Welcome Back & Show Intro

Alex Kracov: What's up everybody? Excited to be doing another episode of Grow and Tell. It's been a while. Took all last year off because I realized that the podcast was taking a lot of time and I need to spend time on actually building a business, Dock. And so I spent a lot of time on product and positioning the company to AI, which we're going to get into.

But yeah, we're going to try and do something a little different with the show. We're still going to be doing interviews. So we're going to be interviewing some enablement leaders, sales leaders, marketing, all the go to market folks, a little more of an angle on enablement, I think, at least in the next couple episodes. But then we're also going to do some Alex and Eric episodes. We're going to talk about building Dock, just go to market stuff in general. And just wanted to have a few episodes where we get to share some of our knowledge from building Dock, building Lattice. And Eric is our awesome head of marketing and I'll let him introduce himself. He's going to be my co-host.

Eric Doty: Yeah. Hey, Alex. I've actually been in the background, I guess, for all previous 40 something episodes, but nobody would know the wiser. Yeah. Producer Eric. So now I'm co-host Eric Hatton. So yeah, I've been doing content marketing mostly for 10 plus years, but now at Dock, I'm the head of marketing, which is very exciting, recent development. And, yeah, we've done, I think, I think why I'm excited to join the show is like, we've done so much collaborating at Dock at like.

Alex Kracov: Yes, producer.

Eric Doty: the, with our sales team, with CS, I've been a part of that whole go-to-market process. So I think we've learned a lot, the two of us together and we have a lot of stuff to share with our guests or our listeners, I should say, and our guests. Not? Yeah.

Alex Kracov: Yeah. Our listeners. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's gonna be fun. We're gonna keep it casual and just jam on Dock stuff and go to market things. And, you know, we all know how it is. No one's gonna listen to the whole podcast. This can all be about the cliffs is what we care about, right? All about the cliffs. Yeah. Yeah. Just, this is just Eric's LinkedIn strategy right here. Just get him more content for LinkedIn. That's the goal. Yeah.

Eric Doty: It's all about going viral on LinkedIn.

The Origin Story of Dock

Eric Doty: Exactly. Yeah. So today, like for the, our first episode back, we kind of wanted to flip the script a little bit and have Alex as the guest in a way. And so today we're going to talk about the journey of Dock sort of from founding to where we are now, just so that everyone listening has the full context of like the journey we've been through. And, so why Alex, why don't you start right at beginning? Like, why did you found Dock? What, I know like you were experiencing a problem yourself that you were kind of.

DIY Dock to solve your own problems. So tell us about that.

Alex Kracov: Yeah. I mean, like in college, I just got bit with the startup bug for whatever reason. I thought it would be a lawyer and then I don't know, like Social Network came out that movie or whatever it was. I became obsessed with just like internet business stuff. And so then like when I was 20 years old, I was like, okay, I got to figure out how I get into this. I became obsessed with entrepreneurship and like long story short, I tried to build a bunch of stupid businesses along the way, like a dog treat delivery business.

Company that was called Doggy Style Treats, was hilarious. And then, yeah. And then an electronic music. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The logo is still out there somewhere. We could find that. It's pretty funny. But like, you know, Hey, that taught me how to like build an e-commerce website and figure out how you fulfill dog treats, but it didn't go very far. And then I tried to do like electronic music search engine, a group travel planning app, all of these random things. But anyways, I got just bit with the startup.

Eric Doty: God. Can't believe that one didn't work out.

Alex Kracov: Bug and always wanted to start a company and that led me to live in to move to San Francisco and I got to work with Google, which was kind of fun. But I long story short, I ended up at Lattice and so I was the third employee there. I ran marketing there and my whole goal with Lattice and I was super transparent with Jack about it was I want to learn how what it takes to build a company and then I'm going to go start my own company. And so that's what I said from day one when I joined and I spent five years at Lattice.

Built Lattice into a really big business, like $3 billion business. But along the way, I was kind of like, what's my idea? Right? Because you obviously need an idea to start a business. And so I was always looking around. And I was playing around in FIGMO with my group travel planning app. Travel businesses are hard. So that didn't really go anywhere. But then, let's say, year four at Lattice, I kind of noticed this problem.

I noticed that I'm running marketing, I'm creating all of this marketing collateral for the sales team. And then our sales team could never find what they were looking for. And then when they would try and share it with the champions, right, in the sales process, it was a disaster. It would be all over these different email threads. And the way the Lattice sale worked is we would sell to an HR person, and then they were our champion, and they would have to go and convince the rest of the organization.

Right, to go buy Lattice. So they'd have to go talk to the C-suite and the managers and the other VPs and the end users and say, hey, we're going to do performance management in this way. We're going to buy the system called Lattice. And so the same time I was really into Webflow. Had rebuilt Lattice's marketing website on Webflow. And I was always playing around with Webflow on the side and kind of built a crappy version of what became Dock, which was like this microsite, which was just a fancy CMS in the background, but it was a microsite.

