> Along our journey (/series of failed ideas), we got frustrated having to send all our user data to 3rd parties to understand our product usage. It felt wrong and it meant we'd lose a bunch of user data that would have been quite useful. So we built PostHog.
I wouldn't call PostHog a pivot, but rather focusing on something else entirely, and really solving one's own pain-points; often a well-trodden way of finding product-market fit [0].
> There were a load of features we wanted conceptually - but it was when we realized that the strategy was being open source first and foremost that we felt more excited than we ever had before. When that clicked, we knew we'd just fallen in love with this idea. We started building on January 23rd, 2020.
Given 'tis the season of FOSS projects pivoting to non-FOSS licenses; as a FOSS developer, I am interested in PostHog's pivot from "FOSS alternative to Heap / Amplitude" to "source-available" [1] instead :)
[0] https://archive.is/66opo#selection-118.161-118.162
[1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/blob/master/ee/LICENSE