How Brainboard raised conversion rates by 350% with PostHog
Brainboard is a DevOps platform which enables cloud architects and engineers to visually design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructures collaboratively. Since joining the Y Combinator W22 batch Brainboard has helped users build over 75,000 architectures, and enabled thousands of platform engineers to cut delivery times by up to 50%.
Typical for a YC start-up, Brainboard’s team had ambitious goals for what they wanted to achieve with their product data. The team considered many different tools before ultimately choosing PostHog.
“We tried Segment, Metabase, Mixpanel, Datadog and more,” says Stephane Boghossian, Brainboard’s Growth Architect. “But all of them were built for just a single type of users, like marketing or product.”
“PostHog was the only one which enabled everyone to both find insights and make data-driven changes,” agreed Jeremy Albinet, Brainboard’s CTO. “The marketing team can use PostHog for our website and landing pages, but my R&D team can manage the product with it too.”
“PostHog is the only tool that allows me to actually make changes and measure if they work or not. Other tools have nice graphs and such, but you can't do actionable things with them. You can with PostHog.”
Creating an internal source of truth for all teams
While PostHog has become the internal source of truth for every team at Brainboard, each one appreciates it for different reasons and has different motivations.
“I love PostHog because it's so easy to deploy and work with,” says Jeremy, who initially tested a hobby deployment before deciding to move forward. “In just a few hours I already had noticeable trends and I thought, OK, this is awesome; it’s fast; this is the tool I want.”
“I even wrote an app to push information between PostHog and Hubspot so the sales team can compute user scores and track usage too.”
Armed with this information about its users, Brainboard has developed robust personas and ICP which guide work across every level of the organization — from what features to build, to which markets and channels to prioritize.
“All of us at Brainboard use PostHog every day,” says Stephane. “It’s not just for product analytics, or experimentation, or dashboards. It’s all of it, across every team, using data to make decisions and build better products.”
Combining analytics, OKRs, and experiments
As infrastructure specialists, Brainboard unsurprisingly decided to self-host PostHog and manage its own deployment. Soon afterward, the team started building insights and centralizing OKRs and other important metrics into company dashboards.
“For example, we've set up a funnel which tracks MQLs, to PQLs, to SQLs, and so on," says Stephane. "That, along with tracking website visits, sign-ups, breakdown per industry, errors, feedback, and so on, means we understand the entire user journey.”
Tracking the conversion of website visitors to sign-ups is especially useful for Brainboard’s growth team, who run regular experiments to optimize performance. These constant iterations have unlocked steady gains for Brainboard, more than tripling the conversion rate.
“Our website is designed for desktop users, but PostHog helped us identify and prioritize the pages which users visited on mobile,” says Stephane. “We improved those pages and that raised our conversion rate on mobile from 12% to 17%.”
“On desktop, our conversion rate was around 20% — but we raised that to 70% by running experiments with our layouts, CTAs and copy and tracking the results with PostHog.”
