PostHog proves that the most distinctive B2B brands aren't acts of deliberate rebellion. They're what happens when nobody in the room knows what normal looks like.
Most B2B companies treat brand differentiation as a conscious decision to break from convention. They study the playbook, identify the rules, and then decide which ones to violate. PostHog, the product analytics platform currently valued at $1.4 billion, did something harder to replicate: they simply never acquired the playbook in the first place. The result is a company where a hedgehog in crystal heels on a stripper pole goes live to promote a data warehouse product, where a Slack channel called Do More Weird functions as a creative pipeline with almost no veto rate, and where a rebrand is treated as a years-long R&D project with no launch date and no agency on retainer.
Lottie Coxon is PostHog's lead graphic designer and its first creative hire discovered by the founder on Twitter within 24 hours of posting her portfolio. Joe Martin joined as the tenth employee and first marketing hire when the product was analytics only. Together they represent the two axes of PostHog's brand: Coxon as the visual instinct that has produced 18 iterations of Max the Hedgehog, Martin as the editorial conscience who came from tech journalism and chainsaw sales before landing in product marketing. What makes their perspective credible is not that they've theorized a bold brand strategy. It's that they've been living one, without a formal brief, inside a company that scales faster than most brand frameworks can follow.
The Playbook They Ignored Was One They'd Never Read
Joe Martin is direct about this: PostHog did not set out to subvert B2B marketing conventions. For most of the company's early years, he was the only person on the marketing team with actual marketing experience. Everyone else was an engineer, a journalist, a person from a completely different corner of the industry.
"We were building things from scratch and not trying to throw out a conventional playbook because we didn't know that those conventional playbooks really existed."
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Every brand differentiation talk in the industry assumes conscious rebellion: the company that saw the whitepaper-and-webinar template and decided to do the opposite. PostHog inverts that entirely. Coxon describes the ethos as "when everyone goes right, we go left." Still, the more accurate framing is that they simply never oriented themselves to the direction everyone else was traveling. The result is brand weirdness that is not performed. It is structural.
Martin's background in magazine publishing trained him toward editorial rigor, content calendars, and multi-layer sign-off. PostHog trained that out of him, replacing it with something closer to: if you have the passion to get a project over the line, it will happen. The "Do More Weird" Slack channel exists not to generate wacky ideas but to socialize them fast enough that someone with momentum can just ship.
Eighteen Hedgehogs and the Logic of Iteration Without a Deadline 🦔
The number eighteen is not a sign of indecision. It is a sign of a company that treats taste as a craft that compounds. Lottie Coxon describes the iteration process the way a sculptor might, each version failing not on technical grounds but on spirit. The early mascot was a human figure with a television for a head. Coxon rejected it because it felt aggressive and oppressive, not because it failed a focus group.
"I felt like going through all the ranges of the hedgehogs, they weren't expressive enough, or they weren't friendly or approachable enough, and it just didn't sit right."
🦔 Max the Hedgehog now has eyebrows.🦔 The change sounds trivial. The reasoning behind it that the character needed more expressiveness to carry the humanity of the brand is anything but. This is the same logic PostHog applies to its current rebrand, which has no agency, no hard deadline, and no launch campaign planned. Martin describes the R&D phase as "very low-stakes work we should be ready to make as many mistakes as possible." In most marketing organizations, that sentence would get someone fired. At PostHog, it is company policy, and it is grounded in a specific belief: that consistency over time builds brand equity in ways that individual moments cannot.
Coxon's metaphor for this is precise: "It's sort of a dripping of water into a bucket. It's not about the one little drip that's going to push the needle. It's like everything you do will group to make what people know and love as a brand." PostHog's willingness to marinate on this for a year is not a luxury. It is a disciplined rejection of the false urgency that drives most rebrands toward agencies, deadlines, and launch campaigns that prioritize announcement over substance.
Data Worship and Data Literacy Are Not the Same Thing
Here is the contradiction that runs through everything PostHog does: they sell a product built on the premise that you should measure everything, and they run their own brand on something closer to taste and instinct. Martin ran a test on this directly. He stripped all of Lottie Coxon's hedgehog illustrations out of PostHog's email marketing and replaced them with product screenshots. The result was a roughly one percent improvement in click-through rates on the illustrated versions.
"I remember thinking at the time, even if they didn't, this is a stupid thing to test. I shouldn't have invested that time in doing that. We should use Lottie's art because Lottie's art is art, and that is worth like investing in and supporting and using."
The test confirmed the intuition. But Martin's more important point is that it was the wrong test to run. Data told him one part of the story. Taste already knew the answer. For a company whose entire product thesis is "stop guessing, measure everything," this is not hypocrisy. It is a more sophisticated position than most operators are willing to articulate publicly: data informs decisions, but it does not replace judgment, and confusing the two is how companies end up optimizing their way into mediocrity.
