Overview

A key component to any product-led growth or sales funnel is the ability to try the product before using it.

Right now, teams can get a feel for the product by ingesting their data and getting events in, but it's high effort and may not lead to the best, most accurate experience of the product due to their taxonomy.

Motivations

1. Provide visitors with a self-serve experience where they can see the value of PostHog with relevant use cases without ingesting any data
2. Help our Sales team scale by first routing prospects through self-serve demos
3. Tighten up our self-serve funnel - we can use marketing to drive towards demo entry and demo entry to mark the start of our sales funnel.

What about focusing on demo videos instead?

• Since this is going to be a living, breathing, org with real data constantly flowing into it we don't need to worry about updating our videos anytime the UI changes.
• Interactivity generally wins. For folks that want a demo they will still have the same ability they do today to self-select into one.
• Videos and a demo environment aren't mutually exclusive, they attract different personas and long-term there's room for both.

Goals

Goal 1: Develop an excellent taxonomy and a system that perpetually seeds data from it into a PostHog org

Summary:

• Develop an excellent taxonomy. An excellent taxonomy...

  1. Makes it easy to demonstrate the value of core analytics functionality (for example, funnel breakdowns) while feeling sufficiently random (the way a real product would)
  2. Is comprised of events and paths that are commonly understood and applicable to industries

• Build out a process that perpetually seeds a PostHog org with data given a taxonomy

Open question: Which industry should we base our first dataset on?

• Based on usage data, we have strong usage from SaaS companies (not very granular) and Fintech after that.
• My suggestion would be our first taxonomy be around typical SaaS use cases– maybe our own version of Coinbase (i.e. CoinHog)?

Goal 2: Expose the demo data project to the public

Summary:

• Surface demo org behind a url we can route to (e.g. app.posthog.com/demo - today HogFlix lives there)
• Email gate to get into the demo
• Demo is fully interactive. Users are allowed to save content in their session but it doesn't persist or show up for others.

After Goal 2: Demo can be sent directly in Slack and sales conversations at this point.

Goal 3: Build CTAs into demo environment, AB test demo signups

Summary:

• Build out CTAs in the demo environment to get started with self-hosted or cloud
• Run an AB test: Swap out primary website hero CTAs with the new demo flow

After Goal 3: Wait for learnings from the AB test and optimizations into core experience before investing into further datasets.

Goal 4: Build out additional datasets

Summary:

• Build out additional datasets for other industries (i.e. e-commerce, healthcare, media)
• Build out functionality for demo users to hop between relevant datasets (maybe each is a project?)

@samwinslow I'd like to get your thoughts on this and chat about it later this week. Seeing how @jamesefhawkins' time looks I think it would make sense for us to prioritize some of this work before the work around expanding our pipeline. So I'm thinking this could be the next project after usage reporting (and before Next Steps - or @smallbrownbike takes Next Steps).