We do three types of sponsorships - commercial, charitable, and open source. Our objectives with commercial sponsorships are to:
- 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. One way we do this is to ask engineers on the team who are close to our target user for their personal recommendations for content they know and like.
Developer influencers
We are trying out developer influencers as a new channel in Q4 2022 to figure out if this could be a fruitful channel for us to reach a new audience. We are working with Yard, an agency, to partner with YouTube creators with relevant audiences. If this experiment goes well, we will do more here (and update this page with what we've learned does and doesn't work well).
Commercial sponsorship
We currently sponsor a mixture of newsletters and podcasts. We did a big burst of sponsorship activity in Q2 and Q3, and are now just doing a small number of ongoing newsletter sponsorships.
You can view the sponsorship tracker here (internally public only).
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 | GitHub Sponsors | $100 |
| 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 |
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.