Brand foundations
Contents
If you work at PostHog, you are a brand ambassador. This brandbook outlines how to extend our brand to your personal responsibilities at PostHog.
What is brand?
PostHog's brand is the total sum of how people experience us – from a first visit to posthog.com to an onboarding email, from how quickly we ship a bug fix someone complained about on X to billboards, merch, event collateral, ads, and more.
Every person who encounters PostHog forms an opinion. Brand is the accumulated weight of all those opinions.
This matters for two reasons:
Brand is a growth driver. It's one of the four main reasons PostHog gets recommended. People who trust a brand talk about it. Developers who find us authentic fight for us in comment sections.
Trust is slow to build and fast to lose. A generic headline, a forced joke, a bad sticker, a robotic support reply – each of these chips away at the trust we've earned.
Our mindset
Everything flows from two ideas:
"Yes and…" We expand ideas instead of shutting them down. When someone proposes something, the instinct is to find what's interesting about it and build on it – not critique it to death. This shapes how we design, how we write, and how we talk to each other.
"We can do this better ourselves." The best things get made by people who genuinely care about what they're making. When we ship something, it should feel like someone made this on purpose – not like it was generated, templated, or outsourced.
Taste
Taste is the most important design principle PostHog has. "Polish" is surface-level – smooth gradients, perfect shadows, trendy layouts – the visual equivalent of buzzwords. "Taste" is deeper: making decisions that reflect a real point of view, caring about whether something is right and not just done, going the extra mile even if only one person notices.
A design with taste looks like someone made this on purpose, especially in a world where more people are shipping AI slop.
What taste looks like in practice:
- Caring about details. Typography, spacing, alignment, whitespace – these are felt even when not consciously noticed.
- Intentionality. Every element has a reason to be there.
- Going the extra mile. Especially for things most people won't notice (you'd be surprised how many actually do).
- Enjoying the work. When you enjoy making something, it shows.
- Knowing when trends are played out. Our visual identity is nostalgic and distinctive because we deliberately avoided what everyone else was chasing.
Brand personality
PostHog should feel:
| Feel like this | Not like this |
|---|---|
| Opinionated | Diplomatic to the point of saying nothing |
| Human | Corporate robot |
| Slightly weird | Trying to be funny in a try-hard way |
| Thoughtful | Random |
| Direct | Fluffy |
| Honest | Corporate fluff |
| Playful | Childish or unprofessional |
| Approachable | Arrogant |
Who we're talking to
Our primary audience is product engineers and product-minded builders. Many of them are technical founders or assume the role. It's incredibly important that we don't alienate them, as they're a driver of word-of-mouth growth.
This shapes everything. Developers...
- distrust marketing by default. They've been burned by overpromising before.
- prefer specificity over benefits language. "It does X" beats "It empowers you to unlock X."
- can tell within seconds if something is authentic or corporate. They view source code for fun.
- react well to honesty, including honesty about limitations and tradeoffs.
- respond to wit, but are allergic to forced humor.
The right model: you're talking to a smart, skeptical friend who happens to be a product builder. Not an enterprise buyer. Not an executive. A person.
The dating profile test
Most SaaS companies write like they're submitting a résumé. Formal, big words – intended to impress the most serious of visitors.
PostHog writes more like a dating profile: authentic, maybe a bit weird – but most importantly, showing actual personality. We might not be for everybody, but our style will connect with the right audience.
Ours connects with personality and ideas. Even the decision maker at an enterprise company is a human behind the screen.
Ask yourself when writing or designing: is this a résumé or a dating profile? If it's written like a résumé – or if it's something a lawyer might enjoy reading, it's not PostHog enough.
The Hacker News test
Before you ship anything – copy, design, a campaign, a policy – ask: how would this be received on Hacker News?
Hacker News is intensely logical and skeptical. They'll call out corporate spin, vague claims, and try-hard humor in seconds. If you think your thing would get roasted, change it. If it would hold up to scrutiny, ship it.
What we are not
A few things to avoid when describing PostHog:
- Not "an analytics platform." PostHog has grown well beyond analytics. Lead with what we actually are: a suite of tools that helps people build successful products.
- Not a single product. We're platform that help you (and your AI agents) build product autonomously.
- Not a "product improvement platform." This is vague and buzzwordy.
- Not enterprise-first. We build for people who self-serve. We get in early and grow with our customers. We don't go out of our way to build niche features just to chase a large contract. Don't let copy, design, or tone drift toward enterprise-speak.