PostHog tracks page views, hedgehog mode engagement, button clicks, activation rates, and brand mentions across social channels through an automated Slack pipeline. They use the data. They also throw it out when it contradicts something they intuitively know to be true. That is data literacy. Data worship would have killed the hedgehog.
Brand Governance Is a Hiring Filter, Not a Process
The most honest and least replicable answer PostHog gives to "how do we build a brand like yours" is that it lives almost entirely in who they hire and how. The hiring process includes what they call a super day: a paid, simulated day of actual work, with Slack access, a task representative of the role, and direct feedback throughout. No unpaid weekend take-home. No presentation of a five-step proposal. Just: come up with an idea and then do the idea.
"We care much more that you can decide what to do and then do the thing. We don't care that you can give like a really polished presentation about what your proposal is and your five-step plan."
Coxon's hiring went through a month of contract work before she was brought on full time. The screening was not primarily for technical skill. It was for taste, for opinionated thinking, for the willingness to bring a brave idea to the table even when it might land wrong. PostHog also deliberately values non-technical perspectives inside a deeply technical company. Coxon's relative distance from enterprise software trends functions as a bellwether for whether a campaign or announcement is actually legible to the people they are trying to reach.
Martin's transferable lesson is not tactical. It is structural: listen to the people closest to the work, especially those earlier in their careers, because they are the ones least incentivized to play it safe. The company culture is reviewed and revised every two years, values included. "Everybody codes" was once a PostHog value. It is not anymore, because the company recognized that an artist should aim to be the best artist in the building, not the worst engineer.
What the Fujifilm Story Actually Proves 📸
PostHog's brand outcomes are not primarily measurable through conversion rates. They show up in stranger, more durable places. A sales rep brings Max the Hedgehog plushies and custom Godzilla-themed business cards to Fujifilm in Japan. The client's stated reason for loving PostHog, aside from the product itself, is the mascot. PostHog is consistently ranked the number one deal available to Y Combinator startups, ahead of much larger competitors, in part because founders in San Francisco see someone wearing a PostHog t-shirt and email to ask how to get one.
"You would be astonished how many emails I get each week from founders in San Francisco or co-founders of other YC teams who have signed up to our YC deal because they have seen, like, oh, I saw someone walking around with your t-shirt."
These are not vanity metrics; they are pipeline. The mechanism is simply harder to trace in a spreadsheet than a paid click, which is why most companies do not build for it. Martin frames the purpose of brand not as driving an outcome but as being memorable, and treating the business result as downstream from that. The PostHog OS-style website drew immediate negative feedback when it launched. The team held the line, looked at the data, made incremental changes, and gave it time. It is now one of the most recognized and praised B2B website designs in the industry.
The brand decisions that compound over time at PostHog are not the ones that won an internal debate. They are the ones that someone with conviction refused to abandon under pressure.
Three Takeaways
Run a "super day" instead of an unpaid take-home assignment. Pay candidates for a simulated day of real work, give them Slack access, and observe how they decide what to do,o not how they present a proposal. You will learn more about judgment and taste in one day than in ten rounds of interviews.
When someone tells you something is wrong, they are probably right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are probably wrong. Hold the idea under pressure, make targeted changes, and do not revert to safety. The PostHog website survived its launch week for this reason.
Treat brand consistency as infrastructure, not a campaign. Every illustration, every mascot iteration, every unusual email is one drop in a bucket that builds recognition and trust over years. Single moments do not move it. Accumulated coherence does.
Lottie Coxon is Lead Graphic Designer at PostHog. Find her on X at @LottieCoxon. Joe Martin is Marketing Lead at PostHog and can be found on LinkedIn.
00:00:01 — 00:01:35
Welcome, where we delve further down the martech rabbit hole and try to make sense of it. PostHog built a $1.4 billion company on one idea. Stop guessing. Measure everything. They sell analytics. So here's the question for today. Why is PostHog's own brand, the Hedgehog, the weirdness and the whole thing people fight for online measured by Slack bot and good vibes?
So a little bit about my guests today. First we've got Lottie Coxon, who is PostHog's lead graphic designer and was the first creative hire. Posted her portfolio on Twitter and was contacted by PostHogs' founder 24 hours later. Now she spends her days designing the brand and drawing hedgehogs doing silly things.
I wait to know what that message was from the founder. And we have Joe Martin, and in order, he has been a clown, a morgue cleaner, a chainsaw salesman, a tech journalist, a content consultant, and a product marketer; that's quite the multi-hyphenate. He joined PostHog as the 10th employee in the first marketing hire, back when the product was analytics only.
