Who we build for
Contents
We define who we build for as ICP (ie, the company) and the Persona (ie the actual person using the product).
Our current ICP
AKA our ideal customer profile.
We build for the people building products at high-growth startups.
Marketing and customer success should primarily focus on this ICP, but should also develop high-potential customers – customers that are likely to later become high-growth customers (e.g. PostHog itself during YC). We should be in maintenance mode for hobbyists, such as engineers building side projects. We want to be the first tool that technical founders add to their product.
| High-growth startup | |
|---|---|
| Description | Startups that have product-market fit and are quickly scaling up with new customers, hiring, and adding more revenue. |
| Criteria | - 15-500 employees - $100k+/month in revenue or very large number of consumer users - Raised from leading investors - Not yet IPO'ed |
| Why they matter? | - Able to efficiently monetize them - Very quick sales cycle - Act as key opinion leaders for earlier-stage startups/slower moving companies - Strong opinions on what they need - helping us build a better product |
| Examples | PostHog anytime from their Series B to IPO, Supabase, ElevenLabs |
Our current Persona
Persona is the job title or role of the person actually using a product in PostHog. Each team will focus more or less on different members of the product team. This is detailed on their team pages.
As companies get bigger, the type of person that uses a product changes. As an example:
- We initially built product analytics for engineers at startups.
- As those companies get a little bit bigger, they'll hire Product Managers who will mostly use product analytics. PMs have more complicated requirements for what a product analytics tool needs to do.
- Even bigger companies often have specialized "analytics engineers." These people are the most demanding.
Each product should start with a single persona, usually an early person (preferably engineer) at a startup. Teams should make sure to build a really good product with PMF for that single persona. As the product and user-base matures, new personas will emerge as users. You only serve that new persona if you've found PMF and satisfied requirements for the initial persona.
You still need to keep your initial personas happy too, which is tricky, but important as that initial persona is how we get in first.
How do you know if you have PMF and satisfied requirements? Look at churn. If the initial persona is churning from your product, you still have work to do to retain that persona before moving onto others. If instead the product has been handed off to another persona in the org, and they are churning, that's an indication that you may need to start supporting the needs of this next persona.
We've not always been successful at building products for personas other than engineers. We're now at a stage where we need to be in order to continue growing.
Churn?
If a team does not currently support a persona, and that persona churns off of using that product, we are okay with that, as long as that doesn't cause the customer to churn off of PostHog entirely. We should try to support those personas to gracefully move off of PostHog. For example: we are okay with sales people churning off to a CRM, and we'll provide exports to export PostHog data to those systems.