We do three types of sponsorships - commercial, charitable, and open source. Our current objectives with commercial sponsorships are to:
- Drive subscriptions to our newsletter Product for Engineers
- Enhance word of mouth - this is our most effective acquisition channel.
- Reach more relevant communities, especially those users that are not active on social media
- Make more effective use of our budget in less popular channels
Measuring attribution directly is basically impossible with sponsorship activities, so we try hard to make sure we are targeting the right channels by validating opportunities properly first. We like to make sure their target audience is in our ICP and test with smaller amounts when possible.
Commercial sponsorship
We currently sponsor a mixture of newsletters and influencers. Where possible, we default to an audience we know is as close to 100% engineers as possible, rather than a massive audience where engineers are a smaller %.
Charles and Ian have the contacts for these people if you want to email them.
Newsletters
We sponsor newsletters to drive subscriptions to our newsletter. We have tried to sponsor newsletter to drive awareness or subscriptions to the main PostHog app, but conversion is not good enough for it to be worth it.
As for measuring newsletter conversion, Substack's attribution sucks. To measure the success of a newsletter sponsorship, we take the cost and divide the difference between subscribers one day before the ad runs with subscribers two days after. This gives us a very rough estimate of cost per subscriber. If you're on the PostHog team, you can see a full list of the ads we have run and this calculation on our sponsorship result spreadsheet.
Some newsletters we like working with and sponsoring include:
- Pointer
- Bytes, React newsletter (same publisher for both)
- Quastor
- Tech Lead Digest, Programming Digest (same publisher for both)
- Software Lead Weekly
- Architecture Notes
- React Status, Frontend Focus, Node Weekly (same publisher)
- The .NET Weekly
- hackernewsletter
Smaller newsletters that we also have supported:
- Level Up
- Console
- FOSS Weekly (same publisher as Console)
- Fullstack Bulletin
Our copy is roughly:
Product for Engineers: A newsletter helping flex your product muscles Product for Engineers is PostHog’s newsletter dedicated to helping engineers improve their product skills. Learn how to talk to users, build new features users love, and find product market fit. Subscribe for free to get curated advice on building great products, lessons (and mistakes) from building PostHog, and deep dives into the strategies of top startups.
Influencers
We are sponsoring Theo. He is a great partner for us. His audience is ideal, he is doing YouTube right, and he's a PostHog user.
We are also experimenting with other influencers, specifically in short-form video. We've tried YouTube a couple of times but they were extremely expensive and the audience isn't technical enough. We think short-form video could provide better ROI.
We make sure to tell these influencers to have people mention them on signup. We then measure their impact by looking at where people hear about us.
Podcasts
We've sponsored podcasts one-off in the past, but have no plans to do them again at the moment. They include:
Copy bank
We maintain a sheet here of various types and lengths of copy that we use for our campaigns - if you end up creating new copy, please add it to this sheet!
Charitable sponsorship
We are looking to partner with charities who are aligned with our mission of increasing the number of successful products in the world. These partners are likely to focus on giving greater access to under-represented groups in tech.
We currently sponsor:
- Django Girls - $500/month
- Transtech - $390/month
Open source sponsorship
PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform built on top of many other amazing open-source projects. We believe in open-source and the open-core model. However, many open-source projects go underfunded.
We are investing in open-source, not just as a business, but directly via sponsorship in key projects we benefit from every day. We're doing this for three reasons:
- We want valuable open-source projects to continue to be maintained and enhanced
- We fundamentally rely on some open-source projects, and it's essential they continue to be maintained and enhanced
- We believe the PostHog brand will benefit from the sponsorship
In addition to sponsoring key projects, we also provide a $100/month budget for every team member to sponsor projects that have helped them.
Projects we sponsor regularly
| Project we use | Author | Why does PostHog sponsor | Sponsored via | Amount/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| rrweb | yz-yu | Powers our session recording functionality | Open Collective | $1000 |
| graphile/worker | benjie | Powering scheduled jobs, retries and other logic for the plugin-server | GitHub Sponsors | $100 |
| Django REST Framework | encode | Powers the PostHog REST APIs | Directly | $400 |
| Webdriver manager for python | SergeyPirogov | Powers parts of our subscriptions and exports | GitHub Sponsors | $15 |
| alex | wooorm | We use it for improving the content we write | GitHub Sponsors | $5 |
| Caddy | mholt | We recommend it as a reverse proxy. | GitHub Sponsors | $50 |
| Tiptap | ueberdosis | The headless editor framework for web artisans. | GitHub Sponsors | $149 |
Request sponsorship
If you know of a project that is fundamentally important to PostHog, add the project to this page via a PR and tag Charles. If we decide to sponsor, we can set up the sponsorship via either Open Collective or GitHub. To get an invite to Open Collective, create an account first with your posthog.com email address and then ask Charles to invite you.
Anyone on the PostHog team can do this!