How PostHog Markets to Developers Without Acting Like a SaaS Company

Howdy, marketer!

I recently sat down with Ian Vanagas, the editorial lead at PostHog - the person who runs the content team and has been deeply embedded in how the company thinks about marketing.

And it turns out, their entire strategy is built on doing the exact opposite of what you'd expect from an enterprise software company. 

They don't care about blog conversion rates, they publish their entire internal company handbook on the internet for anyone to read, and they literally pay two full-time illustrators to draw a hedgehog for their ad campaigns and web designs.

The story isn’t that they do these things now because “they’ve made it,” no, these contrarian choices are precisely what has driven their growth.

Today's Treasure Trove

• What Is PostHog?

• Target Audience

• The Transparent Handbook

• The Anti-SaaS Aesthetic

• Content Strategy

• Influencer Marketing 

• Campaigns PostHog Could Do Next: 

  • The "Build in Public" Series.

  • LinkedIn Thought Leadership for Engineering Leader …

• Wrap Up

What Is PostHog?

Some stats: 

Instagram: 6.1K followers

LinkedIn: 40.3K followers

X (Twitter): 18.7K followers

PostHog is a product analytics platform built for developers and engineering teams. They're essentially the all-in-one product OS for teams who want to understand how their product is being used without stitching together five different tools.

The numbers on their social media don't fully capture the weight they carry in dev communities.

Target Audience

PostHog is an engineering-led company and the founders, James and Tim, came out of Y Combinator building for the exact type of person they now sell to. 

Their primary audience is developers, who are "really skeptical" of traditional marketing. 

They don't respond to hype. They don't want to book a demo to see pricing. They will absolutely read your docs before they talk to a human. 

The secondary positioning is around startups, specifically early-stage YC companies. Remarkably, about 50% of YC batches use them.

This positioning makes sense because founders who adopt PostHog early are more likely to stick around as they scale, and the YC brand halo gives PostHog credibility in a very specific, influential community.

The Transparent Handbook

PostHog’s actual handbook - the one that covers hiring processes, marketing strategy, how they run sales, company goals - is public on their website and has been since the very beginning.

This started as a credibility move.

Two founders coming out of YC needed to look more like a real company. But it has evolved into a genuine expression of the "open source" ethos they carry beyond just code.

The handbook is marketing, even though it doesn't feel like marketing. It builds trust with customers who can see how the company thinks. And it signals, at every level, that PostHog isn't hiding anything.

This is a huge green flag for the “skeptical” target audience.

A handful of companies do this (Resend and GitLab are the two most commonly cited examples), but it's still rare enough that it functions as a genuine differentiator.

The Anti-SaaS Aesthetic

If you look at the typical landscape of B2B software, it is a sea of minimal, blue-toned websites featuring abstract vector graphics of people pointing at floating charts. Bland.

But PostHog actively refuses to blend in. They have invested in a unique visual identity centered around their mascot, Max the Hedgehog.

PostHog has two full-time illustrators. Every email, every onboarding flow, every paid ad, every newsletter issue gets custom artwork featuring Max - their hedgehog mascot.

When they were revamping their paid Google ads, the internal filter was simple: if this could have been written by any other SaaS company, they didn't want to run it. 

That's actually a useful creative brief - "is this distinctly us?" 

Today, PostHog's visual and verbal identity is genuinely hard to mistake for anyone else's. 

By injecting personality and slight weirdness into their brand, they guarantee that every single touchpoint is memorable. 

Content Strategy

PostHog publishes a newsletter, blog posts, video content, and documentation - and what ties it all together is the opinionated voice.

The content that performs best for them, reliably, is the stuff that takes a controversial stance on how startups or engineering teams should operate. 

A newsletter issue called "Collaboration Sucks" - which argued that well-meaning Slack comments on others' work can actually undermine autonomy and slow things down - went significantly more viral than expected.

What's interesting about how this content gets made is how unstructured the process is. They don't have a weekly brainstorm or a formal editorial calendar in the way you'd expect. 

A lot of the best pieces come from execs - James, the co-CEO, and Charles, who oversees go-to-market - writing things they actually believe. 

The marketing team might nudge them or help develop an idea, but it's not top-down assigned content. It's bottom-up conviction.

They also don't have a formal tone of voice guide. Individual writers keep their own voices. Creative license has really paid off here.

Influencer Marketing 

This is the most developed paid channel PostHog runs right now, and they're actively doubling down on influencer marketing.

Their focus is long-form YouTube creators in the developer and software engineering space. Theo (T3, one of the biggest developer voices on YouTube) and Fireship (the largest software dev channel on the platform), and JS Mastery are some of the major creators they have collaborated with. 

The best-performing partnerships tend to be with creators who are already PostHog users, as the authenticity comes through and helps to convert.

They've experimented with multiple formats: standard mid-roll ad spots, full integrated tutorials where the creator builds an app using PostHog, and purely organic mentions where a creator just finds value in something they wrote and makes a video about it. 

All three have worked at different times.

The last one is effectively free marketing, and it's hard to replicate but worth building toward.

The metric they measure the most is signups. 

CPMs matter for reach, but a campaign that gets views and drives zero signups is a failure. A campaign that drives even a handful of signups over a sustained period is worth reinvesting in.

Campaigns PostHog Could Do Next: 

The "Build in Public" Series. 

PostHog literally ships features, debates internally, and documents everything publicly. A structured "build in public" video series on Instagram - going deeper than a changelog, more like a fly-on-the-wall look at how a feature gets built from customer request to launch - would be a genuine differentiator for a developer audience that respects transparency. It's also extremely hard to fake if you're a competitor trying to replicate it.

LinkedIn Thought Leadership for Engineering Leaders. 

LinkedIn is where engineering VPs, CTOs, and technical co-founders at growth-stage startups spend time. A systematic effort to develop PostHog voices on LinkedIn - focused on product-led growth, engineering culture, and startup ops - would extend their word-of-mouth machine into a new, high-intent audience.

Wrap Up

PostHog's success is a direct result of knowing exactly who their customer is and, more importantly, respecting how that customer wants to be spoken to. 

It is building a brand that developers trust. Their marketing consistency is what compounds over time into the kind of brand that drives word-of-mouth signups without a marketing funnel.

It proves that you just need to build a great product, tell the truth, and maybe hire a really good illustrator.

✌️,

Tom from Marketer Gems