From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn

0:04I'm here today with James Hawkins, CEO and founder of PostHog from the YCWinter20 batch. James is here hot off the news of raising a$75 million Series E round of funding at a$1.4 billion valuation, making PostHog the latest YC unicorn. Today we're going to talk about how PostHog got started, how they pulled off what I think is one of the best YC pivots of the last decade, and how they use attention and humor to compete with not just other tech companies, but with everything out there for attention. Welcome James. Thank you for having me. James, could you tell us what is PostHog? Explain it to us a little bit.

0:39Sure. So with YC, I always feel like this is my homework being marked by the teacher. We help users to debug their product, to ship features faster through kind of things like feature flags and so on. And we help keep all their kind of customer and product data in one stack. And tell us a little bit about the state of the company, how big it is. You guys are pretty big these days. Give our viewers a snapshot of what's going on at Postalk. Sure. Yeah. So we're about 160 people, around 300 ,000 customers across like free. I have a lot of free customers unpaid. We have several thousand paid. We have, I think, 16 or 17 products kind of in production or in development.

1:19They're all different kind of stages. And we've been, I guess, like at the moment, the main thing we're doing and the reason kind of why we did a lot of raising this year, we're pushing very hard on getting more products still out of the door. So instead of kind of going upmarket, we're going just across more of kind of the customer data that people are generating. And we're automating a ton of things through AI, which has been a long and arduous process. But we're starting to get to the point where I'm starting to get proud of what we've achieved so far. But I still kind of feel like, oh, we haven't got started yet.

1:48There's a lot more to go, which I don't think is a feeling it will ever go probably. But yeah, it's like being a lot of fun. And we're just starting to scale up pretty aggressively now. Like we're, I think we started at 70 people this year. And so it's supposed to be about 200-ish by the end of the year or something. So we're starting to get properly into kind of scale-up mode at this point. So you've got this team, you've got all these customers, you have all these products that you're developing and improving on. But what was the initial product that PostHog started with? What was the first thing that you guys brought to market as PostHog?

2:16Sure. So yeah, the first thing that worked for us, we had a bunch of pivots before, was self-hosted product analytics. Because we pivoted so many times, every time we had to set up product analytics over and over again, and we're just getting frustrated having to implement it, I think we found that there's an awful lot of really strong competition. But we felt all the products were built for product managers to force engineers to go implement. But it's like reasonably technical, especially my co-founder is a very technical co-founder. We're just getting annoyed at like, I can't, I want to write SQL.

2:43I want to see the data underneath. I would like to keep this in my infrastructure so I don't lose data due to ad blockers. So we thought, okay, we think there's room for a self-hosted alternative. And we also, we spent some time 20 potential customers. and we found that quite a lot of people had self-built their analytics stack and were maintaining this kind of janky system which we felt if we can productize something like that because new infrastructure and we could see this working quite well so yeah we started with just open source products analytics on Hacker News we spent like the last four weeks the batch desperately trying to get that out of the door and then we hit like we actually pivot we iterated or say afterwards and now we're all cloud-based with multi-products but that was the thing that landed for us finally.

3:24I think of PostHog, well, there's this meme among founders of Pivot Hell. And it's a thing that YC founders talk about a lot where you're going from idea to idea to idea, and you're trying to find something that's going to work. And you guys not only came out of Pivot Hell and have built this awesome company, but what you built was literally forged in the fires of Pivot Hell. While doing these pivots, you had this pain that only came because you were doing the pivots and trying to do them at a high level, setting up the analytics over and over again. Tell us a little bit about how you guys actually got to YC and started this journey of pivoting and finding startup ideas that might work.

4:02My co-founder quit. We used to work together. And when I heard news that he was leaving, I'd also been thinking about leaving. And that kind of triggered me to go, okay, I want to do my own thing. So I made sure to grab him. And instead of getting him to go off and work in another startup or whatever, he thought, hey, let's just do our anything. And when he when he was leaving was he leaving to join another company? Was he leaving to start something? Yeah I think he was actually trying to get a job at Facebook at the time. He was doing an incremental kind of career move. I think I showed up being like I think I have this idea that we'll probably have product market fit for in a couple of weeks time.

