioritize.
We haven't just prioritized what to build, but – more importantly – the people we hired. The bar has gone up. It's very hard to get hired here.
4. Beating other companies (using our values)
When I was (a lot) younger, all I cared about was cycling. I did a lot of time trialling, where someone sets off every minute to race around the course as fast as possible.
The moment you see another rider ahead of you, it suddenly gets easy and you magically roar past them… every time.
Since we started, there have always been companies I've wanted to beat. So much. Both those one step and many years ahead of us.
Why does this motivate me? Because the companies we want to beat represent the opposite of what we want to do. Companies we want to beat:
are closed source.
aren't transparent with customers.
have incredibly large teams that don't ship much stuff.
are sales-led.
provide products that aren't extensible.
have terrible documentation.
are messy internally.
have a bland corporate vibe.
I want to show to the world that you can beat the biggest companies, specifically by doing right by our users and our team.
Doing a good job by not doing the list above has led to a strong brand and has made us realize we should keep being ourselves.
It has often meant short-term pain for long-term gain. And we're going to keep it that way.
🤔 More good reads
Apple Demos vs. Amazon Memos – Trung Phan
”Jeff Bezos instilled Amazon with a writing culture while Steve Jobs and Apple designed products through product demos. These approaches are very different. But they have a key similarity: both forced ideas from the brain into the real world.”
10 Tips to Make Your VCs Calmer, Happier – Jason M. Lemkin
”Your VCs aren’t the boss. They should work for you. You don’t need to do what they say, or have pre-pre-board meetings if you don’t want to… many, if not most, founders I work with make life harder by not doing easy things to “manage up” a bit.”
Why we test in production (and you should to) – Ian Vanagas
At PostHog, we test in production. There are many misconceptions about doing this. Ian’s guide covers what it is, why we do it, and how to do it well.
Five Lessons from Scaling Pinterest – Sarah Tavel
”Your loudest users don’t represent all your users, and they definitely don’t represent your future users. They are your power users, your users who best understand your product the way it is now.”
Love this. Been using Posthog for a good while and didn't know about all the pivots (from the linked article). The focus on customer and product really shows.