The Challenge
PayFlow (name changed) is a Series B fintech company building payment infrastructure for SaaS businesses. With 50 employees and $12M in ARR, they were scaling fast—but their analytics couldn't keep up.
Their stack was fragmented across three tools: Mixpanel for product analytics, Google Analytics for marketing, and a custom-built event pipeline feeding Redshift for finance reporting. Each tool told a different story, and no one trusted any of them.
Key Problems
- Conflicting metrics: Product, marketing, and finance all reported different numbers for the same KPIs
- Slow iteration: Getting a new event tracked took 2-3 sprint cycles
- High costs: Paying for three analytics tools plus Redshift compute
- No experiments: Feature flags were managed through config files with no measurement
The Solution
We designed and implemented a unified analytics stack with PostHog as the primary product analytics platform and ClickHouse as the central data warehouse.
Architecture Overview
- PostHog Cloud: Event collection, product analytics, session recording, feature flags
- ClickHouse Cloud: Central warehouse joining PostHog events with billing, CRM, and marketing data
- Metabase: Self-serve BI dashboards connected to ClickHouse
Implementation Process
Week 1-2: Audit and Tracking Plan
We audited their existing tracking across all three tools, documented what was actually being used, and designed a unified event taxonomy. We identified 47 events that mattered (out of 200+ being tracked inconsistently).
Week 3-4: PostHog Implementation
We instrumented their React frontend and Node.js backend with PostHog's SDKs. This included proper user identification, group analytics for their B2B model, and session recording with privacy filters for PII.
Week 5: ClickHouse Setup
We set up ClickHouse Cloud and built data models to join PostHog events with Stripe billing data and HubSpot CRM records. This gave them a complete view of the user journey from first touch to revenue.
Week 6: Dashboards and Training
We built executive dashboards in Metabase, set up PostHog dashboards for product managers, and trained the team on self-serve analysis.
Results
Six months post-implementation, PayFlow has seen measurable improvements across the board:
- 73% faster time to insight: Questions that used to take days now take hours
- $45K annual savings: Eliminated Mixpanel, reduced Redshift compute, consolidated on PostHog + ClickHouse
- Single source of truth: Product, marketing, and finance now use the same definitions
- Active experimentation: Running 3-4 A/B tests per month with PostHog feature flags
"We went from three tools that nobody trusted to one stack that everyone uses daily. The PostHog + ClickHouse combination gives us both the product analytics UI our PMs love and the SQL flexibility our analysts need."