How Octomind’s marketing team uses PostHog with ease
Nov 10, 2024
Popular with fast-moving builders on ProductHunt, Octomind is an AI-powered end-to-end testing tool for developers. Unsurprisingly for a DevTool company, the team is engineer-led — to the point that even Maria Zahorcova, Octomind's Chief Marketing Officer, has a strong grasp of developer tools like Git. When it came to choosing an analytics tool, however, she was starting from scratch.
“I’m far from an engineer myself, though I’ve always been on the technical side,” says Maria. “I’m also the only marketer at Octomind. Like a lot of startup marketers I’d used Google Analytics in other teams before.”
Maria knew she needed a way to track marketing metrics, but also knew that Google Analytics wouldn't suffice because it would only provide high-level metrics from the marketing site — not the full user journey. There seemed no point knowing how many pageviews the marketing site had if she couldn’t turn that into a conversion rate or track product retention.
“We’re product-led and it’s really, really important that we keep an eye not only on marketing activities but also the experience beyond that,” says Maria. “It was great when I found out I could use PostHog to track data across the site, the docs, and the product — I just had to speak to our engineers about implementing it.”
“Sometimes it can be difficult to persuade engineers to even implement a simple cookie banner, but in this case? Our developers love PostHog and quickly got started with no-cookie tracking and EU servers. GDPR compliance was just really easy and our engineers knew they had a real partner in the choice of analytics platform.”
PostHog + Hubspot = A marketer's dream
Following the initial implementation, Maria enabled autocapture to get data flowing into PostHog straight away, and got started with web analytics and pre-built dashboard templates. These enabled her to track the high-level data immediately, and as she’s become more familiar with the data she’s started building her own insights too.
“PostHog helped us understand our users and that we have a lot more global impact than we thought. We have a lot more users in the US than we expected, for example. This is something every marketer needs to understand: who are your users and where are they coming from?”
“Analysis is always kind of funky because marketing data is so volatile,” says Maria. “Our content has gone viral a few times and that puts all sorts of peaks and dips onto the charts. When I don’t need to make adjustments I can just use web analytics, but other times I need to change the data and filter stuff out — it’s all easily done though.”
In addition to setting up these initial dashboards and insights, Maria also integrated PostHog with Hubspot so data could flow seamlessly between the two platforms.
“We don’t have a sales team, so we use Hubspot for automations based on sign-ups. We have different workflows which depend on how far people get with the product, where people get stuck. We’re still in an exploratory phase with this, but connecting PostHog and Hubspot was very useful.”
Just ask PostHog
Even though Maria is building her own queries and piping data to other platforms, there’s still plenty of room for Octomind to achieve more with PostHog — and Maria has taken the learning curve in stride.
“We're trying to experiment and find who the best audience is for us. To do that, we need to know who is using the platform, how they're behaving”
“All the tutorials and guides make it really easy,” says Maria. “Everything I need is right there and if I have questions then I can ask at the bottom of any docs page or look through the comments. I actually sometimes need to kick our guys when they say they’re stuck on something — I tell them: Ask PostHog! They’re really good at answering this stuff!”
Armed with this knowledge, Maria is planning to start using PostHog’s A/B testing tools on her landing pages, as well as no-code user surveys to gather user feedback. Again, templates and guides for enabling users to book their own feedback calls will prove useful — though Maria saves her biggest praise for a different feature altogether.
“I always have hedgehog mode enabled,” says Maria. “I really love that hedgehog!”