4:33Of course, of course they all do. Yeah it's only a hop skip and a jump away and then we can just you know. I had like a I'd created a list of problems I'd encountered professionally thinking like okay I should solve a problem I've had myself and we started going through the list that we thought we wanted to bootstrap initially so the two of us were just like working out of coffee shops all the main problems we found was every time we went to see a customer we'd have to buy another round of coffee and so we'd often end up getting like whatever the coffee equivalent of waste it is basically so eventually we did this for about six months and we worked through an average of one idea every like five probably average about five or six weeks do you remember what any of those ideas were yeah um so the initial thing we tried to build was a sales territory management product So I used to run a sale, I was VP of sales, and I felt that like in sales, you're literally wasting over 90 % of your time because deals don't usually win.

5:23They don't usually close. They usually just float around and gradually get killed off. And we thought if we get better at not focusing on deals that are closing, but on the ones that aren't closing and going a bit more ruthless at using statistics to pull them out of people's pipeline and change the territory for the sales team is what I thought might work. And it was just kind of really complicated to build. And I think because I'm much more technical than a traditional sales leader would be, I just think we built something kind of complicated. And I don't think our go-to-market was right or anything.

5:49Yeah, we had this idea. We built it. I think the thing that was important or the harsh lesson I learned was my co-founder was building it. I was just trying to get interesting prospects to buy it from us. And so I got about 15 sort of series B, C, D sales leaders queued up saying they wanted to use this. Well, they said they wanted to use it. we got the first version done in a couple of weeks, send them the link to create an account of the 15, 14 of them didn't even click the link. One clicked the link and then didn't create an account. And we're like, it was like first good, we should have read the mum test was the, we hadn't done any of the user interviews correctly.

6:25But I also, it made me feel that building for sales people or sales leaders in particular, I feel the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor because they're really quite willing to hop on quick calls and are very, very positive and kind of very friendly people. a little bit later it kind of dawned on us that we think we'd be better because we're not very good at product we're terrible at product initially because we're kind of bad we need to deal with people that are what they say is close to what they'll do and we felt that like natural problem solver people like engineers or customer support people probably would be a better audience for us to work with because out of all the many variables you can get wrong like it might be like your product's incredible but you're terrible at explaining what it does you'll still fail um and And we thought that, okay, one of the variables we can remove from this equation is the person being a little bit easier to read, basically.

7:12And so that was a big part of why we wanted to build something DevTool-y later on, was that sort of realization. But yeah, that was the first thing that we worked on. And so when you guys did Y Combinator, the product that you had was another pivot, was having developers take surveys about technical debt when they would submit a pull request. And so you'd already done a few products by that point. you came into YC with another one did you guys have a like how did you kind of keep your spirits up or how did you track your trajectory did you feel you were getting stronger or better or closer to the target as you were going through these pivots I would like to think that was true I'm not sure it was we didn't reflect on that we should have asked like are we actually getting better each time around um like I think we should run a retrospective basically I don't think we actually were getting that much better each time there are definitely some things that were consistently very important to us though like for example we went full gas on each idea like we didn't sort of like call it in like we would go in person to every single customer that was remotely interested we were going to go meet like we started in england then became san francisco to do yc like we'd catch like a bunch of trains and buses to get to a customer in some random place and like we would put the effort in to go really push it because then kind of what happens when we started charging for all these products you would find that oh i'm not failing this because i don't have a relationship or i'm around like i'm kind of friendly with this customer at this point and they still don't want to buy from us this is a really good sign this product isn't solving the problem this really demonstrates to me it's nice to have like in my previous job um we sell like enterprise software for millions of dollars a year and i can remember multiple times thinking i'm having to work kind of as hard to sell a like 50 a month sass subscription as i was to sell like a hundred thousand dollar a year plus deal in my last job i know that i've tried really hard um and so i can rule out one of the other variables i guess is like are you actually trying as hard as you could be and we were i think that helps us feel confident enough to go this just isn't working so yeah we just we work very hard and it looks I can remember it feeling weird like on LinkedIn for example I talk about like hey this is what we're up to and it'll be like one week it was like some dev tool the next week it's a CRM thing um but we just didn't care like we just threw ourselves into each problem there's an aspect of shamelessness that you have to have yeah to just kind of keep up the momentum and keep trying and not get bogged down I think it's easy to feel kind of lame almost like yeah you have friends who are like in investment banking or they have these like proper careers and we're doing something that just seems so kooky but like that's the bit I think that is a specific reason why most people don't run companies because that first bit is like all is so existential and all over the place I think we just have faith that if we just keep making the input we're looking at is like are we making very regular real progress so on the ideas we'd often at the start of the week be like okay by the end of this week what is the list of things we will feel good if we get them all done and it would be something like okay we want to do like 10 custom meetings build these three big features um and we just held ourselves to account on a very short cadence all the time.

