Overview

How marketing works

Marketing at PostHog is a collaborative effort dispersed across three 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.
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.

(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 benefits of the product 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 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 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'?
Don't unfairly criticize or make false claims about our competitors. We will however 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.

Marketing vision

Things we want to be brilliant at

Word of mouth mindset: By IPO, we want to build a hugely successful company driven primarily by word of mouth, rather than paid ads or PR.
Speed: We want to be highly reactive, low process, and reliant on other teams as little as possible to ship things. We want to get stuff wrong quickly, then iterate.
Helping PostHog users be successful: Through our docs, tutorials, newsletter and beyond, we help PostHog users be more successful, both generally in their goals, but also more successful and powerful users of PostHog.
Content for our ideal customer: We deliver genuinely useful insights about things those customers care about (can be purely product-related, but also general advice). We're pitching our content at ‘self-servers’.
Documentation We work with product teams to maintain update-to-date, high quality docs. We work with Website & Docs to ensure users can discover what they want to know.

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.

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.

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

Highly visible at industry events: We could become known for giving good talks at events, because this enhances word of mouth and is a natural extension of being good at creating good content.
Being cool and interesting people in online communities: We could do a lot more of this in relevant communities in Slack/Discord/Stack Overflow etc., and it's more engaging than one-way social media. We also increase awareness in relevant communities by sponsoring them. Overall, we want to be a net contributor to those communities.

Things we don't want to spend time on

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.
Incentivised campaigns - e.g. GitHub stars campaign. It's not clear how these can be repeatable sources of successful word of mouth growth for us, but they will occasionally be useful.