Now, the marketing lead is responsible for keeping the brand as weird as it was when the company was worth nothing. Welcome, and thank you both for being here. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks. Hi. Good to have you. So let's dive into some quick rapid fire just to, like, warm up. All right. What is one word?
Ghost. Brand voice. But playful.
00:01:37 — 00:02:17
That's a good one. Unfiltered. Ooh, I like that a lot. Okay. What is the most post-hoc thing that post-hoc has ever shipped? Whether it's marketing product. Does it matter? I would say desktop, which was like a little microcomputer developer toy we made just because someone in the company had a 3D printer and a dream.
That's a good one. I'm going to go completely the opposite end. The James Hawkins doll we made or April Fools. It was like a Barbie 3D printed to look exactly like our founder. Terrifying when I found one in a cupboard at work one time. Ooh, that's a little scary.
00:02:19 — 00:02:28
Um, what is one thing you'd never do for the brand, no matter how good? Host a webinar. That's a good one. I thought you were going to say wear a hat. Another hat.
00:02:29 — 00:02:40
I do wear a lot of hats. I was actually I don't think there isn't anything I wouldn't probably do for the brand, but webinars pretty good. So can I still chose you? Probably not attend my webinar.
00:02:42 — 00:02:52
You might design things for it though. Yeah. Would it just be a webinar not called a webinar? Maybe it would have to be a really good idea for us to get away with that. That's fair.
00:02:54 — 00:04:10
Okay. What is a favorite piece of internal pushback you ignored? This one is easy for me because I bring it up all the time. I started like pushing on email marketing, poster building, like nurture campaigns and things like that. And Raquel from our team told me like, very bluntly, email marketing doesn't work for developers.
And consistently remind her that she was wrong. That is an easy one to prove wrong. I'm glad you did. What about you, Lottie? I think trying to be an engineer, I ignored that, and it's actually worked for me. Last but not least, in terms of rapid fire PostHog, where a person at a party, what would they be doing?
Will they be wearing? You name it. I feel like we like our product does so many things, but if we would probably be some sort of manic force at the party doing everything all at once, we'd be trying to sit in a corner and play guitar, while also mixing drinks and hosting and talking to people. I was thinking more like someone wearing, like a garishly loud Hawaiian shirt and their first, like, be on the dance floor because they don't really care what people think.
But maybe that's just that's that's just you describing James Ross. These
00:04:12 — 00:09:33
guys are anything but conventional, anything but typical B2B. And so I'm curious, is there a playbook that you set out to ignore? So you've already mentioned webinars are a no go. That's boring and very corporately B2B. I don't think there's anything we like purposefully set out to ignore. The closest thing to that would be deciding very early on, James.
And I think James especially decided that we didn't want to do the traditional B2B sales motion at all, and we kind of built the sales side of the business very, very differently and made everything in the product as self-serve as we could. on the mock stage side. Like, I think Lottie can correct me if she thinks I'm wrong, but for a very long time, the first I would say like 2 or 3 years at least.
I think I was the only marketer at PostHog who actually had any experience working in marketing. Everyone else was either, like me, an engineer. They worked in different parts of the industry. It was kind of we didn't know a lot of the time what to ignore. We were building things from scratch and not trying to like, throw out a conventional playbook because we didn't know that those conventional playbooks really existed.
So I was the only person with several years of marketing experience, maybe, and nobody listens to me anyway. I would also say that, like I think from the get go, the ethos of like the brand was when everyone goes right, we go left. Like we were trying to be obnoxiously different. Maybe not obnoxiously, but I don't know when the majority of like corporate SaaS companies were doing white papers.
We were like. We're never going to do that. Or if we are, we're going to print it on toilet roll or something. Just digging while everyone's zagging. Exactly. And like purposely trying to be different, to stand out. Otherwise you're just shouting into the void, basically, because there's just so many strategists that do the same thing.
Okay. What's the one? Editorial instinct. Newsroom culture has that marketing actively tries to beat out of people. I think probably like around collaboration and keeping things organized. Journalism is often like very fast moving and chaotic. But at the end of the day, like I worked in magazine publishing and magazine has a strict deadline.
Everything has to be ready for print. There is no room for error. The paper has already been bought. The art has to be laid out. It's a very late, regimented process, and marketing specifically at PostHog has taught me that things can be fine if you just let go of the wheel a lot more, that you don't need to keep everything as organized.
And I think this extends into collaborations. While collaboration at PostHog is almost a dirty word. A lot of the time and we get that makes me sad. Well, I mean, it's not that we don't collaborate, it's more that it's like not performative collaboration and like trusting everyone around you autonomously do their best.
