How PostHog got its users

COPYABLEEditorial SEOstartupb2bno ads

They publish everything, including strategy and salaries. The open handbook ranks and doubles as culture proof.

Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.

Can you run this?

COPYABLE

You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.

Your time

12 to 18 months

Your money

Very little

First signal

6 months

Upside

A repo that keeps recruiting for you without spend, and self-hosters who convert to Cloud later
A search surface your users build for you: more indexed community pages than your own team could write

Price of entry

Engineers writing the content, not marketers, with a published weekly floor you hold for years
Tolerance for flying blind on attribution: signups will not tell you which of these steps brought them

Editorial SEO in 2026

The channel most damaged by AI answers. It still works if you bring data or an opinion, not a summary.

6 steps, in the order they ran them.

1
Hand-recruit your first users from your own network and cold DMs, and onboard each one personally over Slack or WhatsApp.
done whenEvery early user has a DM thread with you, and you know each of them by name.
2
Make the repo public, ask your early users to star it on launch day, and put paid promotion behind that launch.
done whenStars keep arriving from people you never messaged.
3
Post a Launch HN thread under the founder's own name, framed as the open-source product analytics tool.
done whenStrangers install and self-host it off the thread without ever talking to you.
4
Ship a hosted Cloud version after the HN thread so the people who will not run servers can sign up.
done whenPeople who refused to run a server are now signing up on the hosted plan.
5
Start SEO late, not at launch: put engineers on the writing, hold a weekly publishing floor, ship competitor-alternative pages.
done whenPosts ship every week without you chasing anyone, and each competitor you name has its own live page.
6
Shut down the public Slack and move all Q&A to a forum on your own domain so user answers get indexed.
done whenSearch traffic lands on pages your users wrote, not pages your team wrote.

read from posthog.com, live

“PostHog: We make your product self-driving”

from $250/mofree tier~16k public pagesPostHog

In your chat

Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.

In your editor

The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.

curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md

Growth documented publicly in their open handbook

Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.