9:56As people, I think we got much stronger at things like product much later on, once PostDog had sort of taken off. But I think we were just like very, we just, yeah, put our heart into things, we're very fast. That was kind of all we needed, I think, realistically. You guys were working through these pivots, maybe getting better, maybe not, trying to be wholehearted, trying to be consistent, trying to be really committed to the bit, maybe as a comedian would say. When you started with the open source product analytics, what became the final pivot, what signals did you get early on or signs that maybe this is it maybe we're really on to something it was a month before YC demo day tell us a little bit about how that unfolded yeah so I think um we're just slightly higher level of excitement about this idea ourselves I think we had had a couple of ideas where in our heart of hearts we weren't that interested in them like we're kind of doing them because we like felt like we had to get something to work um whereas I think this one and we had an office hours here and I can remember and we're like well we're kind of thinking about building this thing that will do two at the time we thought there are two things are important we thought we want to capture all user data completely automatically like we don't want anyone to have to set up event tracking manually we didn't realize someone had already built this um and that didn't turn out to be particularly important and but then the second thing we're like we want to be able to self-host this thing so that you can stay in infra and we came out the office i was going ah that's not the right framing it's open source product analytics then it's not just about it being your infrastructure it's also just like a whole vibe like i think immediately we were like we feel very confident I could see that really landing on Hacker News.

11:18My care friend would both read it and it just felt like the kind of thing you would see on the front page so the level of excitement was a little bit higher for us. I do think it's a bad idea though to like sometimes I see other founders they're like I'm waiting for an idea that I'm excited about but I think the reality is for us it's we had to just build a bunch of things to find the thing we're excited about. What we didn't do was like sit cross-legged on the top of a mountain waiting for inspiration so by trying a few things we started going this idea just doesn't feel good but we know that because we have tried it.

11:46You had to find something in the middle of what people want and what you're excited about. Yeah, exactly. And so I think doing stuff gives you much stronger. I think it's like a Brian Armstrong quote, but doing stuff gives you much stronger signal and more information. And then I think when we started booking interviews, it was a little bit easier to get people to talk to us. But the big deal was on Hacker News when it was just on the front page and had like, it wasn't the best ever. At the time, it was pretty good compared to what happened before. It was a good launch. You had a good Hacker News launch.

12:10If you look at it like, So like 20, 23, 24, 25 vintage Hacker News launches. It was very mediocre, but it was enough to get an initial audience. I think because I go back to people's old demo day slides a lot of the times when helping batch founders figure out what they should say. So I pull up the post hoc slide every now and then. And I believe, according to the slide, and I think it's true, it was the most upvoted dev tool Hacker News post of the year. So pretty good. I remember being in the office hour. You probably showed the idea with a bunch of people, but I remember the first time I heard it.

12:39And it just made a lot of sense. There were a bunch of product analytics companies out there, but no one had really gone all the way to make this truly developer focused by going open source. And so it just sounded like something someone should try. And I wasn't that surprised that it hit the way it did and was really excited for you guys at the time. So, OK, so you had this you were starting to get some users. You had to go out and raise money for this thing at Demo Day. And you'd only been working on it for a few weeks at that point. What was that like? Like, how do you get your conviction up to go, you know, pitch investors about a product that's really only a month old at this point?

