Overview

How marketing works

Marketing at PostHog is a collaborative effort across several teams. There are six distinct teams that handle different aspects of marketing:

• – Leads all art, design, illustration, and brand work for PostHog
• – Leads all matters related to posthog.com and handles some product design aspects
• – A multidisciplinary team that handles Product Marketing, Influencers & Partnerships, and other unowned marketing tasks
• – Leads content, newsletters, and social
• – Leads video
• – Leads on documentation and the wizard

If you're not sure who to talk to, check Who can help me?.

Slack channels to know

To keep up with what's shipped and what's about to ship across the company, join:

• #changelog – what's just shipped. Owned by the Docs & Wizard team and updated constantly as PRs merge.
• #coming-soon – what's shipping soon. Owned by the Marketing team and posted as a daily digest.

Both channels are populated by agentic workflows that scan merged PRs and feature flag changes in the posthog/posthog repo and summarize them into the relevant channel. Engineers can also opt their PR in (or out) manually via the Publish to changelog? and Alert Sales and Marketing teams? checkboxes on the PR template, or via the @posthog Slack app. See how to publish changelog for the full flow.

Marketing values

1. Be opinionated
2. Pull, don't push
3. No sneaky shit

1. Be opinionated

PostHog makes your product self-driving – that's the vision our marketing and content needs to reflect, and not dilute it with boring corporate-speak. (For the canonical positioning, see Brand foundations.)

When we write content, we take a firm stance on what we believe is right. We would rather have 50% of people love us and 50% hate us than 80% mildly agree with us.

How we say it – clear, direct, honest, and with room for genuine humor – lives in the voice & tone guide. The short version: we have a distinctive, weird company culture and we share it with customers rather than putting on a fake corporate persona. PostHog should not look like a generic software company.

(Sometimes we use terminology like 'value propositions' because that is the standard marketing term for a well-understood concept. That's allowed.)

2. Pull, don't push

_We focus on word of mouth by default._

We believe customers will judge us first and foremost on our product (i.e. our app, our website, and our docs). We won't set ourselves up for long-term success if we push customers into using us.

If a customer doesn't choose PostHog, that means either:

1. The product isn't good enough
2. The product isn't the right solution for them
3. We didn't communicate the product and its benefits well enough

We don't believe companies will be long-term customers of a competitor because they did a better job of spamming them with generic marketing. We know this because we frequently have customers switching from a competitor to us – they are not afraid to do this.

Tackling (1) is the responsibility of everyone at PostHog. The job of marketing teams is to avoid spending time advertising to people in group (2), and making sure we do a great job avoiding (3).

This means:

• Making sure our comms are extremely high quality
• Sharing our messages in the right places, where relevant users can see them
• Spending enough time and/or money in those places so that our messages get through

3. No sneaky shit

Our ideal customers are technical and acutely aware of the tedious, clickbaity, hyperbolic marketing tactics that software companies use to try and entice them. Stop. It's patronizing to them and the marketing people creating the content.

For these reasons, we:

• Don't use any analytics except PostHog. No Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel etc. Customer trust is more important than making our marketing team's lives easier.

• Don't make claims about our product that are not 100% genuine and verifiable. And we don't make promises for future functionality either beyond what's already in GitHub.

• Don't unfairly criticize or make false claims about our competitors. We will compare ourselves to them to help customers make a decision, and occasionally they will be a better solution for what a customer needs. And it's ok to have a sense of humor about this.

• Don't bombard customers with 'deals', pop-ups, and other dark patterns. These devalue our product in the long term.

• Don't pretend our customers are different from us – i.e. more gullible, more susceptible to marketing. We are an engineering-led team building products for other engineers. If you wouldn't like it, assume our customers wouldn't either.

• When doing cold outbound, do it tastefully. When was the last time you read the 8th email a company sent you and thought 'ok yes, I now want to use this product'? Keep it low-volume, thoughtful, and relevant.

Marketing vision

Beyond PostHog's company mission and strategy, we have some marketing-specific areas we want to focus on.

Things we want to be brilliant at

• Word of mouth mindset: We want to build a hugely successful company driven primarily by word of mouth, rather than paid ads or PR. This means being known for quality in all things we do.

• Helping our ideal customers be successful: Through our docs, tutorials, newsletter, emails, video, and beyond, we help our ideal customers be more successful, both generally in their goals as founders and engineers, and as users of PostHog.

• Launches: Our team ships a lot of products and features. We need launches to break through the noise and get noticed. This helps create the momentum products need to succeed.

• World-class documentation: We work with product teams to maintain up-to-date, high quality docs. We work with Website & Docs to ensure users can discover them. Doing this enables users to "self-serve," discover what they need, and get the most out of PostHog.

• Supporting YC founders: Lots of PostHog's DNA comes from Y Combinator. Their companies and founders are our ideal customers. We've done a great job being valuable to them (50%+ of batches using us) and want to continue to do so.

• Merch: We make the coolest tech company merch. Let's keep it this way.

• Events: We have been involved in some events, but we are still figuring out "the PostHog way" to do them. We don't just want to be a name on the sponsor list. We want to create superfans.

• Social media: Specifically Twitter, where we've seen good traction posting on James' personal account and the PostHog brand account. We have been posting more on LinkedIn to promote the newsletter. We don't use any other social media channels.

• Paid ads: We run a lot of paid ads on Google and others. It is fuel for everything else we are doing. We want to be good at this, but do it in a way unique to PostHog. We're not throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. We have a minimum brand bar we need to hit.

• Graphics: We're not the most visually focused team, but creating visuals and animations is a great way to communicate complex ideas. They also make for excellent content. Create a basic version and get the design pros (Cory, Lottie) to help.

• Developer influencers: We sponsor creators like Theo and Fireship to drive awareness and signups to PostHog. Many of the influencers we sponsor don't work out, but the ones that work drive great results.

• Billboards: Billboards are a way to get our brand in front of a lot of people.

Things we don't want to spend time on

• Optimizing marketing spend: We're more concerned about growing fast than being the most efficient marketing team. Go fast, run experiments, look for upside.

• Big, highly coordinated marketing campaigns: We can do them, but our reactive, short turnaround campaigns have been far more successful.

• PR: If we do word of mouth well, our community will be far more valuable/credible than an appearance in TechCrunch.

• Being cool and interesting people in online communities: There are a bunch of communities we could be more active in like Reddit and Discord, but we'd prefer to focus on our own community first.

• Conferences. We're not a natural fit for conferences and being a small fish in a big pond isn't really our style.

• Short-form video. We tried it, but it didn't work. Our audience might be there, but we're not flashy or dedicated enough to reach them.