PostHog Handbook Library / Marketing

1,595 words. Estimated reading time: 8 min.

# Influencers

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. Our approach
2. Creator lifecycle
3. Sourcing and evaluating influencers
4. Working with agencies
5. Negotiating with influencers
6. Working with PMMs
7. What should the placement actually look like?
8. Measuring impact

We work with creators and influencers to make content about PostHog and sponsor placements that drive awareness and sign ups.

We're always open to inbound proposals. If you'd like to collaborate with us, email Adlet Smykov directly – we love seeing thoughtful ideas.

### Our approach

Influencer marketing at PostHog is relationship building. We look for long-term partnerships with people our ICP already trusts, and the best creators are usually users first: we'd rather work with someone who genuinely likes PostHog than someone with a much larger audience and no connection to the product.

We also optimize for recurring collaborations over one-off sponsorships. When a creator works with us across several launches, PostHog becomes a natural part of their story, which beats any single ad read.

### Creator lifecycle

A sponsorship is the start of a relationship. The ideal lifecycle looks something like:

Discover → Evaluate → Outreach → First collaboration → Feedback → Repeat collaboration → Long-term partnership

Most of the value shows up in the later stages, so it's worth investing early in creators you can see yourself working with again across launches.

### Sourcing and evaluating influencers

- You can find new influencers by looking at the creators engineers share or mention internally, searching for ones who have made relevant videos, looking at the recommendations of ones we've already sponsored, inbound, and Kuli (an AI-powered influencer discovery tool).

Don't limit yourself to individual creators. Great partnerships often come from other places too:

- recommendations from existing creator partners
- agencies
- conferences and IRL events
- founders building interesting products
- people actively sharing what they've built with PostHog

The creator economy is surprisingly small. Building a good reputation compounds over time, so investing in long-term relationships is usually more valuable than constantly sourcing new creators.

When you're evaluating a specific creator:

- Their audience needs to be relevant to us, ideally targeting our ICP, but broadly engineers and founders.

- Even within this group, there are some categories to avoid like job interview prep, career growth, low-level engineering, and heavy computer science focus. Try to find web or mobile developers, product engineers, startup founders, and indiehackers instead.

- The channel is growing, gaining in subscriber growth rate and views. Use Social Blade to see this.

- They should have engaged audiences. Strong Twitter or Discord communities are good signs as well as view to like/comment ratios:
- Weak: 0.001 comment/view, 0.02 like/view
- Average: 0.001–0.002 comment/view, 0.02–0.03 like/view
- Good: 0.002–0.005 comment/view, 0.03–0.05 like/view
- Excellent: 0.005+ comment/view, 0.05+ like/view

- Above 5k views per video. Anything below this is just not worth your time. This number will likely grow over time. Larger influencers, although they charge a lot more, are often more efficient, so we don't have an upper limit for size.

Formats behave differently too. Long-form YouTube is still our strongest acquisition channel, while podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, and other short-form content are areas we're still figuring out. Don't expect direct sign ups from every format – short-form often does more for awareness, education, or reaching audiences we wouldn't get in front of otherwise.

### Working with agencies

We increasingly work with agencies to help scale sourcing and relationship management.

Fundlevel, a Canadian agency, is a long-term partner we really enjoy working with.

Agencies are particularly useful when:

- expanding into new regions
- testing new creator categories
- increasing the number of collaborations without increasing internal workload

They're less useful for strategic partnerships or flagship creators, where a direct relationship with PostHog matters more. Treat them as an extension of the team.

### Negotiating with influencers

- Make sure you know what type of slot it is: pre-roll, mid-roll, end-roll, integration.

- Ask for examples of other ad slots they've run to judge the quality of ad read.

- For creators we've never worked with, the initial quote is often negotiable. Understand the value of the placement before agreeing on a price, and use our pricing model as a reference rather than treating the first quote as fixed. Feel free to update the model if you think it's not accurate.

- Make sure the link is in the top 3 lines of the description.

- We pay invoices net 30 (30 days after they've sent them to us).

### Working with PMMs

Influencer marketing works best when we're involved early. If a big launch is coming and the dates are known, post in the #influence-wrangling channel in Slack a month ahead (or as soon as you can). That gives us time to prep creators, fit into their schedules, and come up with a story that works the new product into their content naturally.

