I went through PostHog's onboarding so you don't have to — here's what I found
I've been researching the analytics space for a product I'm building and decided to go through PostHog's full onboarding as a regular user — not a developer, just someone who wants to know which features their users actually use.
Here's what happened:
Step 1 — Pick a data region. US or EU only. Already excluding most of the world.
Step 4 — Install the SDK. A terminal command appears. Most non-technical PMs close the tab here.
Step 8 — Pick a pricing plan. Still haven't seen a single insight.
Step 9 — Finally reach the dashboard. It's completely empty.
9 steps. Zero answers. And this is the tool thousands of SaaS teams rely on to understand their users.
The gap between "here's the data" and "here's what to do" is where every analytics tool leaves you. That's the problem I'm building Featly to solve — plain English feature usage intelligence, one line of code, no setup maze.
Has anyone else experienced this? How do you currently track which features your users actually use?
One line of code still leads to an empty dashboard until events accumulate. Let a user open a demo workspace or upload sample events and reach the first feature decision before installing anything. The activation event should be “found a decision worth making,” not “installed the snippet.” Otherwise shorter onboarding preserves the same delay to value.
That's a great point. Looking back, I think the real "aha" moment shouldn't be installing the SDK—it should be seeing value as quickly as possible. Since writing this, that's become one of the core ideas behind Featly. I want teams to reach their first useful insight with as little friction as possible
Your walkthrough highlights onboarding friction, but I'd also separate friction from the core value proposition. Some users will tolerate a longer setup if they believe the insights are worth it. Understanding which problem people are actually rejecting can make the positioning much sharper.
That's a really sharp distinction — and you're right that friction and value are separate problems. What we're finding from talking to founders is that for small teams it's actually both: the setup cost is too high relative to the clarity of insight they get out. PostHog is powerful but it assumes you already know what questions to ask. Featly's bet is that most small teams don't need more data — they need clearer answers to one specific question: which features are my users actually using?
I'm glad it resonated.
Reading your reply gave me one thought about what happens once the product starts answering questions instead of exposing data. I'd rather explain it in the context of Featly than try to condense it into a few comments.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
Appreciate the thought — happy to keep the conversation here for now."
Happy to.
One thing I'd keep watching is whether users eventually stop asking questions altogether.
If Featly consistently answers the questions they would have asked, the product stops feeling like analytics software and starts feeling like part of the decision-making process. That's a very different kind of value.
That's exactly the direction we're building toward — the goal isn't to give teams more data to look at, it's to get to a point where the product just tells you what to do next without being asked. Analytics as a background process, decisions as the foreground. Really appreciate the framing — that's going into our product thinking.
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