Brand matters to us, greatly. It's one of the four major reasons people get recommended PostHog so directly helps us grow. Everyone else is largely terrible at it so it's a massive opportunity to build a long term advantage as a company, and frankly it's fun. It's every interaction we have with our users and comes from how the company itself is designed. It's more than hedgehogs:
The harsh truth of cat videos
When it comes to attention on the internet, you are competing with cat videos and TikTok, not B2B SaaS competitors. Be realistic - if it's not actually funny (and it's "corporate try hard") then it's not good enough. At one point we realized we were getting cutesy - "ooh a hedgehog". That's not interesting enough for people outside PostHog, even if we think it's cool.
It is thus encouraged to be rogue / sarcastic / meme-y / unhinged / weird.
Our competitors are (i) more defensive and self-interested in their approach (focused on optimizing revenue growth), and (ii) more boring. Let's keep it that way. If we have fun, we'll stick it out longer and will win in the long term.
Brand first
We should always optimize to not piss users off unless they're being totally, extremely unreasonable, in which case figure out how to be the bigger person. Even when that costs us revenue.
For example, we should refund customers when they screw up their tracking and get a shock bill.
Pavlovian merch response
Give it out to people who say nice things about us. That'll create an army of developer warriors fighting for PostHog on the internet!
Breaking bad news
Sometimes you may need to tell customers something they don't want to hear - e.g. "we don't have X planned in our roadmap". Instead of a vague "I'll share this feedback" type response, be specific and give context like "Hey we don't have that planned because we're focused on X, Y, Z at the moment. If you want to suggest it to the wider team, you can do so by X".
Karma
Be helpful to other companies. We are here to increase the number of successful companies in the world – especially those with high potential that are putting in the work, like YC current batch ones. For example, if a YC company reaches out, take them seriously and buy their product (if it's genuinely valuable and safe to do so) or give direct feedback if not.
Hacker News premortem
Hacker News is a very intensely logical and critical place – in a good and bad way. If you are doing something think, "How would this go down on Hacker News?" If the answer is "poorly" then change it. This rule of thumb applies to everything, not just stuff literally getting posted there.
Brand assets
We keep a comprehensive list of brand assets and guidelines for their use on the dedicated brand assets page.