Momentum Dash is Building a More Centered Work Environment with PostHog and Altinity
The Opportunity
Momentum Dash is a productivity tool that empowers over two million weekly active users to improve their focus, organization, and motivation at work and home. This popular browser extension has over two million people around the world using the app to achieve their goals faster and more consistently.
The Problem
Momentum Dash needed to continuously study how users interact with its app in order to make better product and business decisions. Momentum Dash also needed to run experiments to improve outcomes such as feature engagement and conversion rate.
With Momentum Dash’s high event volume, solutions like Mixpanel and Amplitude were too cost-prohibitive. Momentum Dash had already attempted to solve the problem with data sampling and even cycling out users month-to-month for experiments, but continuously ran into problems with data integrity and longer-lived reporting. Joe Trollo, the Tech Lead/Manager, explains that Momentum Dash needed a solution that allowed them to get all data points and report them over time without incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs.
Momentum Dash was looking for something that would be economical but offered a coherent view of user behavior including detailed source data.
The Solution from PostHog
PostHog offers in-depth product analytics that users can host. PostHog puts all the data in one place without sampling or sacrificing consistency where users can see it for themselves. Joe’s favorite feature (of many) is experimentation with multivariate feature flags and multivariate A/B testing. PostHog manages experiments, shows how many participants are needed for valid results, and tracks the winners.
PostHog is open source, and the product has evolved at phenomenal speed since its inception in 2020. The company has a large community and encourages pull requests from users. Joe himself has submitted fixes to improve integration with Confluent.
A lot of the power of PostHog comes from the underlying ClickHouse data warehouse, which enables fast, economical queries on product data that PostHog collects. The PostHog team has done extensive work to use the power of ClickHouse fully including best practices like storing source data in JSON, then pulling materializing values as columns to improve performance. Momentum Dash often refers directly to the ClickHouse database to check source data as well as run more detailed queries. Having such access adds value to PostHog itself.
How Altinity Makes PostHog Even Better
Momentum Dash ingests 16 million events per day into ClickHouse to track usage, which equates to over 5 billion events each year. Momentum Dash depends on the data being fully available and well managed to guide product management. Rather than run ClickHouse themselves, Momentum Dash chose Altinity.Cloud, which provides high-performance, managed ClickHouse coupled with expert enterprise support.
As Joe notes, Altinity did a lot more than just run ClickHouse. They made sure PostHog worked with it as well. The Altinity team recommended cluster topology, helped with scaling, diagnosed and fixed issues with storage, monitored query load, and proactively worked with the PostHog team to speed up queries.
As Joe said, “Working with Altinity has been fantastic. They handled all aspects of running ClickHouse, including working with PostHog directly to boost performance. It was way more than I was expecting.”
Momentum Dash, PostHog, and Altinity together are a formidable team that is making life better for millions of users worldwide.