Tips for new writers

PostHog has unusually high editorial standards (especially for a B2B SaaS company). When I first started writing here, I struggled quite a bit. The feedback was good, but it was a lot, and for a while I couldn't tell if I was actually getting better or just spinning my wheels.

This handbook page is all the stuff I would tell myself from back then if I could. I wrote it for any future writers who join our editorial team. (It might also be useful for anyone trying to understand our unique developer content marketing and style more deeply.) It won't make the learning curve disappear, but hopefully makes it easier!

Before you write anything

Remember that you are new. Learning how to do any creative skill in a specific style takes time. Even the most talented writer in the world would make mistakes adopting PostHog's voice. As the wise old saying goes, "sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something."

Don't compare your ramp-up speed to peers or people who've been here longer. Comparison is almost meaningless because everyone here has wildly different backgrounds It's why you were hired; it makes us better as a team. You have your own strengths and experiences, so make use of them.

While things are still relatively chill early on, read and absorb as much PostHog content as you can: blogs, newsletters, the handbook. Fix typos or update things as you go. Small PRs are genuinely appreciated and noticed.

Bonus tip: Keep a daily work journal. The random thoughts, questions, and observations you have as you're onboarding will make for great material later on. Even this guide is based on my notes from onboarding.

Timeline expectations for your first newsletter

A lot of people underestimate how much work it takes to write a genuinely good newsletter.

Experienced writers (i.e., people who've been doing this at PostHog for years) take about 2 weeks end-to-end to ship a great newsletter. That includes outlining, drafting, and 2–3 rounds of review to get to the finished piece (plus time juggling other projects in between).

As someone new, expect it to take longer. My first newsletter took me about 4–6 weeks:

• 1 week purely on the outline
• 5-8 rounds of feedback (shorter toward the end) spread over 2-3 weeks
• The last stretch was tiny edits and infographics over 1 week
• You will get sick of writing it. That's normal, too.

At the end, I didn't personally feel like my first newsletter was amazing, even though I was told it was very solid. Like I said earlier, remember it takes time to adapt to a new style for creative work.

To keep from going insane, have 1–2 smaller shippable projects running alongside the newsletter. In my first month, I tunneled on just the newsletter because it felt like The One Thing I had to do to prove to myself I could do this. In hindsight, putting all my confidence eggs in one basket added a lot of unnecessary pressure and honestly dampened my creativity. A blog refresh, smaller SEO post, along with handbook edits in parallel gives you breathing room. The early wins and visibility on the team are a real bonus, too.

The #1 guiding principle when writing here

Make it second nature to constantly ask yourself: "What do I want the reader's reaction to this piece to be?"

For example: "I want to challenge their assumptions and make them feel surprised."

Charles' Collaboration sucks article is a great example. It was right on the edge of clickbaity, enough for someone to comment "I was expecting to be annoyed but then I read it and was like, okay."

That's the goal. This one question should drive your title, your headings, your tone, your pacing — everything, really. A "How to do X" title can almost always be turned into something that makes a person feel something.

This matters most for newsletters, but it applies to everything we write. Our distinguishing factor is that we always have an opinion, a flair, a point of view. Without that, we'd become so bland, so fast.

Coming up with ideas

Ideas come from anyone and anywhere. A lot of times, conversations that happen in all-hands or Slack can be the inspiration for a blog. Basically, whatever you think might be interesting is game – you were hired as a developer who likes writing, so you have the advantage of already somewhat knowing our ICP's interests.

Even when you are new, don't let content ideas live inside your head. Turn them into a GitHub issue as soon as possible. Before you commit to writing something (including your first newsletter), have 2–3 issues with some preliminary research already done so you can make a more informed choice about what to actually write.

Not all ideas are good. Many ideas will die, fizzle out, or get picked up again later.

How to write for our readers

Writing nonfiction is a user-centered design problem. You have to start with: who is this for?

Our newsletter has three main reader groups:

• Product engineers — developers who also own product work at startups
• Technical founders — CEOs of early startups with technical or product backgrounds
• Software engineers — not always our ICP, but developers who are curious about broadening their knowledge of product and startup culture (think: a SWE at a big tech company who wonders what else is out there)

Every article should naturally appeal to at least one of these groups — ideally all three, but that's not always possible.

Once you know your reader, make sure the intro and headline appeal to them immediately. The hook should answer: why should an engineer care?

Don't narrow the audience too much, but don't be so broad that you capture nobody. And note that the most compelling hook for your audience might not be the most interesting one for you to write and that's okay.

For example, when I was writing my first newsletter, 10x job posts for 10x engineers, I first kept gravitating toward hooks like "recruiting is so hard" or "we've all read boring job ads." Those were fun and interesting to write, but none of them were actually that targeted for any of the three audiences.

I realized that the best audience was technical founders who want to hire great talent early on, so I ended up opening with "your company is only as good as your people". It's a line that's been said a million times and I personally found a little dull. But it was highly effective for technical founders.

(Think of choosing a hook like choosing a character in a fighting game: sometimes your second-highest DPS character is the best pick because they do physical damage, and the enemy has a lot of magic resistance.)