13:13It was very mixed. We, at first, we felt really good. We're like, okay, it feels like we're going to have this done in like two days or three days. Slam dunk. Yeah, I think we're coming in going like, yeah, we've had a really solid launch. I think we were still buzzing a little bit after like, oh, it's such a feeling of kind of relief that suddenly we've got something where I just instantly, the day we launched, it went from being a push basis to a pull basis, getting people interested. like suddenly it's just like we're trying to service all these random problems and feature requests and stuff we can see coming in and so we went out to raise I think very confident like we thought we'd kind of be pushing quite a big valuation at the time and I think we felt that we will have this done in just a few days um that our the timing was horrible because it was 2020 in March and the same week basically COVID went from being this somewhat niche thing to changing the world and everyone just suddenly pulled out so we kind of went from feeling like oh we've got like all the fanciest VC firms in the world are interested in this thing to everyone's pulled out and we're now doing like we're trying to get angel checks for five thousand bucks a pop to try and get all the way up to like raising a few million dollars this is going to take a long time um so it was very peaky and we also had a lot of stress over like we're in the US still my wife was at home and pregnant and I was worried about getting stuck in America and my co-founder left because he was also worried about getting stranded and overstaying his visa and stuff so there's just this chaos kind of happening we just kept plugging away basically um i think it was very easy to it would be very easy i think to get disheartened and it was painful but we just didn't i guess we just kept going um was the main thing and so we were doing angel checks um happily taking 5k off of people um until and eventually we got um a proper term sheet um and that led to another one and then we um got the round done very quickly and then the market completely picked up like even just a few months later, I ended up doing like a series A like a month after the seed round had closed.

15:00But I think the statistics are something like, I think we met 160 different firms in the seed round. I think for like, if I added up the total number of firms I've met for the series A, B, C, D and E, for like 20 in total, like 30 in total, it was by far the hardest round we had to raise. But also we sucked it. It's not just the market, like we sucked at pitching. we're trying to people please I think too much and so we would be like well they're like what are you gonna do the money and it's like well you know we'll like kind of get some revenue we'll build some features which is very vanilla feeling and we had a lot of people rejecting us because they felt we're too early but the reality was it's like what we're dealing with a lot of these investors have never invested at that time and never invested in open source at all like the vast majority hadn't um because it was quite it was much more unusual then and I started realizing that I don't even believe that we'd want to spend money across all these areas like we actually want to go all in on the open source project for a while.

15:53Again, I think that's very bad advice for something that doesn't have competition that's making lots of revenue, so be very careful with something like that. But we started getting much more opinionated and that's what started that eventually landing. So hey, you're out of your mind if you think we're going to go big on hiring a big sales team or trying to go into the enterprise or something. It's just about building this nice big inbound kind of community. We think if we can't do that, nothing else will follow and we need to really establish that properly. So yeah, we got much punch here. It's funny how that is.

16:18It's almost like investors are pretty agnostic on what the plan is, so long as there's a plan and that you're really passionate about it and you've thought about it and you're ready to go execute on it. I think there's a Mark Benioff quote, which is something like, it's better to be different than right. I think that it's almost equivalent here where I think it's, if you're trying to raise money, it's better to have a plan than it is to necessarily be like somewhat correct, like be either very clearly right or wrong, because you'll learn something from that. So that round was really hard. You talked to the 160 investors.

16:48It took months to get the money? Yeah. Okay. Fast forward to this latest round that you guys just raised. Obviously, it's five years later, things are very different. The company's in a very different place. You have revenue and customers. What's it like to raise a$75 million round? How is that relatable to folks that maybe are out there trying to raise the first money for their company? What's that experience like? Yeah. Perversity is easier. We spoke to one investor for this round. We raised him in PEEP15, this one called Shalendra, that is the main partner of Dorset Arnav is involved as well.

