RFC to change Office Hours to Hogtalks

[joethreepwood]

We're currently discussing improvements to the PostHog for Startups program, including changing the Office Hours sessions to a different format.

This is a placeholder while we collect feedback from users, but wanted to jot some ideas down and get internal buy-in too.

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Proposed Changes

• Currently, Office Hours sessions have low attendance and a cumbersome signup process. Users have to request to be added to the event.
• To address this, I suggest bringing back HogTalks with external speakers. I'd lead a short interview, followed by open Q&A.
• We'd invite ALL members of the startup program and our internal team to create more inclusion and greater attendance.
• The sessions would be recorded and shared in the newsletter (and potentially on the blog).
• Advantages include easier sign-up, reduced repetition, and increased attractiveness to users.

Next steps: Gather user feedback and plan potential guests for future sessions. Feedback welcome!

Potential speakers

Some people in our networks who we could consider inviting to attend would be:

• Marcus Hyett, Product team at Meta
• Mike Cook, Computational Creativity and AI Researcher at Goldsmiths (previously led a Hogtalk)

Potentially we could invite one of our Angel investors?

• David Buxton (founder of Arachnys)
• Dalton Caldwell (founder of imeem / YC Head of Admissions)
• David Cramer (founder of Sentry)
• Brad Flora (founder of PerfectAudience)
• Adam Goldstein (founder of Hipmunk)
• Solomon Hykes (founder of Docker)
• Rujul Zaparde (founder of FlightCar)

I'm sure @andyvan-ph and I could rustle up some other attendees from our journalist days, but happy to take other suggestions.

[charlescook-ph]

(Writing up what we discussed on a call here)

I don't think we should go down this particular route purely because it seems kind of similar to what we're already doing that's not working and in the past HogTalks the effort/results ratio wasn't quite there either. I suspect that this will be more successful than office hours, but only slightly.

Not sure what to suggest as alternatives - should we start a podcast? 😸

[joethreepwood]

The other idea we could consider to move this along would be to expand the mailing list.

Currently, one persona (usually a founder) signs up to PostHog For Startups for their company. And we invite them to all office hours, but nobody else...and founders are quite time poor.

Granted, this make the events more exclusive, but means we're only inviting 1 person from each company - not their co-founders, not their early teams, etc.

I'm not super dedicated to the hogtalks idea either way, but I think there's a case for dropping the office hours idea if we can't get traction here.

[andyvan-ph]

James is building up quite a decent following on Twitter now. Maybe we should promote whatever we end up doing there? Could promo in the newsletter as well.

I reckon some kind of regular #AskJames might draw more people in, but maybe it's done as an async AMA on the website rather than a call? We could do it once a month as invite all users, not just startup program?

[joethreepwood]

Totally up for doing that, but it feels like it would be accomplishing a different objective. I'm specifically looking to drive engagement with the Startups program, rather than with the general audience. Inviting everyone will get us more users, but it won't be as attractive or exclusive for startup users.

Not to say we shouldn't do that as well, obvs.

[joethreepwood]

Closing this for now. Discussed with @charlescook-ph and it didn't feel like there was much traction.

Instead, I'll:

• widen the scope of the invites to not just the founders
• reassess in a month or two

This will help us drive a bit more engagement from having more invitees, hopefully