Over 100,000 users have signed up to PostHog.
Most companies build their product with a particular user in mind. We build everything around our ideal customer profile.
So when it comes to marketing and sales, we are optimizing for developer experience.
Why we're like this
We've met a lot of successful founders in our space who are full of regret, despite leading companies with well over $100m in annual revenue! The one regret they all had in common was letting go of their growth engine (people recommending their product to each other) and getting focused on sales. They all wound up exiting. That's why they told us this stuff.
The way this pans out? They gradually shifted as they got bigger from building for users, to building for buyers to optimize for revenue growth. Over time, that killed their word of mouth growth, which caused them to have to work harder for each sale. So they got more salesy, and so on. They became companies that focused on making a bunch of money by building a product, instead of being companies focused on building a great product.
We won't make this mistake.
For us, marketing is creating useful content
Our marketing team is small. Way, way smaller than our competitors'. Winning on volume of content is out of the question. So we'd better win on quality.
This constraint has worked out pretty well for us. Distribution is pretty easy when the thing you're working on is good enough to generate word of mouth growth – and this helps build an enduring developer brand.
We even hire full-stack developers into our marketing team to make sure we can cover the full depth needed in a lot of our tutorials, docs, and posts.
Things you won't find our marketing team doing: removing information from our website to increase conversion, focusing on paid ads, or letting colleagues ship content they aren't proud of.
We happily spend lots of money on our website
Most companies call it their "marketing website". You already know it's going to be crappy.
We treat our website as a product. With real investment. When we were just a couple of people, we realized that our website is our sales team – since our users would want to self-serve as much as possible.
When we started out, we also realized that all our competitors had crappy marketing websites.
And, as with so much that we do, we get an increasing return on quality. If we do things noticeably better than everyone else, then we're remarkable. That results in word of mouth growth.
100% inbound sales
Why would we invest money in cold calls or emails that harm our reputation and 99.999% of the time are ignored? We'd rather focus on something more reliable.
Customers buy from us, we don't sell to them. It means we can instead invest our money in shipping more (and better) products, at lower prices than our competitors, to provide a sustainable advantage.
Fun fact: the total spend we have on marketing and sales per customer we acquire pays itself off within 5 days of them signing up for a paid plan. "Best in class" is considered to be one year...!