And it's a step further along the journey of like, ask for forgiveness, not permission. And like, you shouldn't ask for forgiveness or permission. You just go and do the thing. But it's definitely a marked change from, you know, trying to get editor, sign off, an art editor, buy in and things like that in journalism and trying to keep that content calendar.
So we've talked about your journalist background, but Lottie, I want to talk about how a teacher once told you that you weren't very good at art, and you should try something else. First of all, a nice you to that teacher. I hope you feel better. How much of what you do today is still, on some level proving that teacher wrong.
I think I'm past it. I think I've let that drive go a bit. I definitely was like my main driving force when I was younger. It led me down the path in doing graphic design and art at school, but I think now in a much more healthy post therapy mindset. Um, I think what drives me now is trying to be the best I can be in my field.
For context, um, I was something like 9 or 10, like very important. I know, I know, I know, it's so bad, right? Oh my God. Teachers forget how impactful important they are. I know, I think it's because it went to some kind of, like, silly, pushy private school at that age. That summer, after I've been told I shouldn't focus on it.
I remember every single day practicing drawing something. And I think after that it got to a point where I was like, okay, you can put in the time and improve your craft. And I think that's when I caught the bug of, like, I can read it better at this. I don't think looking back, I'm like, that was the catalyst.
But I don't think that's like my drive. Loved her, hate her. I'm here now because of her. So speaking of art and doing it over and over and over, there are now 18 versions of a hedgehog. At what number did you think this is? It. This is the one. But then also talk yourself back out of it. And what changed between the early attempts and the one that is well known to everyone?
I think it just depends. I know for me it depended upon if it felt right. Um, and
00:09:35 — 00:16:02
I felt like it wasn't properly representing like, oh, sounds so good. It's just spirit of the brand. Or like how I wanted the company culture to be encapsulated, channeling the energy of like certain people at the company. So like the engineers or like how chaotic or like how passionate they are on because we have quite a lot of people who work for us that are quite silly.
And I felt like going through all the the ranges of the hedgehogs, they weren't expressive enough or they weren't friendly or approachable enough and like, it just didn't sit right. So I just kept on iterating until it did. And like, even like recently, I started adding in eyebrows to some of them. Um, well, all of them from now have eyebrows, so it's constantly evolving.
To be honest, I don't think we're still, I'd love to say that we're like that. Um, but I can imagine it will have various evolutions going forward. So I might be talking about like aiming for a much greater sense of humanity, like fairly consistent consistently as well, obviously, because when I joined like it's we've had 18 versions of the hedgehog, but like we had things before the Hedgehog as well.
When I joined, uh, I remember the, the mascot at that point was like humans, lots of humans with TVs and computer monitors for heads. Yeah. So we had some experiments with that. And Lotty was I thought that was cool at the time. And Lottie was very adamant that, no, it felt aggressive, felt oppressive. It didn't feel very human.
You wanted it to be more personable. There's been a lot of iteration. Humans always called Max. Or where did Max the name come from? Yeah, sure. So Max is I think it was my first PostHog offsite. We went to Porto and at this point there was, I think maybe like 20 of us at the company. And it was we were talking just generally what should the name be for the hedgehog?
I think I suggested someone suggested that we should like name it after Someone in the company in some sense. So like it's a who was our developer advocate at the time mentioned that his I think his eldest child was called Matt and I just felt right. So I we just said, Matt, I think Lottie was the one that was like, yes, Matt is that.
And then it just kind of stuck. That's awesome. Yeah, it was a very short conversation that like the amount of legacy it's had. Yeah, I love that though. And okay, Lottie, what is the most ridiculous thing you've seen drawn made Max do like and it almost get vetoed or you kind of have that I'm going to do it and see what happens.
One that got vetoed. Well, technically I don't know if it's vetoed because I probably would draw it anyway, and then people would be like, we won't use this because it's too long. Recently we've been talking about AI and how AI can have harnesses on them. Can you tell that I'm not technical when I speak about this?
It's a good thing. Classic shapes and colors over there. Oh, and also in the AI speak, they talk about sandboxes. So I was like, it would be really funny to do a hedgehog in a sandbox wearing some kind of semi inappropriate harness. And yeah, that one didn't really get quite a lot of back up from people being like, yeah, you should do it.
They were like, maybe not. I think it's funny, at a minimum, the sandbox for sure. I can maybe understand the hesitation on the latter piece, but I think this question is dangerous because of how rare it is for something to get vetoed as well. Like my favorite one managed data warehouse product that's in beta at the moment.
And it's very the Managed Data Warehouse is a very exciting product that data engineering and data warehouses are very cool. It's hard to talk about them, at least in a way that makes them seem cool. So Lizzie, who is the product marketer or back product, came up with the idea of a campaign around how sexy data is.
