Technically, most of what we do is demand capture – converting existing intent into action. That intent often comes from word of mouth or brand-driven awareness. That’s the real demand gen. But for the sake of clarity, we’re calling this "demand gen" because that's what people usually call it in the industry.
Why this team exists
We’re in a strong position today. We’ve got a healthy volume of high-quality inbound leads driven by word of mouth and general brand love/awareness. That won’t last forever.
There are two main reasons this team exists:
- Lead flow can’t be taken for granted. Inbound may look great now, but it takes 4–6 months to fix a pipeline once it starts to flatten. By the time you realize it's slowing, you’re already behind. This team will ensure we stay ahead of the curve.
- Cross-selling gets harder as we scale. In larger organizations, different teams often own different tools. One team might be responsible for analytics, another for feature flags. That makes it harder to grow within existing accounts. Smart, personalized ABM (account-based marketing) helps AEs and CSMs expand usage across teams.
Protecting the brand
Most demand gen teams will do literally anything to get leads, including stuff that while technically 'allowed' leaves a bad taste. We've worked hard to build a strong brand that people trust, in part because we don't engage in some of the bad practices our competitors might. This doesn't mean we will never do 'marketingy stuff' - there's a balance here - but there may be some things that literally everyone else does that we won't.
Some principles to make sure demand gen doesn't wreck the brand:
- We will never use 3rd party pixels or tracking scripts - we only use PostHog (yes as a performance marketer at PostHog you have to get your head around no Facebook pixel, Google Tag Manager etc.)
- Make it easy for users to sign up or book a demo - don't hide things behind forms and qualifying meetings
- Measure ROI and iterate – but don’t obsess over attribution and spend, just get stuff out there first that we think people will like
- Focus on growth of quality signups, not vanity metrics that don't convert to actual revenue because we bought some email lists
- Don't make unsubstantiated or vague product claims
- Cold outbound may work in future but it has to be a) honest, b) entertaining, and c) easy to opt out
- Be extremely conscientious about using personal data (users and non-users) for advertising purposes, even if technically allowed under our terms - think 'would I be ok if my data was used by [insert favorite devtool] in this way?'
- We are very transparent in this Handbook about how exactly we do demand gen, in a way that other companies are not
What we’re here to do
- Deliver a consistent stream of high-quality sales leads
- Use ABM to reach new people inside large accounts already using PostHog
- Build a system that scales to $500k/month in spend while keeping CAC payback best-in-class
- Ensure we’re working effectively with our external demand gen agency
Growth reviews
Brian runs monthly marketing growth reviews, which cover:
- Top-of-funnel and conversion metrics
- Paid channel performance
- Return on ad spend
- Specific campaigns, any new stuff we want to launch
What is a “lead”?
A lead is someone who has either:
- Signed up for PostHog (we score these to prioritize follow-up)
- Requested a demo through the site
We don’t gate content or the product. We don’t rely on shady tactics or clickbait. If someone wants to try the product or talk to us, we make it easy.
Channels we focus on
We put effort where the intent is highest:
- Google Search – high-converting, scalable
- LinkedIn – good for enterprise ABM
- Reddit – early traction, lots of room to grow
- X – low quality so far, but we're experimenting
ABM: Account-Based Marketing
ABM is about targeting specific companies and individuals based on context, rather than keywords. In order of priority, these are the kinds of scenarios we want to help with:
- A sales rep wants to cross-sell to another team inside an account, but they don’t have the contact
- We're in a competitive RFP process, and we want to subtly influence decision-makers (e.g. CFOs) who aren't talking to sales
- We’ve noticed patterns – like fast-growing companies in a certain vertical using PostHog – and want to find lookalikes and nudge them
We don’t need to wait for a hire to start this, but will probably bring someone on board once we've got it up and running to focus on this exclusively. Internal retargeting efforts (e.g. serving ads to users already in our product or org) fall under this umbrella too.
ABM process
Not reinventing the wheel - any company that runs paid ads follows this playbook basically:
- Get list of target companies from Sales
- Use Clay to get all names, emails, and roles from each target company
- Remove any existing PostHog users from each org
- Identify targets at each company
- Use Clay then get the personal email addresses for each person
- Upload these to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit to build a target audience
- Run ads targeted at these audiences
While we do not share existing user email addresses with third party ad platforms, we think it is reasonable to target non-PostHog users whose data is already in Clay (which in turn pulls from 130+ data sources).
How we work
- Re-use assets. Start with copy that comes from the product or what's already been written - this gets you about 75% of the way there (obviously there are lots of restrictions around character limits, needing multiple variations etc.)
- We don’t build design-heavy campaigns from scratch – we ask the design team for help only when it’s essential, but otherwise use our existing library of content.
- Generally don't outsource the creative thinking to the agency, use them more for execution and channel management.
- Brian does the stuff, in collaboration with the agency, Charles acts as editor for now and/or vibe checks our approach.