How 11x uses PostHog to combat legal threats, build AI workers
Mar 27, 2024
Trusted by the likes of PWC, 11x is an AI and automation company building the next generation of fully autonomous digital workers, such as Alice a virtual SDR for rapidly growing companies.
As part of a new wave of AI-first teams, 11x is creating cutting-edge digital agents that can integrate with your entire stack. But an AI-first company relies on data just like any other SaaS, so the team formed a complex stack of tools to help them ensure the AI was performing well.
“It was a real hodgepodge of tools,” says Keith Fearon, Head of Growth at 11x. “We used HotJar for session recordings, FullStory for analytics, and we were building our own in-house feature flags.”
Eventually, after two years, the team decided to optimize things. They soon discovered that PostHog offered all of these tools in one platform, complete with its own dedicated AI analytics suite
Connecting AI data with Salesforce and sales data
Soon after switching, Keith realized that, just like 11x digital agents, PostHog could be connected across an entire stack. He started by using the PostHog CDP to connect with Salesforce and unify multiple data sources.
“I realized that what you put into it is what you get out,” says Keith. “We started connecting customer break clauses with actual user activity, so we could see the link between usage and retention. PostHog became the cockpit from which we could see across the entire product and all our customers.”
Keith set up a physical screen at the front of the office showing a PostHog dashboard of all key metrics and, soon, PostHog was being adopted by multiple teams. It became where all goals were tracked, where all sales data flows, and even where software issues are debugged.
“I’ve introduced PostHog to so many parts of our workflow and it's become known as the ten-in-one product thing that helps us get so much done. It really does have it all.”
Combatting performance hogs, legal threats, and bugs
Before switching to PostHog, Keith says engineering teams were often “banging their heads against the wall” and spending days trying to debug issues. Now, with error tracking and session replays, it’s much easier for the team to isolate the cause of a bug and to collect context on it.
“We had one case where we couldn’t reproduce an error,” says Keith. “We spent ages on it and it was only after the engineer checked the replays did we see it was a user error: the customer had changed their settings, forgotten about it, and submitted a bug report. We hadn’t even thought of that. Now, all our engineers use PostHog replays when looking into issues like that.”
At other times, 11x has even used PostHog to combat hackers and avoid legal issues, says Keith.
“We had a case where we saw in the logs that 85% of usage was coming from one small customer that was trying to make unauthorized API calls. They were trying to capture all our records! When we kicked them out they threatened to sue, but we were able to use the console logs to prove this was a terms of service violation.”
“PostHog powers our entire team,” says Keith “from product to engineering to even sales and legal!”