PostHog Handbook Library / Marketing

1,553 words. Estimated reading time: 7 min.

# Marketing Events

Auto TL;DR

## At a Glance

This long page covers these main areas. The list is generated from the article headings, so it updates with every handbook rebuild.

1. Community incubator
2. Geographies
3. Co working structure
4. Venues
5. Community events
6. Formulating a purpose and structure
7. Getting support
8. Branding it

> Want PostHog to be involved in your event? See how we do Community events. Want to start a co-working group for builders? Check out our Community incubator program and submit the form. If you'd like to add an IRL event to the events page, contact Daniel Zaltsman or Kliment Minchev.

We did 45 events in real life (IRL) in 2025 and we're just getting started. While we’re 100% remote and set up to work asynchronously–we've found real benefits in getting together with users in real life. All our public events are showcased on the events page.

Events have to be focused on and valuable to our ICP. We prefer not to be a small fish in a big pond, hence we mostly pass on big conferences. And we prefer pull over push, so we gravitate towards content and formats that educate and activate while avoiding booths, badge-scanning, buying attendee lists, paying to speak, and webinars.

The event formats we prefer (and organize ourselves) fall into one of these:

- Hands-on gatherings that enable our users to build better products for their customers
- Experiences that allow engineers and founders to walk away with unique product engineering insights
- Getting product engineers together to identify problems and build solutions for users
- AFK time that we ourselves enjoy like hiking, gaming, cycling, cooking classes, etc.

All plans come together – from conception through to final delivery – on our event management tool which centralizes owners, logstics and feedback in one place.

### Community incubator

We connect builders around the world by helping them start IRL micro-communities that gather for recurring co-working sessions. As we know from our own sprints, offsites, and hackathons, we can build a whole lot when we gather in person with other people who have a bias for action.

We have already seen how this format makes a higher impact on communities because of the velocity built over weeks and months of communal work, collaboration, and creativity.

Image: Philadelphia incubator

Taj leading his builder group in Philadelphia

#### Geographies

The pilot program started in tech hubs mostly in North America, UK, and EU. We now have communities in Austin, Philadelphia, Singapore, New York, Barcelona, and Lahore. At this time, we're open to groups starting in any city with a population of more than half of a million people.

#### Co-working structure

The focus is on weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly gatherings with small groups of ~10 people. Gatherings typically take place during weekday evenings or weekends and go for about 3 hours.

Discuss → Build → Demo

We suggest starting with a roundtable discussion of the latest dev news and trends, then each builder can set their own goals for the session. Allow at least 2 hours for building, and then close out the session with demos to show off what you built. Outside of co-working, the group is encouraged to get together to connect for an AFK activity such as a walk, bike ride, hike, or local sightseeing.

#### Venues

The ideal venues for the community incubator are free-to-use spaces conducive to a group comfortably working (accessible, quiet, Wi-Fi-enabled.) They are typically held in tech or VC offices that have an available room, libraries, and co-working spaces. If you have a venue and want to host a builder group, reach out to Daniel directly.

### Community events

Community events are in real life (IRL) manifestations of our mission organized by enthusiastic partners and customers. They usually originate when someone has identified an interesting topic or problem set for an event and want to help people move faster, smarter, and more together.

These are some of the event formats we're most actively pursuing:

- Builder Breakfasts: bringing together 35 engineers for unconference-style discussions of hyperspecific software problem sets they are encountering. Breakfast served.
- AI Talks with Demos: technical meetups for 75 people with live demos, where startups and scaleups demonstrate how they're deploying AI native tools to solve various problems.
- Founder Fireside deep dives with one of our co-founders (Tim Glaser and James Hawkins) for 100 founders and product engineers.

What community events are not for:

- Forcing PostHog or any other product into conversations with people
- Watching or planning things rather than doing them
- Just networking for the sake of chit chat

#### Formulating a purpose and structure

All impactful event follow the principles of user-driven development which stem from the user problem or requests. Who is the ideal attendee profile for your event? They might be your customers, fellow founders, local engineers or any other collection(s) of people. Talk to them first to validate if the event is worth your time.

