Primary record
James Hawkins, PostHog co-founder, published How we got our first 1,000 users on 2024-06-20, looking back at the company’s early months.What the company reported
The team first recruited users through people they knew, introductions, groups, and LinkedIn. Its launch gate was practical: people could sign up without help, and strangers found the product useful. Hawkins reports 300 deployments within a couple of days of launching on Hacker News, five weeks after starting. He also reports about $2,000 of Twitter promotion alongside the launch and says the repository reached GitHub Trending.Evidence limit
This is a founder’s retrospective. Deployments are not paying customers or stars. The article does not isolate paid promotion from launch effects or establish a repeatable Trending formula.Our interpretation and a test
For a knowledge library, ask five unfamiliar readers to complete one task unaided. Record where they get stuck and the artifact they produce. Fix those failures before a broad launch. Track completed tasks, repository visitors, and stars separately. Evaluate a public launch only when the demonstration is useful to that venue’s audience. Continue with Product Hunt for launch boundaries and measurement for separate scoreboards.Copyright © 2026 Ivan Xu. All rights reserved. See the copyright and reuse terms. Canonical source: github.com/weilun88313/B2B-Playbook