Data warehouses are sexy. And as a result, Lotti ended up drawing a version of Max the Hedgehog wearing. Like, is it like six inch transparent crystal heels and on like a stripper pole platform? A scandalous Max? I like it swinging around the headline columns in all the right places. That was certainly out there and did that.
Is that going to go live? Went live? It already is. Yeah, I think it went live for the weekend. Yeah. Wait. That's amazing. Okay. You have a slack channel called Do More Weird. What was the last idea in there that got rejected? And it should have been. And it better not be this one. I actually feel like we don't really reject many, if any do more weird make it to being shipped.
And I would say that anyone who has like the determination or the passion to like get a project over the line and they can do it. It will happen. So I don't want to say like you've no idea as to where's Joe? Maybe like interject here if he's too bad. The challenge would do more. Weird is like we try and put the emphasis now more on the the do part.
Like every everyone. We don't want it to just be all wacky ideas kind of thing. It's more like we try and view the channel, I think, as a place to like, socialize ideas and get buy in. And then once you have got that buy in, then you just go and do it. You don't need anyone's permission to do more weird things that don't really kind of no one cottons on to.
They'll end up moving forward because the person who is who's had the idea, who's very passionate about this. I think Pavel in our bidding team is at the moment trying to look at making a PostHog mobile or cell phone network just to support our employees when we travel for work. And because he thought that would be an interesting project.
He posted that and I was like, yeah, we'll probably never really do that. I'm not going to respond to this. And now now he's he's apparently doing it. I mean, he's one of the weirdest ideas that I know was discussed a lot that did not get moved forward recently. Whereas in the UK we have a like a children's TV character called Mr. Blobby, who is like this big inflatable jelly man thing.
Um, and the original costume for Mr. Blobby became available to buy and someone wanted to buy it, because Mr. Blobby is also the internal codename for part of our
00:16:03 — 00:16:08
blob ingestion system. I love that connection so much.
00:16:09 — 00:16:16
We did look at buying it, but in the end I don't think we pulled the trigger. Pretty sure someone's put in a bid.
00:16:17 — 00:17:51
That's. Yeah, I'm I'm thinking nothing gets vetoed. Yeah. Okay. Shifting gears a little bit towards really the brand identity. And I assume there's a brand handbook of some sort, because I don't remember where in my research, but I found it said something along the lines of the rogue sarcastic meme and unhinged.
Has anything actually ever been pulled back? What crossed the line? It sounds like very little, uh, rogue, sarcastic, me mean unhinged. Certainly sounds like something we would use to describe it, but I don't know if we actually have a defined statement on what the brand is. The only thing I can think of that is maybe crossed the line once.
So one of the other things that we talk about a lot is not shaming or like poking fun at competitors. What we try and like in all of those conversations take the high road. And one thing that I did that I know crossed the line at one point was I was writing a product page, kind of a book on this now, but, um, and had a comparison chart of like, this feature is present in this competitor and not present in this one, and is present in post.
And at the very bottom of it. I put a note like a line on the chart that said like pouring blue typical like a website. And it was a take for everyone else in the cross for PostHog. And that caused a little bit of a discussion internally where we were like, we pushed it live. And then and then we looked at it again.
We're like, ah, this actually just it feels mean spirited. I was aiming for like a sarcastic
00:17:52 — 00:18:31
week and it came off aggressive. So we just it was my third day or two and we just various people that, um, they don't really begrudge people for making mistakes too much. So one of my, my favorite things since we're talking about and slack channels and I mean, it goes like one of my favorite things at work is something that Paul Danbury from our team and I started.
We have a slack channel called Mistakes Were Made, which is like a private slack channel that started with just hit him and me in it. And now whenever someone makes a mistake and we have to roll something back, we have to do an apology or something gets messed up. We just add them to the channel quietly.
00:18:32 — 00:24:14
And the idea is like it's not to try and shame them, but it's so if someone has made a mistake and you see the sad about it and get added to a channel filled with other people who are like, yeah, I've done that. Don't worry about it. That's a really nice addition to like a post incident review or post mortem. It's like, you know what?
You're not alone in this. Well, it can feel really isolating at the time. Yeah, it feels very isolating. But I think the beautiful thing about that channel is that over time, everyone's going to get added to it. Nobody doesn't make mistakes. It's very true. I think people forget that. And a lot of boring companies don't realize it's allowed.
And it's actually sometimes a good thing. Okay, so your CEO has put it directly. The direction of travel for a B2B company is that you get more boring as you get older and scale. I totally agree. You guys have raised nearly $200 million across seven rounds, and are now a unicorn at $1.4 billion of valuation.
Where do you think you are on that arc, and how would you even know if you've started backsliding? It's been very privilege and lucky to be able to raise so much money. I don't think raising money is really like we don't view that as a metric of success for the journey that we're on at all. Like we raise money because we might want to do something in the future, or we think it is a good strategic time to do it.
