▲ Community Session: Ship and validate faster with PostHog + v0

Hello everyone. Um, welcome to the Versel community session for this week. Um, we're so excited to have you here. Um, it's really nice to do these live sessions because I feel like I haven't done them in a while. So, hi everyone. Um, if this is your first time um, in one of our community sessions, um, I'm Pauline Narvas from the community team here at Versal. Um, you may have seen me around the community spaces on our own community platform. Or maybe on X or LinkedIn, um, answering questions and engaging with the community to really understand what you guys are all building on Versal. So, this is always an amazing opportunity to um, connect with our community, our customers, and our users live. Um, cool. It's awesome to see so many of you already here. I see a good evening from Adam in the chat. Hello, hello, hello. Um, so drop a message in the chat and let us know where you're tuning in from today. Um, if you're watching this on X or on YouTube or LinkedIn and you want to join the chat live, head over to community.versal.comlive, um, you should find this session right at the top and drop in a a comment in the chat. Um so today's session I'm really excited whenever we have these um versell marketplace integration sessions um because it's really cool to see what you can build on top of u versel using our integrations. Um so today we're talking with post hog and if you haven't come across them before the quick version is post hog is an open-source product analytics platform. You could think of it as a feature flags, a slashb testing, event tracking, and basically all of the tools you need to help you understand what's actually happening when people use your product. Um, what makes today's session super exciting is that Post Hog now integrates directly with VZero. Um, that means that you can go from an idea to a live experiment without ever having to leave your builder. So it's no more of the ship it and then figure out analytics later. You can set up the feature flags, run tests, and really track those custom events as part of the build itself. Um, so I will stop yapping, but hey everyone, I can see uh loads of you joining the chat here. Um, nice. Tell us where you're tuning in from, folks. Um, cool. So without further ado, I would love to welcome our guest, Brooker from Posthog. Hey Brooker. Hi. Happy to be here. Um, yep. So like Pauline said, my name is Brooker. I'm a product engineer on the growth team. Um, and to get started, I'll tell you a little bit about what Post Hog offers, why you would want to use uh something like Post Hog in Vzero, and then we'll go through a few use cases in Ver in uh Verscell and Vzero. Um, I'll do a live demo. So, we'll we'll um actually implement some of the use cases. So the the two that I want to cover in particular, well I guess I'll get started on what Post Hog is, why you would be interested in it as a user of Vzero and Verscell. Um so you know you used Vzero, you built the coolest app ever. Uh you deployed it, you want to see how it's working. Um how do you figure that out? How do you understand how people are using your app? What they like about it, what they don't like about it? How do you understand um when something goes wrong? So, a lot of times you deploy an app and you know it works great in the preview mode. Maybe you uh ran some tests on it yourself. Um but when it's running in production, it runs into some issues that you didn't foresee. uh that's when an exception might get might be thrown and it would be helpful for you to have visibility into um into that um and especially bring that visibility and context into v 0ero into the agent so the agent can understand everything that's going on in production and fix the issue for you um without you needing to run around gathering the context in in different um you know whether it's your logging system, your error system um or you reproducing it yourself and copy pasting out of Chrome DevTools. Uh, not that I've ever had to do that before. Um, we've all done that, I think. Yes. Yeah. Um, so, so that's one use case I want to show off is error handling. And then, um, the other is, uh, feature flags and AB testing. So, um, you know, I, I've actually really enjoyed this, uh, method of developing. So, you know, you're you're working with your team. you're talking about a feature that you want to add and maybe you have a different opinion than your teammate about how you want to implement this feature. So, um you know, I want to do it this way, they want to do it that way. Um one great way to resolve that is just do both and then test them in production and see what is giving you better results. So, um we're going to also go through that. So, without further ado, let me share my screen um and I'm going to take you through the entire process end to end. So, a little bit of it is pre-done on this account. So, I'm just going to switch um I'm going to switch to um an account where I don't have Post Hog installed yet. And um if you could let me know when when my screen is Okay, screen is visible. Brooker, let's go. Right. Okay. So, we're in Versell. Um we're going to go into the integrations and we're going to search for Postto. And I don't know why it says Oh, browse marketplace. So, we're going to browse marketplace. We're going to search for Post Hog. and select Post Hog here and click install. This is going to ask me if I want to create a new account or link to an existing. So, if you already have a Post Hog account, you can link them. Um, and what this is going to do for me is, uh, and we'll just install it here. So, um, it's going to Let me just Sorry, I can't click and talk at the same time. Why do I have to enter a billing