Community Onboarding at: PostHog

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PostHog is a product and data toolkit that engineering teams use to build better products. They don't use an off-the-shelf community platform, instead, they've rolled their own.<br /><br />Let's take a look at how they onboard new community members.
Its brand is fun and irreverent, primarily targeting product engineers, but its product is used by product managers and growth teams too.
I immediately spot the 'Community' link in the top nav. A positive sign. But let's explore the rest of the homepage a little more first.
Further down the page is a call-out about its community, with some nice social proof.
It would have been nice to actually see some of those members.<br /><br /> Although it says 'join' it's not meant as a CTA - there's nothing linked to actually join.
In the footer, there's a whole section devoted to community. They even share a team playlist - cute!
Let's click that 'Community' link in the top nav and head on in.
We land on what looks like a discussion forum, but there's not much to go on.
It says 'discussions,' there are posts with questions, and it's rocking a text-only aesthetic common in forums.
But this is actually more of a resource hub - a collection of customer stories, blog posts, guides, and changelog items.
The discussion forum I was expecting is under 'Questions.' Here we see a big list of member-submitted questions, and lots of categories relating to specific parts of the product.
It's very much a support forum. Or at least, as far as I can tell. There's no onboarding to speak of.
They flag that you can ask questions, and get early-access to features, but that's it.
No description of its purpose or intended audience.<br /><br /> No signposting where to start or find things beyond the tabs.<br /><br /> No code of conduct, or guidelines for contribution.<br /><br /> No spotlighting of key members.
I try logging in just in case I'm missing anything.
Sadly, they don't share authentication with the product. It would have been a nice benefit of building your own platform.
It is at least planned, so let's move on.
Once logged-in, there's still nothing in the way of onboarding. You don't get any emails and there are no DMs either. That will probably be welcomed by its developer-audience, but it's limiting, too.
From its open handbook, I discover the vision is for the community to be more than a support forum.
But for now there's no way for members to get to know each other beyond support questions.
When you go custom, you don't get any features for free. There's currently no gamification or status functionality either to encourage repeat use.
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I try to find a place to provide feedback, for example, as all I can see are questions. This is the downside of no onboarding - it's left to the user to find key elements.
A nice thing, especially for its target dev audience, is a Cmd+K universal search function.
You can search across the community, docs, the handbook, and elsewhere too.
I find a guide on giving feedback - I'm encouraged to file a GitHub issue or submit an issue from within the app.
For now it seems like they're using GitHub's issue voting functionality, but it would be nice to see this on the community roadmap - less friction, and to give members a reason to return beyond support.
Exploring beyond the forum, and you start to see the advantages of its custom platform. Everything's gorgeously integrated. From guides...
To templates.
And even the docs. You can actually ask a question from the end of a documentation page.
Submissions made here are filed and appear in the forum. They're also sent on to Zendesk, their support platform, too.
You do also see the drawbacks of rolling your own, though. Some pages would take 30+ seconds to load.
Here I had logged-in but the login box didn't disappear. A refresh fixed it.
Another nice thing is all of their contributors are recognized with a dedicated page, showing a member's contribution level and powers (aspects they've contributed to).
They also reward contributors with swag store credits.
You can redeem the credits in its own branded merch store. Now I want to try and nab myself some sweet stickers :)
A custom platform is a bold move. It's early days, but PostHog is off to a positive start.
What's swipe-worthy?<br />- Tight integration between community platform, docs, and content<br />- Dedicated contributor page<br />- Their own merch store 🤟
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Ah, you found me. I'm not quite ready yet.

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