PostHog Handbook Library

578 words. Estimated reading time: 3 min.

# How we get users

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? As they got bigger, they gradually shifted from building for users toward building for buyers, hoping 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 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.

### We make it extremely easy for you to buy PostHog

Most sales teams do a bunch of low-quality cold outbound that harm their company's reputation and 99.999% of the time is ignored. And then once they've got you on a call, they pepper you with MEDDPICC questions before actually letting you see the product. Who knows, maybe 3 meetings later they'll share some pricing too!

We do things a little bit differently. 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 3 months of them signing up for a paid plan. "Best in class" is considered to be one year...!

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/how-we-get-users

GitHub source: contents/handbook/how-we-get-users.md

Content hash: `953f6e5ebbd01289`

Static reader notes

- `MDX_COMPONENT_STATIC_ADAPTER`: Adapted interactive MDX components for static reading: SmallTeam.