address? Okay, I'm gonna So, you'll you'll fill out this form. Hit continue. This will um actually sync your uh let me show you what it will do. It will sync um your environment variables so that um if I go to settings or well go to the overview. Oh, I thought I had this installed already. Um let's do this real quick. So, we're going to install it for a project. So, I'm picking which project I want to install it. Hit continue. Um great. This is going. So, I picked the project. Let's see. Sorry, I thought I had one on here. Oh, I know what it is. I just have the wrong account up here. I think I'm on this one. This is the best, by the way. Like debugging and going through the steps live. This is great. [laughter] Yeah. Um, okay. Yeah. So, I have it connected here. Um, so what I wanted to show off the really cool thing about this integration is you don't have to manage the environment variables yourself. Um, so if you have experience with that, it's not very fun, especially when you have to rotate your keys, which is a really good idea. Um, so Versell actually the Verscell integration with Postto will manage all that for you. So all you have to do is kind of click through the installation process which I just showed. It also handles billing, which we have a really generous free tier. So, uh hopefully you won't have to deal with that at first until your product takes off and then uh it'll be the least of your worries. Um but um yeah, so this will sync your environment variables. The main things we need here, the Post Hog host is I'm not going to show these off because uh I don't want to get flack for it, but the host is um just a URL. So that's just going to be um like us. postthog.com. This Postthog key is the important part and that's going to tell Postthog that's going to identify your project with Post Hog. So, um when your application is running in production and um you know errors and usage and feature flags are being reported back to Post Hog, this key is what's going to identify your product with um a Post Hog project. So, um, that's really useful to have that kind of automatically set up for you in here. Um, and, uh, are any any questions on like the Verscell side? It's pretty simple. I kind of handwaved and I also ran into some issues, so sorry about that. But basically, you install it, link it to the project, the Verscell project that you want to use it in. Um, and then you're off to the races. There's also, you know, we have some getting started guides here. You can see your feature flags in here if you have them set up. I don't have any in this one yet, but we will in a minute. Um, yeah, this is this is great. I was gonna say there's no questions right now, which I think shows that it's very it's quite seamless. I did ask in the chat, has anyone tried this integration before. Um, so if you have, definitely let us know and ask questions as we go. Feel free to to yeah interrupt. Um, so let's get to a demo now. So I have an app running. I built a little game. It's called Hog Hop. Um, and so I have a little post hog here. I got some bugs running around and I'm trying to collect um data points. So Max is jumping around collecting data points. Um, I have a bug. So when I collect certain data points, it's just frozen. So I can't do anything now. Um, I ran into this in production and I need help figuring out what's going on. So I could, like I said before, I could pop open DevTools. I could um you know uh look into like the Verscell logs to try to find errors. Um but I'm gonna show you how you don't have to do any of that. And in V0ero you can um you can gather all the context you need about the error and fix it right in there. So first I'll show you how we add the MCP. So, in the bottom left of your um of your chat in V 0, there's this little plus button, and it has um a spot for MCPS, and you can just click add MCP. And then Post Hog is set up as kind of a preset MCP. So, I already have it connected for this, so I'm not going to disconnect it, but you're just going to click the plus button, and then it'll ask you to log in with your Post Hog account. Um, one thing I didn't show off was when you um when you create this integration with Post Hog and Verscell, you get this open and Post Hog button and that's going to log me into Post Hog. Um, so I don't have to manage um like credentials or anything like that. Um, so I'm logged in here and then and then over in V 0 when I want to connect the MCP, um, I'll just click the click to authenticate and it will open up a post hog tab um, to authenticate the MCP. I just realized I didn't define MCP and I'm so sorry. So MCP model context protocol, it's basically a way to gather information to give the agent, the vzero agent, the ability to gather information or kind of call functions. um that are connected to this account. So um so in this case we're saying hey vzero if you need to ask any questions or manage things in Post Hog and this is um it's a very fully featured product the MCP of Post Hog. So you can do quite a lot in there. I'll actually show we have a doc um post docs model contact protocol. This shows you kind of all the things you can do. Don't get too overwhelmed with this list. This is all loaded into the agent. So, you could actually ask like, "What can I do with the post hog MCP?" Um, and it'll tell you. And just make sure I have this uh little toggle toggled on here. Um, and um, yeah. So, so what I wanted to show off here is um, again, when I try to collect this third data point, um, I'm hitting a bug. It just freezes. So I'm going to describe that. Yeah. And here. So it told me all these things I can do with Posttom MCP. Um so I'm going to describe that to the agent. So I'm going to say when I collect uh data points