But I think it was our series C, which was like a 10 million raise, was strategically important to the future of the company at one point. But in the marketing side and the brand side, we just forgot to announce that every other company I've ever worked at would do. Here's a press release, and we're going to try and get on TechCrunch, and we'll do a Wall Street Journal thing and it post on until we raised our series D, which later on we didn't even realize that we had forgotten to announce it.
And this guy leads me to my second point as well, which is the part Lotti is not going to like. Because I think, to be very honest, I think glossy keeps us honest and a lot of this stuff. It's not just Lottie. I think also Heidi as well. Um, so obviously the the illustrator and the team, like the graphics team, ends up working on a lot of these sorts of like announcements and projects.
They are often very tied in to what is important and getting attention at post right now. And as Lottie alluded to earlier, is not an engineer. She is not a tech investor out there who is really tied into enterprise software trends or anything. And I think that is actually really valuable because it makes someone who is within that cycle like a great bellwether for like, I don't understand what this is.
I don't understand why this is important. And when someone starts asking those questions, it's a great prompt internally to be like, actually, yeah, is this important? This is interesting. What would be the interesting way to like, communicate the story? And as a product marketer, like working on some of these announcements from the other end, that helps.
Challenge me to the easy way to solve a lot of problems. If you're announcing a feature or announcing the product, you might need to like do a standard press release, a list of features, or when you're being challenged in that way, you have to get creative starts. Yeah, I think that's how we know that we are spoiled into enterprise.
We used to be IBM sort of told no, but it's true. And I think a lot of companies become their own echo chamber of, well, this person gets it. So it's fine. It's actually know the diversity of thought and background is what makes this interesting and also approachable. One other thing to add to that context, chances are if we come up with a fun marketing campaign, he'll be like, speak to someone outside of post-hoc who doesn't know what post-hoc is.
Run it past them, and if they actually think it's funny, then we're in the money. And if it's not, then you sort of have to take away the sort of like, oh, just because Post Hoc thinks it's funny. Sort of gut check. Okay, I want to talk a little bit more nerdy and under the hood. So a lot of you mentioned shapes and colors.
Previously, I want to have you walked me through the actual visual language. Like what are specific choices that make something unmistakably Max post hoc, you name it. I love this question because we're also like going through a bit of a a brand refresh at the moment, so I don't even know what makes post hoc.
I mean, I do, but I don't. I guess the first thing first I would say is bright, bold colors. We've got sort of a, a color scheme of around seven sort of key cards that we've continually used since Corey Wadlow joined, uh, the head of the website. He's also the guy behind the sort of amazing OS website that we have at the moment.
So just want to give him a little big fan. That's that was my initial Understanding of what post-hoc was and don't say. But it's huge. It's amazing. Specifically on the hedgehogs, it's sort of the line way. It's the colors. It's I even use like a template every time Heidi uses a template every time. So we've got consistency there.
And maybe just the visuals that we choose to create are specific. They're cheeky, they're out of the box thinking or at least like that's what we're aiming for. Um, so yeah, I don't know if that's. Oh, and fonts, obviously we've got like a few fonts that we sort of keep in rotation, one that's a bit more serious for the website, which at the moment is open round.
Um, and then one for marketing, which is a bit more like punchy and shouty and loud, which is called squeak, which we, I think we got custom made an excellent name. It is. Yeah. My favorite font was still the first one that we had, which was called Loud noises and was just Lottie's handwriting.
00:24:15 — 00:25:26
That's kind of awesome, though. Did you actually create it into a font, or did you handwrite everything? No. It's, um, I think it was because people wanted. So before when we had hedgehogs, I would write little speech bubbles and they would have my handwriting writing messages. And when we got big enough, people like, oh, I'd really like to write my own messages in your speech bubbles.
But we didn't want to use the other fonts because they just didn't feel like they fit into the sort of visual environment that the hedgehogs were in. So yeah, I went through the process of making a font. It was really informative and very easy to do. Brought to you by our sponsors. If there's one theme that's followed me at every step of my martech career, it's trying to get good data into the hands of marketers.
That's why I'm so excited to tell you about our sponsor, High Touch, the leading composable CDP and AI decisioning platform companies like Domino's, chime, Erica, and PetSmart trust high touch to power there data. And here's the kicker. 90% of customers have a real use case live in production within their first week.
That means you can implement a world class CDP in months rather than the usual years long headache. That's why top brands choose high touch to personalize every customer interaction at scale. See what high touch can do for you at high touch.
