Mission
“Help engineers build better products"
Context
PostHog helps engineers be better at product through a suite of tools that we call a “Product OS” (product analytics, session recordings, feature flags, experiments, and a lightweight CDP). We build for and sell to product engineers at early stage to high-growth startups. Our competitors provide point solutions focused on (non-technical) product managers. Focusing on engineers enables us to get in earlier and empower the engineer to own product outcomes - owning the market for product tools.
We now add more companies each week than any closed-source SaaS rival, and we're the open-source standard for all our applications. Financially, we're in a great position - default alive, and profitable within the next 12 months.
Strategy
Provide every tool needed for evaluating feature success.
The best use of an engineer's time is to ship features that have an impact on customers. Currently, this requires a large number of tools, product managers and in some cases, a data team to pull all the insights together. By integrating all these tools we can make this easy - no integration needed, no extra vendors, no extra javascript, and workflows to guide engineers through feature development.
Get in first.
By already being used by our customers, we’re the default for each additional tool they add. It’s the technical co-founder and early engineers building the MVP and integrating the first product tools, not PMs. By focusing on engineers we can be their preferred choice and get in first. Additionally, we can ladder our tools - for example, session recording is used much earlier in the life cycle of the product than others like the CDPs helping us get in earlier than competing products.
Be the source of truth for customer and product data.
Traditionally, as companies scale their data warehouse becomes the source of truth and non-warehouse native tools (like product analytics) become less relevant as people lose trust in the data in them. However, by providing the data and data-intense tools in one place, we can enhance the power of our products (like product analytics), provide increased trust, and enable companies to build on top of the warehouse itself as they see fit, all without them having to setup a complex stack.
2026 vision
Where do we want to get to?
We are the first product tool that technical founders integrate into their product. We scale with them from their first user; to their first dollar; to 1000 person engineering orgs; IPO; and beyond. The best product people don't want to join a company that's not using PostHog.
We become the customer's data warehouse and pipelines. We enable other users throughout the org to use customer and product data with our applications that come out of the box.
We could go public with $100M ARR from the following:
1) 1,000 companies building successful products with us, paying $25K each 2) 500 companies building successful products with us, paying $50K each 3) 50 companies building successful products with us, paying $1M each
We are fully focused on high-growth self-serve startups to nail (1) and (2), as we believe this will enable the most successful products in the world and reduces our reliance on a handful of very large customers.
This will give us the strong brand, product, and financial position to move into (3) if we want to in the future. However this won't be something we start looking at until 2024 at least.
2023 vision
- Creating workflows around evaluating features to automate a lot of traditional Product Management work
- We are the only company that can do this because we provide all the tools in one
- Improve the core UX to be more focused on product engineers:
- A slick experience
- More powerful querying than our competitors can offer (for example, SQL access) that answers the long tail of questions
- PostHog 3000 UX = a design uplift including dark mode to encourage more word of mouth
- Launch product analytics, session recordings, feature flags, experiments, a warehouse and a CDP each as full standalone products
- Enables us to sell each product individually at the best rate in the market then expand to generate a higher order value overall. This means no one can outcompete.
- Individual product pricing helps us understand where to double down and which feedback to prioritize.
- Builds trust in the individual products as being 1st class.
- The product should have optional deep integrations with the other tools to promote cross-activation and push the capabilities past competing standalone products.
- Become known as the first tool that engineers add to their product
- Work on top-of-funnel growth in high potential startups (whereas last year we primarily focused on monetization of high growth startups)
- Create a more precise approach to this (growth model / CS focus / marketing focus)
This quarter - quarterly goals
We set small team quarterly goals to keep us on track.
Ideal customer persona (ICP)
See our ideal customer persona.