with max sometimes it freezes. Can you find the bug using the post hog MCP errors and fix it for me? Um, and while it's doing that, I'm just going to kind of show off the Posttog dashboard. So, um, when I'm in Postto here, I can go to, um, apps and then error tracking. And like I said, Postto does a lot of things. So there are quite a quite a lot of features you can explore here. We're just kind of focusing in on a couple just to give you an idea of like tangibly what you can do. Um so if you if you are more technically minded and want to see what's actually going on with these errors um you can open this and um and see you know you could like click into the error and see like a stack trace. You can see how many times you're seeing it. Um, and what else can you see? Similar issues. Um, one actually, let's see if this is still working. Oh, it fixed it. Okay, I'll show you another thing next time. We have to wait for the agent. Um, so this says that it fixed it. Um, let me see if I can deploy or we can test it in the preview. Let's just do that. Um, all right. So, I'm going to jump around, collect. Oh, it's working. Sweet. Um, so it's that easy. So I had a bug. I told it kind of what I saw happening. You could even if you don't have that much information about how to reproduce it, you could give it less information, just tell it to look for errors. So I could say, you know, are there are there other errors in the post hog MCP we should fix? I'll say from today just so we're not getting too historical here. Um, the other thing I wanted to show off is if I go to um, session replay is a pretty cool feature. So, I can actually see Oh, and it doesn't look that great here. Uh, that's interesting. Okay, we're going to skip that, but I'm going to look into this. Um, typically you'd be able to actually see what people are doing. I think probably because of the technology we're using on this game, um the recording is getting messed up. Um but probably in um different types of apps or definitely in other types of apps. I've never seen this for any other app. So um you can see kind of how people are using your app and what they're um what they might be running into. and just seeing that that live video of what they're doing uh can really help contextualize um and it just gives you so much more information than trying to look at like activity or events or things like that um or logs. So, all right. So, we have a couple other errors and this is something I I also want to stress like you as the builder might not know all the things people are running into in production. They might not be reporting it to you. you might not have run into it yourself. And so having visibility um into all the errors can be super helpful for you. So um in this case, we have a couple other errors that were being run or that we're running into. Um oh, it looks like they were both fixed. So um cool. Any questions on that? And I want to move on to feature flags here. There's no questions in the chat for now, but there are comments. So, um, someone in the chat has said they have a lot of tools in one place, an extremely generous free tier and an amazing DX in their platform, which is always great to hear. [laughter] Um, I guess a question I had actually like I'm sure you'll probably touch on it in this next uh section, but beyond the errors, what are a couple of like other high value things uh the Post Hogs MCP can do for vzero users that you think people overlook? Yeah. So in my mind, feature flags and experiments is one of the the most beneficial things to that I think there are a lot of teams, a lot of applications are not using them that should be. Um so I'll show that off real quick. Yes, absolutely. Perfect segue. Yeah. So let's add um so in this case I have this game. I don't have a way right now to kill the bugs. So, this one in particular, there's this bug like going back and forth on this little platform, and I'm having a really hard time getting that data point. Um, and my users are too. So, I want to build um I want to build some extra functionality. So, let's build uh like give my hedgehog the ability to shoot lasers out of its eyeballs. Um, but I want to test this against a a different um piece of functionality. So, um, trying to think lasers. I guess we could do kind of the classic like Mario. Um, also, well, let's start out with, um, build a multi-variant feature flag with lasers as one variant and the ability to jump on the bugs to kill the bugs as another. Um, and then so this will so the what I want to show off here is a couple things. So the MCP is very powerful. So you can use the MCP um for most things that you would use the dashboard for. So you can do this in the dashboard. I'll show you. Um, if we go to um apps and then um let's just say feature flag. You could also, most things you can do in the MCP, you can do in the chat here as well. So, if you use um I'll just open a new tab here. And oh, there's no way to chat in the tab. Oops, I lost it. Um, so open a new chat. Here we go. Um, I could kind of give this a similar prompt. The only difference is this chat is not going to have the ability to update my Vzero code, obviously. Um, oh, I had to accept. But I could still use it to manage the feature flags or in here I can create a feature flag. Um, you know, using and it should be creating it right now. Here we go. Experiment create. Um, I could create it through the UI. I'm showing off how to do that via the Vzero agent using the MCP because um I find it I find that the more I can do in my agent in like a Vzero um the better. I don't want to have to spend my time kind of clicking around learning a new UI even though the dashboard is super cool and I love the you know the the interface here