00:25:28 — 00:28:04
And now back to the hot seat. I find it ironic that you're going through a rebrand and you say you don't know what the brand is, and yet you very much do know what the brand is. When you go through a refresh, like what's going through your mind? Because I think in most contexts it's how do we change our colors or how do we change our logo?
And for me, that's a very blasé rebrand. And it's not really as a marketer, it's very boring versus no, it's actually recontextualize or figure out what the next evolution of existing brand is. How do we mature it or grow it or make it funnier? You name it. I think for us. And as I can imagine, other companies in this sort of time are going through as sort of this sort of age of shifting from before to now, where sort of AI is taking a bit more of like a front seat in how companies are run and how they're seen.
And I don't want to be like every other company where we're like, oh, we're jumping on the AI train and we're going to add in gradients and do the stuff. But I think there is something to be said in visuals being a big signifier to how you want to be seen and how you want your company to be seen progressing in the right direction.
So there's a reason why all these companies like Google are redoing all their icons X, Y, z horribly. Might I add? Yeah, it's interesting to say the least, but I think for us in the rebrand, similar to I'm going to throwback to what we were talking about before about hedgehogs and going through what felt right.
I think we're basically just going through the iterations of what could postal look like in 2030, and how does post-hoc look in a sort of futuristic different way of working? And so yeah, we're just having a lot of R&D at the moment. It's really fun. It seems very it's a big lift but low urgency because typically when folks are going through a rebrand, they hire an agency.
They're like, all right, we need to get this done by this date because we're going to launch it and make that a campaign of itself. How do you see this refresh? Is it something you consistently do every year, or is it just when everyone feels it's time and do announce it, or is it just part of the evolution in process?
I mean, the announcement we don't really care about. I think it's just gonna it's just gonna appear until that to every brand marketing team ever. No one gives a
00:28:05 — 00:28:27
no. Like, realistically, the the shining front and center product should be the product. Right. Um, the website and the brand have a good product first, though, not everyone is there. Yeah, exactly. Um, so where we will get to it when we get to it. But also good things take time. I think it's interesting.
Uh, one thing I would add to that, though, is that you said it's
00:28:28 — 00:29:48
like it's it's low urgency. One of the things that I think often like, from my experience, I've done a lot of rebrands and stuff at other companies, and they've always felt like this is the the most time sensitive. Like, we need to really get this out. We need to come out. This is why eventually you would go to an agency, because you can throw money at the problem to make it happen faster.
I don't think feel that urgency in the same way. Like this is a I feel and I hope everyone else feels. The rebrand is actually when it's in this R&D stage. It's very, very low stakes work we should be ready to make as many mistakes as possible. And like if we spend a year working on this sort of like digital refresh, then we haven't wasted a year.
It's been a great use of time to spend as long as needed on something like this. And Lotti and Heidi, Corey and Eli as well. We just finished writing and so they find something that really captures the imagination. That is certainly to me, a unique part of those dogs approach is like being willing to take the time to do something like that.
It's definitely an unusual privilege. I feel like there's very few companies where you're given not only the autonomy, but the time and the resources to just marinate. It's a very atypical approach and the best way.
00:29:50 — 00:31:23
More companies should learn to build on that. Is that just part of the company culture? Is that how it's always been? Was there a specific influence in that? Except that it is evolving, and we have a mechanism through which it can evolve every two years of each other. Marketing company upside. We basically discuss with the company values and the culture as a group.
I remember a good example of this is when I started. One of the values at that time was like, everybody codes because we wanted everybody to use technical tools. We wanted everyone to be able to ship stuff to the product. And after two years, I think we had the discussion and realized that, like, not everybody actually needs to code.
It's not valuable for everyone. And I talk about this a lot. You know, an artist in a company like post shouldn't aim to be the worst engineer. They should aim to be the best artist. And we changed the value. And so the culture is kind of like at this point, I think, six years into Christo's lifespan, and I think his fate made me buy the people at the company because we've iterated on.
I think at this point, every single value you should constantly be asking why not now? Why aren't we doing this now? Why aren't we shipping this now? And I think gives us like a high sense of urgency to move things quickly when we think we are able to. But it also gives us an affordance to like hold back when we need to.
So something like why not now? If I ask to be like why not now? Why aren't we launching? This rebrand now is very valid for Lottie to say, like it's not ready yet.
00:31:26 — 00:42:26
Well, on the engineering side, like it's often the flip side of the same challenge, it's like, why can't we launch this now? And the answer might be, well, it's not ready yet. And we would say, well, yeah, but is it ready for beta. Is it ready for Alpha. Can we test it with someone. And that's that propels us to like launch things into the product very, very quickly.
