How PostHog Keeps a Pulse on Brand Perception and Product Sentiment
Learn how PostHog uses Octolens to create real‑time feedback loops, product‑level insight, and measurable brand moments (e.g. for billboard campaigns).
PostHog helps developers build better products by giving them everything they need to deploy, test, observe, and analyze new features in one platform.
The fast‑growing company is equally serious about shipping great products and understanding how they land with the community. Today, PostHog is trusted by over 170k engineering teams worldwide.
Company info (June 2025):
- Size: 108 employees
- Funding: $70M Series D
- Headquarter: San Francisco, Remote
For this case study, we interviewed Brian Young, who is leading Demand Generation at PostHog.
PostHog’s core audience (engineers and technical founders) trust peer‑to‑peer recommendations far more than ads. Engineers tend to install ad‑blockers, skim past promoted posts, and share candid opinions on Reddit, X (Twitter), and Hacker News.
Marketing is split into three teams at PostHog: Brand & Vibes, Content, and Demand Gen.
“My side is about using all that brand power to drive new sign‑ups—but keeping our brand perception positive through engagement and responsiveness is everyone’s job”, explains Brian.
Before Octolens, the team used a simple Slack integration from a generic monitoring tool. Mentions flowed in, but key context was missing:
- No sentiment analysis to separate love letters from bug rants.
- Cumbersome mention filtering that was difficult to update.
- No way to slice feedback by product area.
“Our Slack channel was just a firehose of mentions, and would often miss things,” Brian recalls. “We saw our name, but not how people felt or which part of the platform they meant.”
Especially with PostHog launching new offerings like LLM Observability (currently in beta), the Demand Gen Team team wanted more granularity. “I wanted to split our social listening in a way that lets us track perception by product. Are people excited about this release? That’s critical feedback.”
Today, PostHog uses Octolens to monitor Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and more. Mentions come through a webhook into a PostHog dashboard using ValTown, where the team can view trends by platform, product, and timeframe.
Additionally, they have set up Octolens Slack integration and funnel mentions into a channel that includes almost every PostHog employee.
“Everyone’s invested in mentions,” said Brian. “It’s part of our culture. If something needs attention, it gets flagged and handed to the support team or, often, directly to the team that is building the product. Giving everyone access to this information enables us to support our community better and to have engineers directly engage with our users."
Last, and also importantly, if someone says something hilarious or positive, PostHog shares that too - it’s great for their team morale.
PostHog's workflow looks like this:
Cast a wide net: Begin with broad brand and product keywords (across core product lines).
Route in real time: Octolens pushes AI‑scored alerts into Slack together with sentiment analysis and AI classification tags, making triage and response time fast.
Analyze trends: The ValTown connection using Octolens webhooks to a PostHog dashboard allows the team to create custom charts by sentiment by platform and product, highlighting spikes or dips after each release.
Close the loop: Key insights are shared within the team.
One of the most unexpected use cases? Measuring billboard campaign impact.
“We ran a billboard campaign—something notoriously hard to track. But thanks to Octolens, we saw real-time reactions like ‘Who is PostHog and why are their billboards so hilarious?’ It gave us a clear brand signal that would’ve otherwise been invisible.”
Octolens also helps PostHog jump on support requests, identify misinformation, and get feedback on UI changes - all as it happens. “We’ve caught negative threads early, surfaced bugs, and celebrated wins. But most importantly, we’ve built a habit of listening. That’s changed the game.”
With PostHog's most new signups coming from organic or referral traffic, staying close to those unfiltered conversations is crucial.
Real‑time sentiment across Reddit, X, Hacker News, and more.
Product‑level granularity to track new launches like LLM Observability.
Measurable brand moments - even offline campaigns get instant online feedback.
Company‑wide culture of listening that boosts morale and speeds support.
When asked about life without Octolens: "I think we’d be in a tough spot,” Brian said.
“As I said before, brand reputation is critical to our success; not being on top of our users' needs and thoughts could mean a missed opportunity for us. Octolens makes sure we’re never in the dark.”
Octolens monitors your brand in real-time. Receive AI-vetted alerts for keyword mentions and growth opportunities so you can act fast and stay ahead of your competition.
Get started for free or book a demo to see how Octolens can help you stay on top of the conversations that matter.