um I'd rather spend more time just in in v0ero building. So um cool. So it set up this experiment and we set up some metrics. So this is uh kind of one of the keys for experiment or the the key for the experiment is like what is your hypothesis you're trying to test? Vzero went ahead and kind of made up a hypothesis for us. So that's kind of cool. Um I might want to read this and kind of um update that. So this is saying testing which one leads to better game completion rates. That's cool. Maybe my goal is game completion rates, but maybe my goal is just like time spent playing the game. Um, I think game completion rate kind of makes sense. So, um, so it set that as the primary metric. So, you're you're going to first come up with a hypothesis. What am I testing? In this case, I'm testing is Stomp more engaging or is laser more engaging? Um, and then we're going to set up primary metrics. And then there's there's also this concept of secondary metrics which I think are super important. So um primary metrics are going to be the main goals that you want to achieve. But with any feature that you add or change that you make there might be kind of secondary effects to that. So in this case like maybe they're killing more or less bugs per session. Like maybe they're completing the game at a higher rate but killing less bugs. Probably unlikely. Um or you know the deaths per session is another thing to look at. So, um, anytime you're setting up an experiment, it's important to think about like what's my goal and then what are the the things that are that this might be impacting that maybe aren't kind of the primary goal, but I want to be aware of as I'm making that decision. Um, quick question here, Brooker. Um, so if someone like accidentally sets the wrong goal metric at first, how easy is it in post hog to adjust that like experiment without losing everything on v 0ero I guess? Yeah. So um so you could do it either via the MCP again or the chat or in the UI here. So it's uh there's this little pencil icon next to the metric. Um, so you just click that and then, you know, let's say you want to change it from game completed to like time spent in the app or something like that. You would click in here, um, and and find an event or maybe, you know, maybe it's like we decided we actually want to check like if they're leaving at a higher rate. Um, so I could change it to page leave and then in this case I'm going to have the goal of that be to decrease. So I want people to leave the page at a lower rate. Um that's so it's as easy as that. You can also use the like I said the MCP to do that which I find much much easier personally but um nice. It's good to see both both ways. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. And and it'll it'll recalculate that some sometimes what I run into is like I might run an experiment. I'm seeing the results and I and that kind of helps me realize I have another question that I want to ask. like you said, I want to update the metrics that I'm tracking. There are times where maybe I don't have an event or a way of tracking that yet. Um, so that's another place where the MCP can be really helpful. Um, you can say something like add an event. I'm trying to think of a good example like um I don't know, maybe jumps. I could add like add an event for every time the hedgehog jumps. Um, in that case, you would only have those events probably like depending on what it is that you're tracking. For most things like that, you might only have that tracked from when from the time that you add it to your app. Um, and then in that case, you can kind of change the duration of your experiment to start from a certain time. Um, you could also target Oh, sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. Um but and if you if you do change that mid experiment, do you is there like a recommended best practice on uh should you restart the the test or is it safe to just keep collecting data in the kind of same experiment if that makes sense? Yeah, that's a good question. As as long as you are kind of aware of the different changes that might be impacting what you're doing, I don't see a problem with just keeping the same experiment going. um there might be a scenario where like there are other changes happening at the same time that could be impacting your experiments. So you want to be really aware of like all the different tests that you're running and kind of how they could be impacting each other. That's why I I feel like generally if anything like in this case we did a multivariant um where I have you know stomp and laser. I guess it just set this laser to the control, but um I might want a control that's like no um you know, no no weapon. Um it can be helpful to group all of those into one experiment so that you're not running into issues where like different experiments are competing with each other, if that makes sense. Um yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Um and let's see where we're Oh, I didn't add that to the queue. Okay, so it's done. So, we got laser eyes. Let's see what happens if we use the app now. Okay, cool. I have a laser. Ah, but it's not killing the guys. That's lame. So, anyway, so um and you know, you might run into this uh as well if I didn't I didn't effectively prompt V0. So, we're not going to blame Vzero for that, but I just said shoot lasers out of its eyeballs, but I didn't say kill the bugs with the laser. So, um that you could also target different users. So I could say like um target my user for the stomp feature uh for example and then we'll see if it can find who my user is. So um this is kind of pushing the agent and the MCP to the limit a little bit but the MCP does have the capability of like finding a