For launches, we generally need:

- product context
- messaging
- demo access
- visuals
- launch timelines
- someone available to answer technical questions

### What should the placement actually look like?

- Make a judgement call on whether to use a unique link set up with Dub (like `https://go.posthog.com/sponsored`) to point to specific UTMs unique to each video or an influencer-specific link using `posthog.com` redirects (like `posthog.com/theo`) to the same UTMs across videos. These links should have `utm_source` and `utm_campaign` set to the influencer and campaign name.

- Make sure they tell their audience to "mention them on sign up" or "say that they heard about PostHog from them" so we can track the attribution.

- We generally let influencers decide what the ad read is like so it best fits their audience. We can provide guidance on what to talk about though – our brand foundations go deeper, but the key points to get right:
- The frame everything should ladder up to: PostHog makes _your_ product self-driving – it puts all your product's data in one place, turns it into signals, and uses agents to find problems and opportunities and ship the fix. Keep the creator's product (or their viewers' products) as the thing that becomes self-driving; avoid "PostHog is self-driving software," which centers us instead of the outcome.
- PostHog is the platform for self-driving products – a suite of tools that gives developers (and their AI agents) everything they need to build successful products. Don't call it "an analytics platform" (we've grown well beyond that) or pitch it as a single product.
- Be specific rather than benefits-y. Developers can smell marketing fluff instantly, so "it does X" beats "it empowers you to unlock X."
- The suite spans product analytics, web analytics, session replay, error tracking, experimentation, feature flags, AI observability, and surveys. There's also a CDP for sending data to 50+ destinations and a data warehouse that connects to external sources like your database, Stripe, or Hubspot so you can query them with SQL (or no-code insights) alongside your product data.
- All of this exists to help founders and engineers debug their product, understand their customers, and ship a more successful product faster.
- There's a generous free tier for every tool – you can sign up and start using all of them for free right away, and 90% of users stay on PostHog's free tier.
- Setup is simple: install an SDK or paste a snippet into your site header, and we autocapture data like pageviews, clicks, and sessions. There are SDKs for all the popular backend languages too – Python, Node, Go, and so on.

- There are a handful of video assets for them to use here. Feel free to add more, but also suggest the website and in-app as sources.

- Ideally, a placement should relate to ongoing marketing efforts, like a new product launch, product push, or pricing change.

### Measuring impact

Some metrics we look at for individual videos include:

- CPM (cost per thousand views)
- Unique sessions from the custom link (or clicks if you're using a Dub link)
- Sign ups, either from converting from sessions or who mentioned the influencer on sign up

We track these on our marketing budget and spending spreadsheet. For a per-influencer and per-video breakdown, HogWatch joins that sheet with live sign up attribution and YouTube view counts. We also have an influencer marketing performance dashboard in PostHog that can help you get an overall view of different influencers' performance.

Attributed sign ups aren't the whole picture though. Some partnerships are valuable because they:

- introduce us to new audiences
- build long-term brand affinity
- lead to future collaborations
- generate clips that can be reused across channels
- strengthen relationships with creators or platforms
- are just really cool and worth doing for taste/vibes

### Relationship management

We treat creators as people, not inventory. Good partnerships take months or years to build.

- Reply quickly.
- Give thoughtful feedback.
- Celebrate good work.
- Stay in touch between campaigns.
- Meet creators in person when it makes sense.

The aim is for creators to think of PostHog first when they have a new idea, and to feel comfortable bringing us the weird ones.

### Events and conferences

Conferences pay off through the people you meet more than the talks. In 2026 we've been to Stripe Sessions and VidCon, and both helped us meet the right people and grow our creator roster.

The biggest benefits usually come from:

- meeting creators
- meeting agencies
- meeting platform teams
- strengthening existing relationships
- making introductions that continue after the event

If possible, prioritize speaking, hosting dinners, or organizing meetups over just attending.

### Current experiments

We're constantly experimenting with new distribution channels. Current areas we're exploring include:

- podcasts
- Instagram & TikTok creators
- startup founders as creators
- agency partnerships
- creator dinners and other IRL events

Not every experiment will work, and that's fine. Document the results and share what you've learned so the next person doesn't have to repeat the same experiment.

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

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

Content hash: `03020ed610ad5a22`

Static reader notes

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