Our mission
Equip every developer to build successful products.
A few words
On the surface, PostHog's products are a bunch of different SaaS tools, which work together better than anyone else’s. However, the secret to our success is our long term plan: automate how entire businesses operate by building around the unit they operate on - their customer data.
Critical to making this happen is to deliver each tool without compromise - better, cheaper and with all the customer context in one place. The way to achieve this is very simple - shipping every product that teams use, from day one when there are just two technical cofounders. This is because if we get in with these developers, we’re upstream of every need they’ll have. The end result is that we can offer all the products in one place, with no need to charge as much as everyone else for each one, and most importantly with perfect quality customer data. An actual perfect 360 customer view.
Even so, it’s right to question whether this actually does any good for the world. Are we really in need of better software? And beyond those in the most competitive industries, will perfect customer data actually make a difference to an everyday person’s ability to build a successful business?
No and not really. However, that misses the point, unless you understand the secret master plan alluded to below. The strategy of PostHog is to get early stage software teams to use every single customer related product inside our platform, where we can easily generate a perfect customer data record. This means we can learn to configure and automate how all of these tools work. We can simplify the experience of running a business.
Then with each successive product, we can reach a wider and wider market and further simplify the experience of running a business until anyone can do it.
I’d like to address a repeated argument against shipping multiple products, let alone all of them.
You can build more than a product or two
The world of tech is changing fast.
First, there’s just more money at better valuations than when this advice was created. Software companies, us included, have more leverage than ever before - with capital deployed well, we can do more than our predecessors.
Second, software development is far quicker.
Third, we’ve managed this very well so far.
Our strategy
1. Be the source of truth for customer and product data
Building a successful product is hard; doing so when you don't understand your customers is even harder. It's wild that no one has already provided a complete customer record. This has happened because the entire industry has focused on integration instead of consolidation.
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 they collect, simply because they are misused and divorced from the source of truth. Every company winds up with a huge mess of data spaghetti, with their business logic still spread across dozens or hundreds of tools.
We provide customer infrastructure - by providing every tool related to customer data in one place, we can:
- Enhance the utility of all the tools when used together
- Increase trust in data by eliminating complex data stacks
- Automate everything better than anyone else can, by using AI across this wider data context
- Continue to provide all the tools companies need as they grow
2. Provide every tool needed to build successful products
We aim to offer every tool software teams need to find, acquire, understand, support and sell to users so they can improve their product experience.
By doing this, we wind up with the perfect customer data record. No integrations needed.
We can then get our AI to work across all of them together, whilst making every individual tool cheaper than the rest of the market - since we provide so many we can charge less.
3. Get in first
Since developers exist first in a startup, by getting in with them early, we are naturally upstream of every other tool they might have considered using. Although anyone can pick up our products (and lots of mature companies certainly do), this means we can best deliver customer infrastructure to early stage companies, and so should focus there by default.
Once we land a customer, we then let them pull us upmarket as they grow. But not before. We don't want to hire a big enterprise sales team and go upmarket before our existing customers are there. This keeps us efficient and able to stay focused on product.
Secret master plan
- Ship every tool that small software businesses need that relate to their customer data. We call this customer infrastructure. It's the tools and customer data together.
- Automate all of these tools - this is Max AI.
- (not here yet) Expand the range of products to meet the needs of teams that aren't software-focused.