Sponsorship

We do three types of sponsorships - commercial, charitable, and open source.

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

Our current objectives with commercial sponsorships are to:

1. Drive subscriptions to our newsletter Product for Engineers
2. Create awareness, enhance word of mouth, and drive signups to PostHog

To do this, we sponsor a mixture of newsletter and influencer sponsorships. 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 %.

We track these sponsorships in our marketing budget and spending spreadsheet.

Ian Vanagas has the contacts for these people if you want them.

Newsletters

We sponsor newsletters to drive subscriptions to our newsletter. We have tried to sponsor newsletter to drive awareness or sign ups 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. We instead create a custom link for each campaign using Dub.co and calculate cost per click to measure success.

We look for newsletters that focus on software development and engineering. We don't care about list size or reach as much as we care about clickthrough rate (you can ask for their average CTR). Some 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
• Unzip
• Internal Tech Emails
• This Week in React

Smaller newsletters that we also have supported:

• Level Up
• Console
• FOSS Weekly (same publisher as Console)
• Fullstack Bulletin
• freek.dev

Newsletter sponsorship content

Titles that work well include:

• Product for Engineers: A newsletter helping flex your product muscles
• Product for Engineers: The first newsletter dedicated to product engineers

The main copy is some variation of:

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.

We have also found that linking to an article directly converts better than just a generic "subscribe to our newsletter" link.

If you need images, there is a collection of many sizes of them in Figma.

Influencers

We sponsor influencers to drive awareness and signups to PostHog. We look for ones who are already PostHog users and have large, engaged audiences (on social, Discord, YouTube comments).

We find that spending more money on larger influencers converts better than sponsoring many smaller ones. We experimented with short-form video, but it was difficult to measure and didn't convert well.

Some of the influencers we sponsor include:

• Theo. He is a great partner for us. His audience is ideal, he is doing YouTube right, and he's a PostHog user.

• Fireship

• Chris Raroque

We measure impact by looking at clicks on the custom link as well as where people hear about us on signup. This is tracked between PostHog and our marketing budget and spending spreadsheet.

Influencer sponsorship content

As guidance for what the ad should look like, we ask the following:

• Be at least 45 seconds long
• Be included in the first 2 minutes of the video
• Custom link that redirects to UTM URL in the top 3 lines of the description
• Mention you heard about PostHog from them

Beyond this, we are flexible and suggest that influencers talk about how they use PostHog.

Podcasts

We've sponsored podcasts one-off in the past, but have no plans to do them again at the moment. They include:

• Lenny's Podcast
• Data Engineering podcast

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:

1. We want valuable open-source projects to continue to be maintained and enhanced
2. We fundamentally rely on some open-source projects, and it's essential they continue to be maintained and enhanced
3. 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

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!