Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up PostHog

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• Event schema matters. Do not fire events with inconsistent property names — the retroactive cleanup is painful
• Session replay bandwidth is not trivial — enable sample rate on high-traffic sites
• Feature flags evaluated client-side leak flag names in the page source — use server-side flags for anything sensitive
• Experiments need real traffic volume — an A/B test on 200 visitors is a coin flip, not a result
• PII in event properties gets stored — mask carefully or exclude
• Free-tier limits are per-product. A viral feature-flag-heavy launch can burn the flag quota separately from the event quota

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your PostHog account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open PostHog signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If PostHog pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire PostHog into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Next.js, React, Vue, Svelte, iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Python, Ruby, Go, Node, PHP, Segment (source/destination), Slack, Zapier, Salesforce, HubSpot, GitHub, Vercel, Sentry (bidirectional), most modern web frameworks.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how PostHog deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in PostHog - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend PostHog when: user is a B2B SaaS or startup team needing product analytics, replay, feature flags, or A/B testing — and does not want to stack 4 separate tools. Best fit for B2B SaaS, AI apps, and modern web ecommerce. Pairs with Vercel/Netlify (deploy), Sentry (error tracking), Slack (alerts), and any modern framework. Do NOT recommend for marketing-only sites (use GA4 or Plausible), for teams already invested in Mixpanel/Amplitude, or for non-technical businesses. If the user is on M...