📄 marketing-feedback.doc
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Why I don't listen to marketing feedback (sometimes)

When you ship a lot of product and marketing like PostHog does, you get a lot of feedback from people on the internet. You should be careful about which feedback you listen to! This is especially dangerous for us marketing folks, who like to bask in the warm glow of people saying nice things about us.

Weight the feedback by believability

I think I first read about the concept of ‘believability weighting’ from yer boi Ray Dalio of Principles fame, though I doubt he was the first person to come up with it. In the context of marketing feedback, I think it’s about weighting more heavily the feedback you get from people who are closest to your ICP.

This applies equally across positive and negative feedback! Here are some examples relevant to PostHog - our ICP is AI-pilled software teams at any scale, and our main persona we build for is engineers:

I am not saying this feedback isn’t helpful in a general sense - more that you need to more strongly weight the feedback of your ICP.

Feedback you should probably listen to

I like to think of it as a bastardized Maslow’s hierarchy of feedback quality. Again thinking about PostHog’s ICP, it looks like this for me:

Internally, I find it really helpful to watch the reaction from our engineers whenever we do something. If we post in Slack a link to a new video for example, and a bunch of the positive feedback comes from our engineers, then that’s usually a good sign we’re on track!

One thing to watch out for - if the feedback you are getting is consistently from people who are not in your ICP, you might want to think about your distribution, as you may be reaching a lot of the wrong people.

Got it, ignore haters forever

Welll not quite. Over time you want a mix of feedback - consistently getting rave reviews from your superfans feels good, but remember you are talking to a wider audience than those people as your company grows. Each piece of feedback is just one slice of a whole cake, so you want multiple slices to make the whole cake. Mm, cake.

(‘Over time’ means once you’ve established product-market fit for your ICP and are generating a bunch of revenue, not ‘3 months after launch’ though.)

“Charles this all sounds a bit miserable, I said nice things about PostHog once and this is how you show your gratitude?” Look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy the praise from your peers. You should enjoy it for its own sake, but not always as signal to necessarily act on!