user um and then setting the variant of the experiment for that user. Um, and you can target different cohorts for different features. So if you want to say like, you know, everybody in Australia gets laser eyes, uh, you could also do that. Um, and yeah, I think we're running. Are we running close to the end of time? I forget how long. Yes, we are. I actually just checked that, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um, I can kind of keep this running, but if you have any other like questions or um, anything that I didn't cover that would be interesting, love. Yeah. Yeah. Another question that's come in is, you know, for the VZ users that are new to the experimentation, do you have like a checklist or something that people can follow to avoid setting up like a in quotes bad or maybe misleading experiment? Yeah, that's um, I'm not 100% sure. I know we have guides. I don't want to try to find it here live, but um I could definitely follow up with a guide. Um and we could attach to the notes. Yeah, we can definitely attach it to our resources section in this in this chat. So, yeah, 100%. Yeah. And and then and you could kind of go through the AI. I I would encourage people to, you know, ask the chat um go through the UI. There's a lot of helpful like I like I mentioned the hypothesis. You know, you didn't see that in the v 0ero. So, it could help to pop open the UI and kind of see what else is here that you could play around with. Um, or even just asking v0ero, you know, like what what kinds of things am I potentially missing out on here? What what else could we do with this? Um, so I'd encourage you just kind of like leverage Vzero as much as you can for something like that. Or or the Post Hog AI is another option. The chat and Post Hog. Wow, I didn't even know you guys had that. That's so cool. Um I guess um I ask this in every one of our integration um sessions but longer term um what do you have cooking? Anything you can share with us? Yeah, so we view the future of software development and product development to be more autonomous and I think it's already happening but I think there are still um there's still ways to go. Um, so things like what I showed off with the error resolution, I I don't think it's very long before that's kind of a standard in an application is like I have an application running and it there's something running in the background that's just fixing errors without me having to tell it to. Um, and maybe I get some kind of report about that about what happened. Um, but ultimately in the future, like I don't want to have to prompt an AI to check for errors or I don't want to have to, you know, get a an alert uh in the middle of the night, get woken up with an error. Um, I think in the future, like some form of um some kind of system, it could be Post Hog, could be Versel, could be kind of them working together. They're going to be um basically gathering information. Errors is just one thing. There's session replay which I showed. Um the product analytics experiments is another one where like do I really need to manually create different metrics? And I I it was interesting actually here we got to see Vzero actually picked some interesting metrics for us already. Um, but I'm probably going to have an agent monitoring those things in the future and and making code updates without me really needing to um to prompt it at that level of specificity. Like I'm definitely going to be guiding strategically like what kind what experiment experience am I going for my game? What what are the metrics I'm targeting? Um but in terms of like the lower level stuff, I think a lot of that's going to be picked up by autonomous um yeah development engines. Yeah. Yeah. I I love that that vision because uh that basically aligns with everything we're talking about at Versile and with Vzero as well. So it's all about like closing that loop from deploy to then like observe in post hog and to fix and iterate automatically as well. That's awesome. Um, I guess one last question before we close off because I know we're at time here. Um, how can people get involved in the Post Hog community? Um, I did say at the start that Post Hog is open source. Do you accept contributions? I don't know if I got that correct by the way. I read that somewhere. [laughter] Yes, 100%. Yeah, we have um PRs that come in from uh from all over the place that we review. Um, there's also like a forum, uh, post hog forum you could ask questions in. Um, we have live events. Um, again, I wish I had the URL handy, but I'll I'll hand it to you after. Yes, absolutely. But yeah, there's live events. Um, and just sign up, use the use the app, tell us what you think, you know, reach out on X or what whatever you use, LinkedIn or whatever. Um, and let us know what you think. We're very active across uh those platforms. Amazing. Thank you so much, Brooker. was incredible. And uh for everyone who's watching, if you do have follow-up questions, drop them in the chat and we will make sure that the Post Hog team um you know, follow up with them. Um but yeah, thank you so much, Bucka. I appreciate your time here. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Amazing. Thank you so much everyone for joining this uh chat and our live session today. Um, if you don't know, we host a community live session pretty much every week. So, if you head over to community.versal.com/events, you'll see a very nice calendar where we post all of our in-person and online events. So, let us know what's the what next integration would you like uh to see um in our community session and we will definitely get them on. Um, incredible. Well, thank you so much everyone for joining us today and I hope to see you in our next live session.