Overview

How marketing works

Marketing at PostHog is a collaborative effort dispersed across four teams:

Content & Docs: Responsible for content marketing, SEO, and maintaining documentation.
Comms: Responsible for product marketing, artwork, events, special programs, cross-sell and email marketing.
Video: Responsible for video ideation, production, editing, and publishing.
Website & Vibes: Responsible for website design, community, and backend.

Marketing values

Be opinionated
Pull, don’t push
No sneaky shit

1. Be opinionated

PostHog was created because we believed that product analytics was broken, and we had a vision of how it could be much better.

We need to reflect this vision in our marketing and content, and not dilute it with boring corporate-speak. When we write content, we take a firm stance on what we believe is right. We would rather have 50% of people love us and 50% hate us than 80% mildly agree with us.

We communicate clearly, directly, and honestly.

It's ok to have a sense of humor. We are more likely to die because we are forgettable, not because we made a lame joke once. We have a very distinctive and weird company culture, and we should share that with customers instead of putting on a fake corporate persona when we talk to them. PostHog should not look like a generic software company.

(Sometimes we use terminology like 'value propositions' because that is the standard marketing term for a well-understood concept. That's allowed.)

2. Pull, don't push

We focus on word of mouth by default. We believe customers will judge us first and foremost on our product (i.e. our app, our website, and our docs). We won’t set ourselves up for long-term success if we push customers into using us.

If a customer doesn't choose PostHog, that means either:

The product isn't good enough
The product isn't the right solution for them
We didn't communicate the product and its benefits well enough

We don't believe companies will be long-term customers of a competitor because they did a better job of spamming them with generic content. We know this because we frequently have customers switching from a competitor to us – they are not afraid to do this.

Tackling (1) is the responsibility of everyone at PostHog. The marketing team's specific job is to avoid spending time advertising to people in group (2), and making sure we do a great job avoiding (3).

This means:

Making sure our comms are extremely high quality
Sharing our messages in the right places, where relevant users can see them
Spending enough time and/or money in those places so that our messages get through

3. No sneaky shit

Our target users are technical and acutely aware of the tedious, clickbaity, hyperbolic marketing tactics that software companies use to try and entice them. Stop. It's patronizing to them and the marketing people creating the content.

For these reasons, we:

Don't use any analytics except PostHog. No Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel etc. Customer trust is more important than making our marketing team's lives easier.
Don't make claims about our product that are not 100% genuine and verifiable. And we don't make promises for future functionality either beyond what's already in GitHub.
Don't unfairly criticize or make false claims about our competitors. We will compare ourselves to them to help customers make a decision, and occasionally they will be a better solution for what a customer needs. And it's ok to have a sense of humor about this.
Don't bombard customers with 'deals', pop-ups, and other dark patterns. These devalue our product in the long term.
Don't pretend our customers are different from us – i.e. more gullible, more susceptible to marketing. We are an engineering-led team building products for other engineers. If you wouldn't like it, assume our customers wouldn't either.
Don't do cold email marketing to acquire new customers. When was the last time you read the 8th email a company sent you and thought 'ok yes, I now want to use this product'?

Marketing vision

Beyond PostHog's company mission and strategy, we have some marketing-specific areas we want to focus on.

Things we want to be brilliant at

Word of mouth mindset: We want to build a hugely successful company driven primarily by word of mouth, rather than paid ads or PR. This means being known for quality in all things we do.
Helping our ideal customers be successful: Through our docs, tutorials, newsletter, emails, video, and beyond, we help our ideal customers be more successful, both generally in their goals as founders and engineers, and as users of PostHog.
Launches: Our team ships a lot of products and features. We need launches to break through the noise and get noticed. This helps create the momentum products need to succeed.
World-class documentation: We work with product teams to maintain up-to-date, high quality docs. We work with Website & Docs to ensure users can discover them. Doing this enables users to "self-serve," discover what they need, and get the most out of PostHog.
Supporting YC founders: Lots of PostHog's DNA comes from Y Combinator. Their companies and founders are our ideal customers. We've done a great job being valuable to them (50%+ of batches using us) and want to continue to do so.
Merch: We make the coolest tech company merch. Let's keep it this way.

Things we want to be good at

Social media: Specifically Twitter, where we've seen good traction posting on James' personal account and the PostHog brand account. We do a minimal amount of posting on PostHog's LinkedIn account to keep it active, but it's not an important channel for us. We don't use any other social media channels.
Paid ads: We run a lot of paid ads on Google and others. It is fuel for everything else we are doing. We want to be good at this, but do it in a way unique to PostHog. We're not throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. We have a minimum brand bar we need to hit.
Graphics: We're not the most visually focused team, but creating visuals and animations is a great way to communicate complex ideas. They also make for excellent content. Create a basic version and get the design pros (Cory, Lottie) to help.
Developer influencers: We sponsor creators like Theo and Fireship to drive awareness and signups to PostHog. Many of the influencers we sponsor don't work out, but the ones that work drive great results.
Billboards: Billboards are a way to get our brand in front of a lot of people.
Doing sales without salespeople: Rather than care a lot about "capturing every lead" or "marketing qualified leads," we'd rather work with sales to create content that helps potential customers, ideally without a salesperson.

Things we might want to be good at but haven't tested yet

Events: We have been involved in some events, but we are still figuring out "the PostHog way" to do them. We don't just want to be a name on the sponsor list. We want to create superfans.
Broader partnerships: PostHog is a complement to a bunch of types of companies, from vibe coding tools to infrastructure platforms. Our data warehouse and CDP are built to enable integrations. How can we leverage this?
Video essays: Video essay style content is a natural extension of what we are doing in our newsletter. When done well, it is what "great video content" looks like.

Things we don't want to spend time on

Optimizing marketing spend: We're more concerned about growing fast than being the most efficient marketing team. Go fast, run experiments, look for upside.
Big, highly coordinated marketing campaigns: We can do them, but our reactive, short turnaround campaigns have been far more successful.
PR: If we do word of mouth well, our community will be far more valuable/credible than an appearance in TechCrunch.
Being cool and interesting people in online communities: There are a bunch of communities we could be more active in like Reddit and Discord, but we'd prefer to focus on our own community first.
Conferences. We're not a natural fit for conferences and being a small fish in a big pond isn't really our style.
Short-form video. We tried it, but it didn't work. Our audience might be there, but we're not flashy or dedicated enough to reach them.