Put real effort into this first step. Defining the "what, why and how" of an event beforehand will pay off on event day. Let our shared values guide you. Don’t submit your event for support until your answer to “Would I attend this?” is a clear “YES!”

#### Getting support

Financial support: We are happy to support the growing ecosystem of PostHog users and product engineers more broadly through financial sponsorship. We do this often for events that align with everything outlined on this page. Budgetary support typically falls in the range from $500 to $3,500. When we support monetarily, it almost always involves some added level of engagement.

Speakers: Want a speaker in our ecosystem (team PostHog, customers, partners)? We’ll try our best. When considering speakers for your events try to avoid:

- Corporate speak aficionados spewing tedious enterprise marketing nonsense
- People LARPing (live action role-playing) as executives
- Loudest person pretending to know more than they do

Content: If your speaker(s) are unsure of what to talk about, consider going back to the purpose of the event. Otherwise, we have plenty of material for your inspiration.

Merch: We use the store merch processes to handle distribution of PostHog-branded merch. We tend to be generous with merch for community events. Outline what you had in mind in the issue.

Co-promotion: Most of the time the help requested is in the form of promotion. As a general rule, we don't promote events we aren't supporting or co-hosting ourselves. We decide when to repost community events on our social media channels and email on a case by case basis.

Venue and catering: Identify the vendors and costs and include them in the GitHub issue. If the event will not be possible without monetary support, make that clear. We may support the cost of venue, food, or beverages but require the paper napkin math.

Feedback: You’ll learn more by doing than planning so don’t worry about having every detail complete before submitting for feedback from our team.

#### Branding it

Our brand is a reflection of us and how we’re experienced by others, including events.

Words: Naming products is hard. Same goes for naming events and writing their descriptions. As a prerequisite, read our primer on writing for developers. Try your best to come up with event names that communicate the 'what?' and will attract the 'who?' And then again ask yourself, "would I attend this?"

Pictures: Every event is improved with a flyer or poster that showcases the essence of the experience. We keep a comprehensive list of brand assets and guidelines on the brand assets page. Share your assets and we’ll give feedback. Depending on the scale and timing of the event, our team may be able to help with branding as well.

#### Event recaps

Community events are better when organizers share what happened, what you learned, and any follow-up actions. We value feedback and expect the same from event organizers. In addition to what you learned and feedback from attendees, we ask that you share any photos, videos, quotes, data points with our team.

### Sponsoring external events

We often get invited to sponsor events - these range in size, location, and audience. We rarely say yes. For these to be a worthwhile endeavor, the sponsorship should be a win-win primarily for the end user and secondarily for us. Hence, it's important that the audience, content, format, and ethos to all align. Even if we don't sponsor financially, we encourage team members to speak at events and we can support with merch. Ask in the #team-irl-events channel.

### Speaking at events

If you're interested in attending or speaking at a developer conference, consider submitting a CFP (Call for Papers) to one of these events taking place in 2026. If you don't see an event you're interested in, please add it directly in the reference sheet.

For first-time yappers, reference the speaker's guide. If you need inspiration for a talk, pretty much any practice we use for actual production code is fair game. This includes integrations and implementations with other products. And at this point people are interested in not just what we build but how we did it.

### Sponsoring student organizations

Sometimes students at varying universities ask us if we are interested in sponsoring their career fairs, hackathons, or other student-led initiatives. We don't currently participate in these. Although we don't use specific years of experience as a qualifier for hiring, we rarely hire students straight out of school. If there is a custom partnership you have in mind or it involves an existing employee's alma-mater, ask in the #team-irl-events channel.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/marketing/events

GitHub source: contents/handbook/marketing/events.md

Content hash: `37dfd9317fdd3d3d`

Static reader notes

- `MDX_COMPONENT_STATIC_ADAPTER`: Adapted interactive MDX components for static reading: Caption, TeamMember.