How PostHog Guarantees Virality

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, where we’ve worked with brands like BuzzFeed and Clay to understand their audience, build trust and deliver measurable outcomes through content-led growth.

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How PostHog guarantees virality

Most B2B brands are trapped in an endless cycle of hoping to go viral. They craft the perfect LinkedIn post, optimise for SEO and pray their content wins the algorithm lottery.

The problem is, you can't build a business on hoping to get lucky.

Owned Media Revelation

You're essentially gambling your marketing success on forces completely outside your control.

PostHog recognised this fundamental flaw in the typical B2B content strategy. Instead of hoping for viral moments, they decided to create them. Their newsletter became their own personal media outlet, delivering guaranteed front-page-level distribution every time they hit ‘Send’.

100,000 engaged subscribers equals the reach of a major viral moment. But unlike hoping to trend on Hacker News, PostHog can access this audience whenever they want. They publish valuable insights fortnightly, directly to engineers and founders who've specifically chosen to hear from them.

That difference, between hoping for viral distribution and owning it, changes everything about how you approach content marketing.

How They Built It

Creating a newsletter that people actually want to read requires solving two challenges. First, producing genuinely valuable content, and second, getting it in front of enough of the right people.

PostHog cracked both through a combination of editorial rigour and distribution savvy.

"Product for Engineers" delivers exactly what the name promises. Instead of thinly veiled product marketing, each issue tackles complex technical topics with the kind of depth you'd expect from engineers talking to other engineers. Recent issues have covered AI coding mistakes to avoid, product development lessons learned from building at scale and other startup insights that only come from actually doing the work.

The content philosophy is ruthlessly simple. Create something that would be valuable even if PostHog didn't exist. No sales pitches. No product updates disguised as thought leadership. Just engineers sharing what they've learned with other engineers. To give you an idea of what I mean, guess which software they use to manage article drafts. Notion? Google Docs? Apple Notes? Nope. Github.

They treat their newsletter content like any other product they're building. This isn't just about using familiar tools, it shows they approach content with the same focus on quality, collaboration and iteration as they do with their product development.

But great content alone doesn't build audiences of 100,000. Ian told me "honestly, it's mostly been paid that we've grown the newsletter". Through recommendation swaps and strategic paid promotion, they amplified their content to reach the scale where network effects could take over.

This hybrid approach of exceptional content plus strategic distribution is what actually builds sustainable audience. The myth of purely organic newsletter growth ignores the fundamental challenge of breaking through in a crowded market. PostHog combined content philosophy with growth tactics to create their own viral distribution channel.

The Strategic Payoff

One of the biggest challenges I see when working with B2B brands on their content engines is a struggle to get and maintain buy in from the rest of the business. Long-term strategies like this require the time and patience to work, but quarterly budgets and short term priorities can often derail those efforts.

PostHog doesn't measure newsletter success through direct conversions to paid users. With 90% of their product users on free plans and long B2B sales cycles, immediate ROI tracking misses the point entirely.

"It's mostly top of funnel", Ian explained. "We mostly care about views".

This long-term perspective is exactly how owned media actually creates value. The newsletter isn't generating leads, it's building relationships. Engineers who've been reading PostHog's insights for months aren't just prospects when they eventually need analytics tools. They're pre-qualified advocates who already understand the company's technical approach and cultural values.

The evidence shows up in unexpected places too. More than 5% of PostHog employees discovered the company through the newsletter and cited it as a reason they wanted to join the team. When highly qualified engineers are seeking you out based on your thought leadership, that's worth significantly more than traditional acquisition metrics would tell you.

The newsletter has also positioned PostHog as the definitive voice for "product-minded engineers". Industry voices regularly praise their content on social media, generating organic amplification and creating a compounding effect. Each mention reinforces PostHog's authority, which makes their content more likely to get shared, which generates more social proof. It's a flywheel that feeds itself.

But the deeper strategic advantage comes from ownership. Instead of rolling the dice every time they hit Publish on Linkedin, they hit Send to a guaranteed reach of 100,000 people in their target audience. Algorithms change. Platforms disappear. Email lists endure.

They've essentially built their own media channel with guaranteed distribution to exactly the audience they need to reach. When you own the relationship with your audience, you're no longer dependent on external platforms to reach them. That's the kind of competitive advantage that can only be built through consistent value delivery over time.

Control Your Distribution

The "Hacker News equivalent" insight explains why newsletters work so well for B2B companies. Instead of hoping for viral moments, you create reliable access to engaged audiences. Instead of competing for attention in crowded feeds, you land directly in inboxes. Instead of praying for algorithmic success, you own the distribution channel.

That’s not to say you should be abandoning other marketing channels, it's just about having something you control in the mix. PostHog still creates content for social media and optimises for search. But their newsletter ensures they're never completely dependent on external platforms for reaching their audience.

The intersection of technical depth and brand personality creates a defensible content moat that competitors struggle to replicate. Anyone can copy PostHog's topic selection or visual style. But building the genuine expertise and authentic voice that makes the content worth reading takes time, consistency and commitment.

For B2B companies sitting on deep technical knowledge, PostHog's approach is a blueprint. Your expertise + the right brand packaging + consistent delivery to an owned audience = a sustainable growth engine that gets stronger over time.

Stop just hoping to go viral. Start building the audience that guarantees virality.

P.S. Building this kind of distribution channel for B2B brands is exactly what we do at Pistachio. We’ve worked with some of the best media companies in the world, and now we help you create your own media outlet that attracts and builds trust with your target audience.

Get in touch with me here to talk about what this could look like for your brand.

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