17:20The round before he tried to take part in, we only had just gotten to know him though. So we kind of felt like we want to spend a bit longer with you before we raised with you, basically. We did spend a little bit more time in him because we liked him as a person. They offered to do the next round preemptively. And at first we thought it was a bad idea because we just felt we don't know how we would spend this. We haven't spent like the round before, the round before almost. But then at the same time, what was starting to happen was we were getting increasingly confident on AI um what actually happened was I went on vacation and read um about some of the motives for why some of the co-founders built OpenAI in the first place and I thought the reasoning was really interesting it was humans have a brain um it's a physical object we can therefore build one basically and there's no technical reason we can't build ADI essentially then I just again this is nerdy reading but I started thinking like what are the specific differences between your brain and LMs today and I kind of concluded there's a lot of things that could be built that I don't understand why they don't exist yet so I therefore think that AI will I don't think it will flatten out like I think the rate of improvement may vary but I think over a long time frame it will be incredibly important to the world so I got much more bullish on its importance and then thinking at work I'm like okay I can definitely see a path okay I just spent some time reflecting with my girlfriend I'm like okay how could this shake out basically like should we change our strategy if we both believe this is this important so at the time we were thinking about building like a crm a support platform all kinds of other data customer data oriented products and everything was kind of working but we thought actually we can do so much more in the realm of product at first like we can build kind of product autonomy out um so we want to go deeper within our products that help you understand what to build and so we wanted to work on like at the moment we're working like a desktop app for example that ships pull requests based on your customer data so we'll look across all your session recordings or your analytics or your error tracking your lm traces go hey these are the issues we can see in your customer base we've literally fixed them whilst you're asleep um here are the pull requests so instead of like please build me this feature it will be the flow is pool based so it's like hey we've built these features based on what's happening and you can just review close edit merge them depending what you want to speed up development further um and we just were like hey let's just go we want to be able to go all in on this idea um and so we raised to have just like the comfort and the confidence so a lot of it's psychological like i don't think we'll manage to spend it um but we want that's kind of the point it's like this means that we can just fully embrace um our product strategy and take a bigger and just like increase the size of swing that we're taking well and it sounds like what you're saying is uh you're able to fully explore the implications of the original idea of post hog which is understand what's happening in your product and what your users are up to and there's all this stuff downstream of that like once you understand it then you can do these things and take these actions yeah because we start thinking like okay it's a bit like if you're trying if your customer is like a painting that you're trying to understand if you have one data type it's a bit like seeing a painting but only being able to see the color of blue you're not going to get a nuanced understanding of a customer like looks like they're not using this feature we should email them to cross sell them the new feature we've just built but at the same time your other data might be telling you something conflicting like they're really pissed off in support right now and this is a terrible time to automatically send them an email or something so we kind of felt like and that's what a human would do today is you kind of look across your tools and we thought oh we can basically just build something that does this and so we set off trying to build basically a product manager that's physical thing we can build it yeah we don't want to build something that has like that we can't conceive of we want to build something that exists but just like a better version and we're like well there's a human product manager has product market fit like companies buy those that is sort of where the idea came from um so instead of just building because normally our strategy had been what are the products have product market fit that have customer data we will build all of them it's more convenient but then we're starting well also like you could consider the team members um and thinking about sales has product market fit and companies so does support so does engineering um so can we build those things now because it's now possible uh i I think it's going to be correct that that works, but we'll see.

21:06All right. All right. You mentioned to me before we started talking today that this is like unexpectedly, maybe you're having more fun than at any other point in the company so far. And that is a little counterintuitive to people. A lot of founders say, oh, the early days are the most fun. And they kind of look back nostalgically. Why do you think you're having more fun now than ever before? The work feels much more leveraged now, which is quite entertaining. I think before you're so much of our focus was trying to get attention from people because you have no attention by default. The world is very noisy.

21:38And so I'm just like sending emails and LinkedIn messages into the ether basically. And it just feels like I'm doing awful little stuff that has no impact. Obviously when you do get like a tiny little spark, it then leads to a big fire. Whereas now it feels like we're playing computer game. We've just unlocked like rocket launchers or something. So it's like, oh, we can like go absolutely nuclear on this particular idea and like really fully build it out in a way that would be very hard to we're like lucky enough to be able to build this because it involves having to have like 15 or 16 products and also a bunch of ai stuff and we need to be able to like have the time to build this because like there's been remarkable work at like intercom where they built fin um and what we're trying to do is analogous to that i think but it's not making postdoc work with kind of what a couple of products it's trying to make it work across like 16 of them um i feel like we're going much deeper than we've ever been but But it's enabled us to make a bet like that.

