Andy Vandervell

In 2025, we interviewed 2,431 candidates and we observed two things: 1. Over 70% of the people we hired just applied and had no referral. 2. Candidates who asked the best questions were more likely to get hired. So we made this video about the questions we wish people asked more. Full vid on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=KVMZgY…

Generic job titles attract generic candidates. That’s fine for a lot of companies (and people) but if you don’t want to build a generic company, you might need to try something different. For example, at @posthog, we struggled with hiring a product marketer for months. We got hundreds of applications from people who had been product marketers at other companies, but their experience was a bit too corporate for us. It wasn’t until we changed the title to Developer Marketer that we started getting the right kind of candidates. Developers who could write, marketers who could code, the weird generalists we were looking for. We do something similar for lots of roles now: Docs writer → Developer who loves teaching Events marketer → Developer who organizes events Paid ads copywriter → Propagandist Social media manager → Social poster in chief (hiring btw, DM me) ClickHouse Operations Engineer → ClickHouse Rizzler (ok, I made this one up) Weirder job titles attracts people who want less traditional jobs. It gets the M- and T-shaped people we want more excited and likely to apply.

@Ed_Chester @evenstvr Two Towers is the best of the three.

@evenstvr Ew, no. Fellowship all day.

i genuinely think return of the king is the best film ever made and it’s a hill i’ll die on. btw if you disagree with me you’re wrong

2025 was the year we started to truly innovate at PostHog. we're going even further in 2026.

warning: actually non-meme content... @timgl and I jumped on some quick calls and ended up raising a $70 million series D led by Stripe. and of course we decided to announce this with the help of our newly created irl hedgehog Max. see reply for a link to a post on how we’re going to use the $$$, but here’s the tl;dr version: - we'll build even more products, like messaging, support, CRM, a lot more - all the tools + your data + Max AI = shareholder value

serious post incoming... i'm kind of obsessed with keeping teams small. the bigger we get, the easier it would be for us to slow down. once momentum is lost, it's lost forever. small teams have been an incredibly effective way for us to avoid this trap. to work, a small team has to: - be genuinely small. 3 to 6 people is ideal. each team should own an area of the company and behave like an early-stage startup. - run itself. they should decide on their own goals, make the final call on what features to ship, own growing revenue for their product, etc. - be flexible. moving people between teams, or creating new ones, should be trivial. no one should feel trapped working on an area of the product that doesn't interest them. small teams aren't without tradeoffs. there will be overlap sometimes, and ownership can be fuzzy, but these are things you can mitigate. the benefit is you create teams that are highly accountable, motivated, and move fast. and here's the best bit.. most of our competitors have 500+ employees but a single one of our small teams isn't competing with a company of 500 people they're competing with a team of 30 people in that company who can't move as fast because of all the bloat and process they deal with this means we can out ship companies that are much larger than us, despite still being relatively small. and we can maintain that advantage as we grow by keeping our teams small.

The mastermind behind one of the community's favorite products is coming to The Morning Maker Show. Get ready to hear @james406 journey, insights, and—of course—why he's not a fan of those "quick calls". Make sure to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss this one.

some non-obvious behaviors that will kill your startup: - not praising people for day-to-day work: companies are full of people who don't even do their core job well, so don't forget to recognize when people do - giving mostly positive feedback: a lack of constructive feedback is equally corrosive. inertia is the default mode of most companies. the day you stop giving each other constructive feedback is the day inertia becomes the default. - taking shortcuts when hiring: hiring is hard, so it becomes tempting to accept good enough candidates so it doesn't slow you down. this will slowly kill your culture. - not trusting teammates: you can't move fast without trust. this is also why compromising on hiring is a huge mistake. - sticking rigidly to plans: judge people on what they ship, how often they ship, and the impact of their work, not on whether they “stuck to the plan.” people who feel like they must stick to the plan won’t bias for impact. - waiting “one more week” to ship something: one more week sounds harmless enough, right? it’s just ONE week. but this attitude extrapolated out over months or years = way less momentum. the sooner you get something into the hands of users, the faster you will learn - not following-up with customers: when someone gives you feedback about your product, respond with something useful. failing to do so will teach them not to share more feedback in future.

@talhof8 @daltonc @posthog Yes. BAAs available with our Teams add-on. posthog.com/addons

@daltonc @posthog HIPAA compliant? @posthog

Posthog LLM observability is in beta

we look at a lot of different things, but for organic the main one is tracking conversion to either "consideration" or "intent". we define these using actions in posthog (e.g. visiting our docs, product pages, etc) would be considered showing intent. we then create funnel insights that track how specific organic content pages convert. this isn't something we do continuously, though, as we have a pretty good understanding of what does and doesn't work based on previous work. I wrote this in more detail here: #content-marketing-effectiveness" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">posthog.com/blog/posthog-m… not everything in that article is current, but it gives you the broad strokes.

Thanks a lot! I am very curious, how do you attribute effectiveness to the organic channel? Do you simply look at the native traffic acquisition report and look at organic as a whole ignoring branded / non-branded distinctions, or do you rely on something more advanced to figure out if non-branded efforts yield results per se?

@andyvan Quick Q: What's your preferred way of tracking SEO improvements at the individual page level at posthog? For example you are tweaking several variables on a blog page and want to track when the experiment started, what the experiment was, and whether it worked or not. Do you track all content pages in some grand sheet? Thanks.

@MrBenB PGR2 is the best arcade racing game of all time.

Bizzare Creations made seminal games that put multiple console gens in the limelight: F1 & F1 ‘97 on PS1 Metropolis Street Racer for Dreamcast PGR & PGR 3 showed the power of Xbox and Xbox 360 They were *the* driving game team and kickstarted Live Arcade with Geometry Wars

@IanVanagas Podcast before the meme coin, though. That’s the last out.

The new American dream: win the lottery, hit a parlay, go viral, launch a meme coin, scam your "audience" with said meme coin, host a podcast.

@meganeoleary @posthog call the number…

for a long time, i was a skeptic of saas billboard marketing. @posthog may have changed my mind this is *amazing*

@IanVanagas Words by Ian Vanagas, certified Homer bro.

Huge day for all the Homer bros out there

@t_blom I think this more or less what Starmer ran on. He may not have framed it like this, but it’s was / is implied.

When was the last time someone tried running on the promise of extreme competence in government? I’m pretty fed up of the left vs right nonsense. I just want an effective, technocratic government and civil service.

PostHog is becoming too powerful. It is allowing us to potentially drop Google Tag Manager.

@stuartbrameld @posthog You win. I’m off today, but when back at my desk I’ll be in touch with a merch code.

@posthog 1 Mr Blobby 2 1993 3 You once changed how you ingest session recording data to use S3 blob storage and called it Mr Blobby

Merch code to the first person to identify: 📺 This "iconic" (creepy) 90s UK TV personality 📆 The year they topped the UK singles chart at Christmas 📖 The significance of this character in PostHog lore (hint: the answer to the last one is in our public handbook)

Our newsletter, Product for Engineers, has just reached 20k subs! 🎉 These are the 5 most read issues we've published so far.. 42k reads – The magic of small engineering teams by @jtemperton: newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-magic-of… 24.4k reads – A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way by @LiorNn: newsletter.posthog.com/p/ab-testing-m… 17.8k reads – Beyond the 10x engineer by @IanVanagas: newsletter.posthog.com/p/beyond-the-1… 17.8k reads – Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers by Charles Cook: newsletter.posthog.com/p/hiring-and-m… 17k reads – Defining our ICP was the most important thing we ever did by @andyvan: newsletter.posthog.com/p/defining-our…