Technical Account Executive

PostHog was created as an open-source project during Y Combinator’s W20 cohort and had the most successful B2B software launch on HackerNews since 2012 – with a product that was just 4 weeks old. Since then, more than 50,000 companies have installed the platform. We’ve had huge success with our paid upgrades, raised $27m from some of the world’s top investors, and have shown strong product-led growth – 97% driven by word of mouth.

Despite the tech market, we’re default alive and doing better than ever! We average 10% monthly revenue growth and are on track for $10m ARR in early 2024. While others are focused on layoffs and struggling to grow into huge valuations, we’re focusing on building an awesome product for end users, hiring a handful of exceptional team members, and seeing fantastic growth as a result.

What we value

• We are open source – building a huge community around a free-for-life product is key to PostHog’s strategy.
• We aim to become the most transparent company, ever. In order to enable teams to make great decisions, we share as much information as we can. In our public handbook everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, what our strategy is, and who we have raised money from. We also have regular team-wide feedback sessions, where we share honest feedback with each other.
• Working autonomously and maximizing impact – we don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what is going to have the biggest impact on our customers.
• Solve big problems – we haven’t built our defining feature yet. We are all about acting fast, innovating, and iterating.

Who we’re looking for

This is not your typical AE role. If you’re looking for a classic ‘AE who pairs with a sales eng then passes the customer to CS to take care of’ role, you should stop reading now.

We’re looking for someone who is:

• Technical enough to help our customers – you need to be incredibly helpful and solve real problems without asking a sales engineer for help. No going away and asking an expert by default – you will be the expert.
• Great at reading the signs of which inbound customers to focus on – you will be laser focused on helping customers who match our ICP, and not spending time where you can’t have an impact.
• Good at maintaining long term relationships past the initial sale – you will own the relationship and sell new products in as fast as we build them, not just hand off to an account manager.

We’re building every tool a product engineer needs to build better products, and our strategy is working – we’re finding customers organically using 2, 3, or even 4 PostHog tools at a time. Your challenge is to drive multi-product adoption without forcing people into using tools they don’t need.

Our sales are 100% inbound right now – we have over 1,000 organizations signing up to use PostHog every week. We have product market fit and loads of customers happily self-serving to large contract values, but staying focused on the biggest opportunities is increasingly challenging as a result.

Right now, we have 2 people in this role at PostHog, so you have an opportunity to get in exceptionally early at a time when our revenue is rocketing.

What you’ll be doing

We believe that the days of the classic account exec -> CS manager playbook are over, especially when it comes to multi-product platforms like PostHog.

For us, “expansion” doesn’t mean a boring annual contract renewal negotiation at +X%, it means helping customers adopt new tools across the PostHog ecosystem. This year alone we’re planning to release web analytics, data warehouse (both already in beta) and a CDP, in addition to product analytics, session replay, feature flags and more.

What this means for you:

• Together with the rest of the sales team, you’ll qualify and process inbound interest from people who contact us directly for a demo or via other channels.
• You’ll have an existing book of business – these are engaged, high paying ($20k+/yr) customers who we think have huge expansion potential. Some of these people have never talked to us before!
• Owning customer feedback and making sure it gets to the wider PostHog team – you’ll work directly with product teams, we don’t believe in bureaucracy here.
• Being hyper responsive is obviously a must – you need to feel like an extension of a customer’s existing team. We try to do as much customer comms in Slack as possible.
• You’ll need to be an expert on all PostHog products so that you can help customers see the value and adopt them.

This is a great role for someone who has been an AE before and has owned longer term customer relationships, but equally good if you have been a sales eng/product specialist and are tired of letting the sales team get all the credit!

This role comprises a base salary component plus commission for hitting/exceeding sales targets – the salary in our compensation calculator is your expected total pay for on-target earnings.

What you won’t be doing

❌  Taking someone with you to every customer meeting – it’ll normally be you and the customer. Very occasionally you might bring a product engineer with you, e.g. if they are one of our first customers paying for a new product.

❌  Automating everything – a big part of this role will be ‘inefficiently’ building a lot of white glove, 1-1 customer relationships, so you can’t just rely on email sequences.

Requirements

• Commercially-minded – you’re excited about growing and retaining revenue. If we’ve never spoken to a particular customer, you’ll get creative to get them to engage.
• Strong customer focus – you need to help our users and remove any blockers to them using Posthog effectively.
• Good at handling relationships strategically – helping a customer achieve their goals over time, expanding their usage and buying more and more products from us as they do so, while saying no to customers who we’re not right for.
• You’re able to go deep on understanding the product. You don’t need to be a developer but the ability to get into the details will give you confidence and really help you bring more value to customer conversations.

Nice to have

• Experience working with similar technologies, ie. developer tools more broadly, or specifically product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, data warehouses, or data pipelines.
• You’ve been the owner of several customers in the several $20k-100k+ ARR range previously.

If you have a disability, please let us know if there’s any way we can make the interview process better for you – we’re happy to accommodate!