22:27Like I think similarly, if we're starting from scratch, trying to build what we're now trying to build would be probably impossible, I think. Like SpaceX or something is a much more grandiose idea. Like on day one, it's not building like the transportation from Mars. It's like day one is like we need to build actually a relatively unambitious satellite launching business. I think we've sort of done quite a lot of the homework that means we're able to now do these, take the bigger test basically. I wonder how many products PostHog would need to have to be as grandiose, as ambitious as SpaceX. It's an interesting comparison.

23:00You know, you mentioned like having fun, getting this work out there. Like I know building in public is something that you're keen on. What does that look like as a CEO? Is getting this attention, getting that spark and putting it out there and trying to start a fire. How do you think about that? Doing it in the open where people can see what you're up to and hear about it and follow along. Trust was the original reason for it. We just felt that even if you're offering, like most of our users don't pay anything, like open source project, no one paid, but it still takes up. There is a cost, like it's trust in terms of what are they doing with my data and also just time with setting this tool up.

23:31I think especially as software is getting more, like is it getting quicker to build? There's more software appearing. It's getting just more and more competitive. I think it's become a step change more competitive with AI. And so we felt that, OK, the fundamental thing we have to achieve in marketing is we need to highlight how we're different because it's in a busy industry. And then we need to build trust with users. and like the foundation of trust we felt was transparency so um instead of just having like a one-pager landing page we're going to like really fully explain everything we can about who we are what we're trying to do i think that gave us the trust we needed um and we thought about kind of i looked through other hack news launches and just sort of summarize like okay these are all the pieces of critique i can see and so we're going to make sure we have transparent answers to these types the questions would be things like they don't have a clear business model i don't think this is sustainable for example there's like this sort of inherent suspicion of ideas and we thought okay let's just like think through these types of questions that we know that our audience developers would have and we'll just address them on the website so we like you know we didn't have a pay product we said hey this is how we think the pay product is going to work in future and that was from like day zero you you put some of those things in practice yeah like before we launched hack news i think the other thing we realized from a content and like a marketing perspective was i think experts writing about things is more compelling often than non-experts if you look at like the front page of hack news there'll be like incredibly technically savvy people talking about very complicated topics quite often.

24:45And I thought, man, I'm not clever enough to get there, but I need to figure out a way to get us visible in Hacker News as probably the most popular place for our audience. And I thought, well, the thing I'm actually an expert in is our business, and so I can write about what we're learning and doing. And so I feel like a really natural topic. So we wrote a blog post, also during the Bicy Batch, shortly after the launch of what it's like moving San Francisco students. I remember that post, yeah. And again, that was also viral, but I think I built a lot of trust because it humanized us underneath so i was like put photos in of like we climbed up like twin peaks for example in the night at night i think people realize like oh there are human beings you know in the same way that someone might be really aggressive online but as soon as you meet in person they're much more chill it's the same sort of feeling and we're trying to make that clear like with all our products today you can see like the literal engineers that we have every single team member on the team pages you can see all the so you can look at like product analytics you can see the handful of engineers building it you can click their bio and read about like their pet cat for example so that you're like oh there are people building this the humanization i think is really important.

25:39It's not out, basically. Yeah, it lets people know someone's at home. You go visit this house, there'll be someone there and you'll have a neat interaction. I actually, I think about your moving to San Francisco Post quite often over the years since, because if you look at it, there's nothing that remarkable in the Post, but you got it on Hacker News, people read it, they talked about it, it was discussed. And I think you're right. It's because you just showed some of your humanity behind this product that people could use. And everyone's looking for ways to relate to folks like themselves. I remember when I read that, I thought, wow, they can climb up Twin Peaks and write about it and get developers to want to check it out.

26:16They've got, you know, this is going to go somewhere. Building in public is one of the ways that you guys have really connected with developers. I think another aspect of that, is humor and bringing a sense of merriment, amusement, and maybe even a little chaos to how the post-hog message gets across. One of the manifestations of that was present all over San Francisco this last year with the crazy billboards that you guys put up. In my opinion, like there's billboards all over the city. When people move to San Francisco, they're shocked by all the tech ads everywhere on all the billboards. But I don't think I've seen anyone do quite what you guys did with your marketing.

