PostHog Handbook Library

500 words. Estimated reading time: 3 min.

# Who we build for

We define who we build for as ICP, i.e. the team, and the persona, i.e. the actual people using PostHog.

### Our current ICP

AKA our ideal customer profile.

We build for the people building products in AI-pilled software teams at any scale.

We want to be the first tool that technical founders go to when they start building their product.

| &nbsp; | AI-pilled software teams | | --- | --- | | Description | Ambitious (ie they want to grow a lot) software teams that either just getting started or already have product-market fit and are quickly scaling up with new customers, hiring, and adding more revenue. They believe in an AI-first approach to building and are already familiar with the standard AI tools. | | Criteria | - They have 1 to 500 potential PostHog users, but the company itself could be anything from one employee to thousands<br />- Has lots of revenue or aims to raise or has raised from leading investors<br />- Not hobbyists or cost-conscious bootstrappers, basically| | Why they matter? | - We believe AI-pilled companies will outperform non-AI-pilled companies <br />- We're able to efficiently monetize them<br />- Very quick sales cycle<br />- They act as key opinion leaders for earlier-stage startups and slower-moving companies<br />- They have strong opinions on what they need, which helps us build a better product | | Examples | PostHog any time from during YC to IPO, Supabase, ElevenLabs |

### Our current Persona

Persona is the job title or role of the person actually using a product in PostHog.

PostHog's initial adoption inside an ICP should come from an _engineering_ persona most of the time, simply because engineers exist first in startups. This persona can include technical founders. The more we appeal to engineers at the earliest stages of their startup's life, the more overall growth we will have.

> We should in general go _very_ hard on making sure we have excellent coverage of any needs an engineer has in trying to build a product first.

Once we're in with engineering, we spread to multiple personas. AI tools have led to the emergence of non-engineer builders inside software teams. These are product, support, or marketing people who have realized they _can_ now code. They are unlikely to ever be as technical as an engineer, but the tools and problems they can tackle now overlap. Some light touch work can dramatically improve PostHog's usefulness for these other teams and we should be willing to do that when its obvious. For example, PostHog AI is used by 25% engineers, 25% founders (often technical), and 50% across other roles. An anti-goal is to completely ignore the 50% of other roles.

The anti persona: we are unlikely to build products for people furthest from product, such as those in finance, ops, or recruitment. There simply is much less need for customer data in those teams, we don't have any natural advantage here.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/who-we-build-for

GitHub source: contents/handbook/who-we-build-for.md

Content hash: `6f076719001856c2`