#96: Go Sell & PostHog Path
September 7, 2025 – DevTools Brew #96
I’m Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery. Every week, I share the raw, often uncomfortable lessons from building and scaling a tech startup from 0 to 1 and beyond.
In today's edition:
Go Sell
→ Why building a great product isn’t enough and what selling (early, hard, and uncomfortably) teaches you that shipping never will.
PostHog Path
→ How five pivots, full honesty, and one boring idea led PostHog to $10M+ ARR and what every founder can learn from it.
Let’s dive in.
Go Sell
“You can have the finest product in the world, but if you don’t go to sell it, it’s worth nothing.” — Estée Lauder
This one hit hard.
Because I’ve lived it.
And most teams fall for the same thing:
We think product is the hard part and selling is what comes after.
But selling is the hard part.
Because selling means putting your product in the world before it’s ready.
It means facing the market not your roadmap.
And that’s what most teams avoid.
Especially when you’re a product-led, engineering-led company.
You get your first users. You get some love. You convince yourself it’ll compound on its own.
But it never does.
The biggest delusion is thinking that great product = great business.
It’s not.
Selling is not the enemy of building.
But the fastest way to build the right thing.
→ You don’t know what resonates until you try to articulate it.
→ You don’t know what’s missing until someone tells you why they won’t buy.
→ You don’t know your strongest wedge until you try ten.
→ You don’t know how valuable your product really is until you sell it.
A great product is the minimum requirement.
A business is what happens after you’ve gone out and sold it;
when nobody’s asking, nobody’s waiting, and nobody knows who you are.
That’s what selling does:
→ It forces clarity.
→ It forces focus.
→ It puts reality in your face.
And it’s the only thing that keeps your product from drifting into irrelevance.
I learned this the hard way at Qovery.
And for years, we sold only when people came to us (ie, inbound deals).
Founder-led sales. Only. No sales team.
We thought we weren’t ready for outbound.
Too early. Still fixing bugs. Still maturing.
But truth is… we waited too long!
Once we started selling proactively, everything changed.
We got punched. Rejected. Ignored.
But we also learned:
→ how to position (clearly) our value,
→ how to handle friction,
→ how to trigger urgency,
→ how to position and move when nobody’s waiting or know you.
And most importantly:
How to stay connected to what people really care about.
Not what we think they should.
A product improves by design.
A business improves by contact.
So go sell. Even if it’s uncomfortable.
Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
Because selling is not the final step.
It’s the multiplier.
PostHog Path
I’ve always had a soft spot for PostHog.
Devtools company. Self-serve DNA. Built for engineers.
Built by engineers.
And one of the few startups that shares their journey with radical honesty — the good, the bad, and the brutal.
In many ways, they’ve always felt like a sibling company to us at Qovery.
Same audience.
Same ambition to replace the status quo.
Same early intuition: you shouldn’t have to fight your infra just to understand your users.
But what I admire most is how PostHog found its clarity and the path they took to get there.
Here’s one story I keep coming back to 👇
The Pivots before the breakthrough
Before PostHog had product-market fit, they tried five different products in six months:
A CRM with predictive analytics
A 1:1 sales tool
A technical debt tracker
An engineering retention tool
A sales territory manager
All built. All shipped. All killed.
Because none of them stuck.
None of them got real usage.
None of them solved a must-have problem.
And in the words of James Hawkins, the CEO:
“We had to stop lying to ourselves.”
Then came the idea that changed everything:
→ An open-source product analytics platform.
It wasn’t shiny.
It wasn’t popular in VC circles.
But it was real. Painful. Immediate.
Teams were tired of black-box analytics tools.
They wanted control. Privacy. Developer-grade flexibility.
That’s what PostHog gave them.
And for the first time, the users stuck around.
What this teaches us
→PMF is not a feeling.
It’s not “positive feedback.”
It’s not “they said they’d pay.”
It’s usage. Retention. Pull.
→ Speed wins but only if you ship + kill fast.
Most teams half-pivot. PostHog went all in, or not at all.
→ The idea that sounds boring might be the one that scales.
Open-source analytics wasn’t trendy.
But it solved a real problem that devs were desperate to fix.
→ Listen early. Listen hard.
The founders talked to every user.
Slack groups. Private channels. Bug feedback loops.
Every insight was used to fuel the next decision.
PostHog is now north of $10M+ in ARR.
They doubled revenue. Hit profitability.
And kept their team lean and product-led.
Not by “thinking bigger”.
But by thinking clearer.
That’s what I take away the most.
A great idea doesn’t matter.
A great product doesn’t even matter.
The only thing that matters: who wants this and how fast can you find them?
That’s what James and the team figured out.
And that’s what every tech founder can learn from.
Final Thoughts
Two stories. But same lesson.
At Qovery, Go Sell is our way of forcing clarity: by facing the market before we feel ready, and learning through rejection, not refinement.
At PostHog, it was the same pattern in reverse: clarity came after five pivots, not because of vision but because they finally listened to the signal users were already giving.
What connects both?
→ You don’t find answers in your roadmap.
→ You find them in the contact zone where users live, and where excuses die.
→ The real unlock isn’t better ideas. It’s faster loops. More shots. Less ego.
A great idea doesn’t matter.
A great product doesn’t even matter.
The only thing that matters: who wants this and how fast can you find them?
That’s what every tech founder can learn from.
That’s it for me today! :)
Thanks for reading and Happy Sunday!
— Morgan
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Do you like personal lessons like this? More insights/stories from other devtool founders? Let me know, I’m always open to feedback.
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.