> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://b2-b-playbook.mintlify.site/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # PostHog: make the product usable before the public launch **Company:** PostHog · **Motion:** Developer launch · **Last reviewed:** 2026-09-06 Recruit early users; Make signup work unaided; Launch to a wider audience ## Primary record James Hawkins, PostHog co-founder, published [How we got our first 1,000 users](https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/how-we-got-our-first-1000-users?ref=b2b-playbook) 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](../playbooks/04-channels-and-distribution/product-hunt.md) for launch boundaries and [measurement](../playbooks/09-operations-pipeline-and-measurement/measurement-model.md) for separate scoreboards. *** Copyright © 2026 Ivan Xu. All rights reserved. See the [copyright and reuse terms](https://github.com/weilun88313/B2B-Playbook/blob/main/LICENSE). Canonical source: [github.com/weilun88313/B2B-Playbook](https://github.com/weilun88313/B2B-Playbook)