26:53And so I thought it'd be really fun to just take a look at some of these together and get your take on what's going on here. So I guess this first one is about session replay ostensibly but it's a also like an ad for tomato sauce and it's promoting the sweet taste of understanding where did you guys come up with this and what made you think to compare tomato sauce to session replay for example there are a few things i think kind of by design we wanted it to it had to be different so kind of our grand theory of billboards was how interesting your brand is if your brand's normally here everyone's a bit more interesting on billboards like if you just look at companies seem to come out of their shell a bit more on billboards than they do on their websites.

27:31Why do you think that is? I think they're trying to stand out basically but I think it's a bit like yeah this is gonna sound harsh but I think it's a bit like watching like a first grader play football where they're gonna dabble um but like they're starting from basically being a first grader where it's like well we're already pretty weird online so our billboards need to be bizarre like they need to be like totally out there so we should like lean harder into this which we think will work because the whole point is like it has to stand out in the environment and we need people to we won't be able to talk about and see it and we're not trying to get conversion.

28:00Like it's, you're unlikely to decide to install like our SDK whilst you're driving your car down the freeway. Instead of trying to please everyone, we're not going to care about conversion. We are just going to try and raise awareness. And then the other thing I think that had struck us was from actually doing a bunch of social stuff, we're like, oh, I can like spend the time to write a useful post based on something we're learning and that will work reasonably well to get some, like if it's helpful, people will share it. But somewhat depressingly, if we write, like if I just write something I think is funny, it can sometimes go a thousand times further in terms of reach.

28:30So if I'm just trying to raise awareness, it has to be funny. And that's actually the primary thing we want to get across. And so, yeah, we just really wanted to like crank as far as we could over on the like weirdness, slightly funny scale. It is a real skill. I think we've been trying very hard to, I think a lot of corporates or whatever do like corporate try hard and it's very hard to not come up because you're obviously trying hard. Your stuff is almost a parody of corporate try hard. You've transcended corporate try art. It's a very, like on Hacker News, for example, people talk about like on Hacker News, it's like trial by fire, basically, where there's unbelievable level of criticism.

29:03Our marketing channel in Slack is like that too, where people are like, your joke is just not funny. It has to be better. You look like you're trying. So it's a very heavy feedback culture in marketing. Let's talk about that. So before a post-hog tweet or billboard gets out into the wild, what is the incubation? Yeah, it's a very small number of people will be involved, like probably like three or four, and it is a very high trust, direct place. And so we're really trying to get something that we think is genuinely, it might be sarcastic, but something that's genuinely funny to get onto a billboard or like genuinely just something that would make us laugh or that we would want.

29:41We are kind of doing them for ourselves. Like, is it something I think would be quite funny to see? It's sort of the bar. It feels like you're competing against B2B software because there's all these like AI billboards that are quite similar to each other um but I think the reality is if you want people to pay attention it's like no you're competing with like what they're listening to on the radio or what they're doing on the phone or whatever else um and so the bar is so many times higher and so it's sort of like it needs to be like in the at least in that realm um it's not just about being like doing a slightly better incrementally better job than other software companies and which is like impossible I mean nowhere near as interesting as Mr.

30:13Beast or something but like the mentality is like oh I wish we need to be playing that game at least a bit more um we felt that um we would make fun of adverts in general and so we thought like okay we'll do like a very like americana style that's right ads but we'll make it like it's like a 1950s thing but for like so ai software right so tastes better than spaghetti and you're done up here like the host of a um like a 1950s food show uh talking about your b2b b2b sass product okay and so why why 1950s americana like what what was the appeal there yeah i think if you sort of say like what's the most stereotypical kind of billboard ad you'd imagine.

30:50I think you sort of would imagine you would go back to like, what's the origin of billboards? That's almost when you would look at them from a positive perspective, I think of like, oh, like back in the day ads were kind of cool. They're like funnier, better thought out. Whereas now they've just got a bit. Death to humans. Yeah, yeah. Or it's just like big words on a billboard with like no design element to it at all. And we thought like, actually, let's try and make something kind of a little bit like warm feeling and pretty stupid. Like I was wearing like a frilly frock. And what about the decision to put yourself in all the ads?