E255 | Navigating Growth and Retention: Lessons from PostHog’s CEO, James Hawkins

CHURN FM

Today on the show we have James Hawkins, CEO and co-founder of PostHog.

In this episode, James shares his experience navigating growth and retention at PostHog. He discusses his journey from working in outbound sales to leading a product-led growth startup and the importance of an inbound-focused approach.

We delve into how PostHog defined and focused on their ideal customer profile (ICP) of engineers, which not only shaped their product development and marketing strategies but also influenced their unique team structure, where every team member can code.

We wrapped up with James talking about the transition from self-hosted to cloud services and their strategic shift to usage-based pricing.

Mentioned Resources

• PostHog
• Arachnys
• Jira
• GitHub
• Hacker News
• Kubernetes
• AWS
• Cloudflare
• Zendesk

Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.

บท

1. E255 | Navigating Growth and Retention: Lessons from PostHog’s CEO, James Hawkins (00:00:00)

2. James' Transition from Outbound Sales to Product-Led Growth (00:02:34)

3. Defining and Focusing on an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) (00:05:31)

4. Team Structure and Culture (00:06:52)

5. Open Source and Initial Traction (00:08:41)

6. Transition from Self-Hosted to Cloud Services (00:10:14)

7. Usage-Based Pricing Model (00:15:16)

8. Retention and Churn Management (00:19:42)

9. Future Directions and Challenges (00:29:17)

10. Balancing Product Expansion and Core Competencies (00:33:24)