That makes sense. And I'm surprised the word weirdo has not come up in any of this. And I mean that in the best possible way. While I'm from Dallas, I'm sure you guys have heard of that as I keep Austin weird and it's the best part of Austin. And so when you guys are hiring, you filter specifically for weirdos, aka people who come from an opinionated position, even if you may think that they might be wrong and with a different mindset but the same sense of taste.
How do you test and curate for taste without just hiring people who either remind you of themselves or really good at pretending? I don't think I've ever hired anyone that's reminded me of me. Um, everyone I've hired is is far, far better. I think basically the hiring process app is basically designed for this, and I think is very heavily informed by the experience of Lottie.
In the first other four hires I went through where, you know, they started with an initial conversation and interview, and then that turned into, I think, what was it like a month of contract work. Yeah, it's sort of just like freelancing, just to, like, test how you worked. That is also that idea that, okay, what we need to test people actually doing the work is really important.
The way we do that at post OP will have done it since we did a month of contract work, because no one's going to do the contract work as part of their interview. Um, is we do what we call super days. In a typical company, they would test this stuff by. They would give you a tax, you go away and you do the task at the weekend.
And as a result, the company gets no insight into how you did the work and like what the process is and how long you took. And the candidate loses their weekend and it's just a rubbish situation. So what we do is we give people we run a super day, which is a paid simulated day's work. A postdoc, you get come in, you get a meeting to meet the team.
You get the opportunity to like give you a task that is indicative of your job. You get the slack group where you might ask for feedback and chat to us throughout the day. Ask questions if things are unclear, and we can chat to you about how you're getting on in the process. We get to get to see you do the work.
We actually get to stand to test you out, and taste is something to be screened for there in the final result. It's not the only thing we screened for, but it's definitely a really important part of it. And I've been hearing probably one of the things you said as well, it's like people taking possession. What's wrong with that?
So if someone could have a very brave old idea and that's what we want to see. Doesn't matter if it's like we've tried that once before, we didn't like it or we thought about it, but we don't want to do that. That's not very post target, and it's looking for people who are going to try something just a bit new and brave.
I feel like it's very brave and also the wisest decision a company can consider. There's nothing worse, in my experience, being asked to do one of those assessments unpaid, get either a certain amount of time or too much time where it's overwhelming, like, oh no, how much time should I dedicate to this?
And so, on behalf of all the candidates in the world, I appreciate that you actually pay for that person to come in and do an actual simulation, because that's important. I think another part of it is like, personally important to me as well, is that we're actually we're testing for your ability to actually do the job.
And I don't see a product marketing interviews in the past where I've had a task that I've spent my weekend doing, and then I had to present it. And I, like, make a proposal and a pitch that's never going to be part of someone's job. People are often surprised, but they come in to a super day. They do the task and like create this deliverable.
And then there's just kind of it's like we care much more that you can decide what to do and then do the thing. We don't care that you can give like a really polished presentation about what your proposal is and your five step plan. Your sources and your references. No. We just want you to, like, come up with an idea and then do the idea.
Those are the two things we can't ask. No, it makes a lot of sense, I know. I've never had the privilege of having a, like, a super day where you test someone out. But any time I interview, I always ask questions. I don't actually care about the answer. I care about how to get to that answer. And I want to hear them talk out loud and walk me through it.
Um, like, yes, I might have a preferred answer, but I care more about the process. Because to your point, if you're able to do the work, you'll be able to come create the outcome no matter what. It's more just very collaborative, very thoughtful. Are you thinking through all the different aspects, or you just think through a case study and, you know, very point A to point B, which is only getting harder and harder to combat with AI.
So I think to your point, the in-person component, what is the single smartest brand decision post hoc has made that most companies wouldn't have the nerve to make. Unless you've got a better answer here. I think probably, like I would say, keeping the website live, the new version of it. I think there are.
So our new website with this kind of OS design is quite bold. It's quite out there. I think really, really cool and well designed. It is without a doubt. It has some friction in it when you want it because it is just just it breaks a lot of patterns for what people expect a website. When we first launched it, we immediately got pushback from people seeing it.
Like nowadays, we get a lot of praise for it and it is very widely recognized and celebrated. But at the time, people like the first, I would say week really strongly disliked it. It's that old axiom, you know, if you want to make enemies of people, try and change something for sure. And we had changed something because we kind of made enemies, and there was a lot of discussion about conversion rates and how to track them, what to track.
And like that was probably debated, but we've given a lot of credit to Corey and Eli from the website team. We're very confident to stand by that decision. And like now this is a cool website. Like give it time. This is going to be good. And we can look at the data and we can discuss it. We can make changes. But we have very high confidence in this.
It's a differentiator for sure. I think yeah, the differentiator was certainly like Corey. Uh, it can be quite outspoken and direct. That was what he was channeling. Um, for the better in this situation of holding
Special thanks to Claude for helping to summarize this conversation.
