We want to build a self-sustaining and scalable community of engaged users because it will enable us to own our audience in a way that third party social media platforms do not. Like brand or content, building a thriving community is a (very) long term bet, so we will need to both invest a lot of time up front and then wait to see what works and what doesn't.
Our approach to building community at PostHog differs from most devtools in two ways:
We are building our community around our website and content, rather than the product itself. This is because a) PostHog is a product that you add after you have already built something, and b) 90% of community activity turns into support queries, which is not what we want community to be.
We are focusing on building the community platform itself - creating the tools that enable the community to interact with each other, rather than hiring a community manager whose job it is to go out and talk to everyone on other platforms/social media - this is not scalable.
Responsibility for community
This is shared across multiple teams and people - we (deliberately) do not have one person responsible for 'community':
The Website & Docs team builds the platform and tools. Rather than using an off-the-shelf community platform, we have rolled our own. This gives us the flexibility to do what we want with it, all without having to depend on third parties or their cookies.
The Marketing team doesn't 'run community' in the traditional sense, but is instead responsible for ensuring that the content hubs in particular have a steady stream of engaging content and replying to users when they engage. They also proactively respond to questions and use feedback to create new types of content such as tutorials and docs.
Support should not considered part of community at PostHog. Support is driven by the Customer Success team, primarily using in-app support and decdicated Slack channels. Good customer support helps build positive word of mouth, but replying to support queries is not an engaging or scalable way to build a thriving community.
Content hubs
We are in the process of building these out. We have created two hubs targeting our ICP:
We have a bunch of features we are building here – more details to come!
Community forums
Our community forums live at posthog.com/questions – but they come with a twist...
Anyone can ask a question within the forums, but they can also ask a question at the end of any docs page (under the "Questions?" subheading). We've found this to be a great place for people to ask very specific questions after attempting to find an answer in documentation, as it acts as a mini-FAQ section.
Questions that are asked within the docs are also automatically aggreagated to the correct category in the community forums.
Asking a question
A user can write a question, but they'll need to create a PostHog.com account before posting. (Note: This authentication system is currently separate from PostHog Cloud accounts, though we have plans to unify them.) Users can write Markdown and upload images to a question.
Once it's posted, a question permalink page is generated, which gets indexed in our site search (and tends to rank well in Google, too). The user is automatically subscribed to reply notifications by email.
Anyone can subscribe to thread replies by clicking the bell icon in a thread (after signing in).
Answering questions
If you're a PostHog team member, read the guidelines for responding to community questions.