About

Built from client work, not a pitch deck

Hogsend exists because one engineer kept rebuilding the same thing.

The short version

One engineer, the same wall, every engagement

I'm Doug Silkstone — a software engineer with a previous life in growth engineering, analytics, and martech. Over 15+ years of freelance startup and product work, every engagement hit the same wall: the team had PostHog, had Resend, and had a folder of webhook handlers pretending to be a lifecycle email system. Dashboards everywhere — and then someone asks "can we send an email when someone drops off onboarding?" and everyone stares at each other.

I rebuilt that system enough times to know exactly what it should be: durable journeys, real segments, suppression that actually suppresses, all as code the team can review. So I built it once, properly, and versioned it. Hogsend is that codebase — shipped as a framework you install (@hogsend/engine), not a service you rent or a repo you fork.

Philosophy

Why it's shaped like this

Code-first

Journeys are TypeScript because lifecycle logic is product logic, and product logic gets reviewed, tested, and blamed.

Philosophy

Studio observes, it doesn't author

The moment a UI can edit what's in git, git stops being the truth. Studio shows you everything and changes nothing.

Studio

PostHog-first, not PostHog-only

Events in from anywhere, engagement out to anywhere. PostHog is the default center of gravity, not a cage.

How it works
How it's run

One engineer, building in the open. No growth team — which is funny, given the product.

Roadmap lives in GitHub issues and the changelog. Pre-1.0 and versioned properly: the public surface is semver-committed, and breaking changes are documented, not discovered.

The setup week

Set up for you, in a week

I built Hogsend to go faster for my clients; the setup week is the same engagement, productised. One week, $2,300 — deployed on your infrastructure, PostHog and your provider wired in, event taxonomy agreed, templates ported, and your first journeys live in your repo by Friday.

Bugs go to GitHub issues. I read everything.

No forms or calendars. Email what you're working on and you'll get a straight answer — including "you don't need me for this."

Your events are already flowing. Put them to work.

One scaffold command gives you the engine, 10 journeys, and 13 templates — in your repo, under your review.

Free to self-host · One scaffold command · No per-contact billing

Terminal
$ pnpm dlx create-hogsend@latest my-app