You can also angle for one group first but weave in relevance for others. For example, the 10x job posts piece was aimed at founders, but by telling them what to look for when hiring great engineers, it was also implicitly signaling to the product engineers and SWEs reading it what traits they should aspire to have themselves while job searching and interviewing.

A few smaller principles worth keeping in mind:

• Avoid double intros. Pick one good hook and then get right into the content.
• Never say "it depends". If you're leaning that way, it usually means you need to go straight to examples
• Paint the problem, then get to "how to deal with it" as early as possible. Developers want the useful part fast.
• The line between funny and cringe is very easy to cross.
• Don't lean on big enterprise company examples unless it genuinely fits the piece. It usually won't.
• Snark and strong opinions are good. Pure negativity is not.

How to actually write a newsletter

The biggest lesson I learned was that writing a newsletter is 80% research, 20% writing.

What sets PostHog content apart is that we actually do the work. We don't just say what we think, we actually go and find out.

In other words, we gather evidence usually in the form of (1) real-world examples or (2) first-hand experience to establish credibility.

Real-world examples are observed data from other companies, blogs, and people — and this is what you'll lean on most as a writer. Research examples first. They don't just support your outline; they are the foundation of it. You might have a strong opinion and feel certain it's right, but you don't actually know until you go find out.

For example, for the 10x job posts newsletter, the "data" I used to develop my opinion were literally job posts from other companies.

You should include real examples even during your outline phase because without them, you don't actually have an informed opinion to build on yet.

Where to find good examples:

• exa.ai — an AI search engine that's much better than ChatGPT for surfacing real examples (ChatGPT has a tendency to give you plausible-sounding examples that are just made up)
• First Round Review
• HN Algolia search — the comments can be just as useful as the posts themselves
• Slack search for what PostHog people have actually said about the topic
• GitHub — past PRs and issues at PostHog

Avoid using other blog posts as your primary source material. Basic digital literacy. "I saw it on the internet" or "I made that shit up" is not a valid source.

First-hand experience is more like "things we've learned at PostHog." Charles can write a piece that's mostly just his perspective because he has the experience and credibility as an exec — he'll almost always open with a personal anecdote or something from PostHog's history to establish that.

As a writer, you probably don't have that kind of experience to lean on yet, but you can do this too by framing things as "what we've learned at PostHog". I do this by reading all past PostHog content on a topic before I start writing, and then pulling out the real internal perspectives and examples. (Conveniently, you can save those to put in as internal links later!)

When your writing doesn't feel good

A useful gut-check: would someone who knows a lot about this topic share this with someone else? Worth noting that this person might not be the same as your target reader. For the 10x job posts piece aimed at technical founders, the person who'd actually share it is more like a seasoned recruiter or someone on a talent team.

If the answer is no, here's a quick diagnostic list:

• The topic feels overdone and unoriginal. That's okay, originality isn't really the goal. Your goal is to write something that genuinely moves this audience at this time.
• We've written about something too similar to this in the past. Also fine. Nobody remembers something we published two years ago. We commonly refresh old blogs into newsletters because the structure and style naturally evolves it into something different
• It's too clickbait-y or fluffy. You probably need to go one level deeper. If it feels fluffy, it means you're not even convinced by your own argument. Find more concrete examples to back up your opinion.
• It's getting dry and boring. It probably needs a stronger take. Talk to people with real experience on the subject. For example, when I was writing the "WTF does a PM do?" piece, I asked PMs directly what they thought were the most important parts of the role, and what made for a bad PM. That made it so much better.
• The content is interesting but isn't flowing well. Rewrite it, then rewrite it again. When I was stuck on the intro for "WTF does a product manager do?", I wrote three completely different versions, then wrote out a pros/cons list of what I liked and disliked about each before deciding.
• It's too deep and detailed. Try zooming out. Ask yourself "why would anyone actually read this?" Most of our newsletter topics hover at a certain level of detail. For example, we've written "An engineer's guide to talking to users," but we haven't written "An engineer's guide to dealing with difficult customers on quick calls." If the topic feels too niche, reconsider the scope (You'll probably also struggle to find enough examples for it.)
• I can't figure out what's wrong, I just know it is. Ask for help — especially in your first few pieces. I asked Ian to write an entire section for my newsletter because I just needed to move on at a certain point.
• I tried all of the above and it still just feels forced. The topic might just not be working. Depending on how deep you are, it might be worth pivoting rather than pushing through. You might just save it for a later issue.

When you hit writer's block

Writer's block is real and it will happen. It usually isn't actually about the writing — for me it's almost always anxiety or self-doubt in disguise. Things that helped me:

• Change your environment. Go work at a cafe or outside for a bit. Especially since we work fully remote, getting out of the house makes a huge difference.
• Switch to a different project. Something more tactical and less creative helps reset things and give you a little boost.
• Brain dump — stream of consciousness, no editing, just write it. Even if you don't use the output later, it's like a nice warm-up exercise.
• If your stuckness is rooted in self-doubt, try all of the classic self-care and self-compassion tips. Journaling, exercise, or whatever works for you. Staring at the doc rarely fixes anything for me, personally.

Things click eventually, but might just take longer than you'd expect. As always, don't hesitate to ask for help and feedback from the rest of the editorial team along the way. We want you to succeed!

– Jina Yoon