How Literally Created Growth Dashboards in PostHog for Hatchet

Client: Hatchet

Industry: Developer tooling / Open-source infrastructure

Service: Analytics infrastructure, growth metrics framework, dashboards

Overview

Hatchet is a fast-growing startup focused on building reliable background task orchestration. As their product usage and community grew, the team needed an easy way to monitor their growth in a Pirate Metrics style. However, since they are an open-source tool, they needed someone who could understand their business and what growing an open source community actually meant.

Hatchet needed Literally to design and implement a scalable, privacy-friendly analytics system. They wanted to focus only on their product usage and not their open-source project usage. The goal was to connect content performance, community engagement, and revenue into a holistic and actionable metrics framework - Dirty Pirate Metrics.

The Challenge

Before working with Literally, Hatchet faced several common but critical analytics challenges:

• They were using PostHog but not pushing many events to it
• Content performance was difficult to tie back to product usage and signups
• They had a hard time understanding where they were getting new users from
• The team lacked a clear growth narrative across product, content, and community

They wanted dashboards that could answer these questions:

• Which content leads people to learn more about Hatchet?
• Where are users coming from?
• Why do users drop off?

The Approach

Literally designed a metrics system tailored to Hatchet’s product and growth stage using a simple process.

1. Analytics Infrastructure Setup

Literally started by strengthening Hatchet’s analytics foundation:

• Relied on privacy-friendly tracking from PostHog that doesn’t get blocked by ad blockers
• Standardized event tracking
• Ensured key product and content interactions were captured

This step involved doing deep engineering work on their codebase, which ensured Hatchet could trust their data before making decisions with it.

2. Defining Metrics and Events to Track

Instead of using traditional AARRR metrics, Literally applied its Dirty Pirate Metrics (FAAAAARRRT) framework. This model sounds funny, but it was designed for modern devtools, SaaSes, and open-source products that sell to developers.

This framework helped Hatchet:

• Understand how website traffic correlates with engagement
• Connect user’s progress from content → signup → activation → revenue
• Identify which stages of the funnel were healthy and which needed attention

Key insights were defined across systems, including:

• Website visits, traffic sources, and content performance (PostHog)
• Signups and onboarding behavior (Hatchet’s system)
• Feature usage and activation events
• GitHub stars and community signals
• Revenue, first payments, and MRR

3. Creating Dashboards in PostHog

With clean data and a clear framework in place, Literally built intuitive dashboards inside PostHog that:

• Connected content metrics directly to product usage
• Highlighted drop-offs in onboarding and activation
• Tracked growth across product, content, and community in one place

Dashboards were reviewed with the Hatchet team and iterated on based on real-world usage and feedback.

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The Results

After relying on Literally to build their entire analytics system, Hatchet gained:

• A single source of truth for growth metrics across content, product, and revenue
• Clear visibility into what drives adoption, not just traffic
• Actionable dashboards that support product and growth decisions
• A scalable analytics foundation that can evolve as the company grows

Most importantly, Hatchet now has a metrics framework that tells a growth story that that aligns community growth, content, and business goals.

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About Literally

Literally helps startups and open-source companies with developer marketing & DevRel efforts, as well as building analytics systems. This helps clients have a full picture of their performance and enables them to track whether they’re hitting the right growth metrics. From tooling setup to metrics frameworks and dashboards, Literally focuses on clarity, actionability, and long-term scalability.

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