Where the sales rep could of like toggle on and off different things like the case study, the pages, different things, and then create this nice little package, right? This little private website that they could send to the champion and that champion could share around the rest of organization. And for a pretty crappy product, right? There was very limited functionality, no analytics, not much. It started to take off at Lattice. Like there was, I don't know, like eight.

Alex Kracov: 900 something of that like that volume of these things created a few of the reps like swore by it. And so was like, okay, there's something here and then I started scheming a little bit more seriously to be like, all right. How do I turn this into a real company? And then like Luke, who's our head of design and one of the co-founders of Dock, and was the brand designer at Lattice. Me and him were sort of working together to kind of figure out how do we actually turn this into a real product? The hard part was we both didn't know how to code. And so we were this is precursor and pre vibe coding and stuff. We probably could figure that today, but then we luckily through Seth, who's the first sales rep at Lattice, reconnected us with Victor who was one of our early engineers at Lattice. Who was just coming back from a couple years being a guy just chilling in Thailand diving all the time. And we started like actually building a real product. And I'll pause there, but that's kind of like the initial story of how we got it going with Dock.

The Marketing Wedge Into Sales

Eric Doty: Yeah. What I never realized before, I mean, I've been at Dock for three and a half years now. I never thought about how you kind of like tried to put a marketing, more of a marketing wedge into the sales process of like, you and I have talked before about like sales is really good at this one-to-one communications. Marketing is really good at this one-to-many. And then you kind of found this problem where sales was having to do like lots of little one-to-ones and that was probably stretching the typical rep.

And you're like, how do I marketing my way into the sales process? It's not just like, here's more assets, but it's like, here's a tool that will help you speak more one to many.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's like how does marketing and I would say sales leadership to get control over the sales process and what's actually shared, right? And and look, there was like really good reps at Lattice who knew exactly what to share and know where to find the latest assets. But the problem is as you scale a company, it gets it's chaotic, right? I mean, Lattice when I was a third person there were like 600 people by the time I joined like left and like it was chaos and there's a bunch more junior people and like they don't know where to find things. They don't know what to share at different things. And so being able to kind of control what they're doing in the sales process became like a pretty big insight that drove, you know, like that initial product.

Early Days: First Customers & Product

Eric Doty: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So first year, who were your customers? How'd you get started? What did that look like?

Alex Kracov: Yeah. Okay. So first year, I eventually quit Lattice, right? And Victor was kind of building, had started to build on the side and good software takes a long time to build, which is what I'm still learning at Dock. But we basically, the timeline was I quit Lattice on April 1st of 2022. Yeah. I think it's 21, 21. Yeah. You get fact-checked. Yeah. The time is hard these days.

Eric Doty: Can fact check you.

Alex Kracov: But yeah, I think it was 21. And so I quit April 1st, 2021. Victor had kind of already started building and we were slowly building like and ramped it up right after I had quit. And then in July, we kind of had our first set of users. So we built like a really crappy V1 that people could actually start to use. But hey, like you can log into a product. There was basic analytics. It was a really like sort of thin deal room, although I don't even know if he called it deal rooms at the time. I did not think of this thing as a sales deal room, which is what the market has become. But we basically launched our first version in July. Were some initial customers like Lattice. I planted this funny, Lattice had a pretty intense security guy, shout out Frank, who's awesome. And he basically realized, hey, the Webflow thing I built at Lattice was so insecure.

Eric Doty: No.

Alex Kracov: Selling Dock in and saying, we could replace that with something that like was a real product was easy sell to them. And I wanted to give it to free until they were like, hey, no, we need to pay you for this, which is cool. So yeah, anyways, launched initial product in July, we had a couple random customers, I was mostly posting on LinkedIn or messaging people. And the first year really looked like, okay, let's just like get feedback, right? Like I would get people to use this product and our editor like barely worked. Like every couple clicks you would click to try and build one of these workspaces, you'd get like a little error message, but you'd have to find the right combination of clicks to get it to actually work. And I'd be like, Victor, like, will this ever be solved? Like he's like, yes, yes, it will. But like trying to build a notion style editor is actually really, really hard. Like you see word documents, you see Google docs, you're like, this is easy. Everyone has it. But turns out Microsoft Word and Google have thousands of engineers making that a perfect experience.

And so that was really frustrating, but the first year was really just like, you know, playing around with the product myself, trying to build these workspaces for people and trying to fix all the little bugs. We had, you know, a decent amount of users. And I think one thing that I can't tell, like, I mean, Dock has worked out, so I guess it wasn't a giant mistake, but we did like have people in the product really early. Like we got people in there super, super early and started getting real feedback. And I think oftentimes people think of feedback as like, very high level, like what feature should I build? What should I do with my product? But oftentimes feedback is just like, hey, when I click enter three times, it breaks the product. You need that type of feedback to kind of tighten up software. So yeah, it was kind of a fun first journey of just how do you get this really nascent product, just even get it going and usable, I think was the first goal.

Selling to Everyone vs. Niching Down

Eric Doty: Yeah. And I think what stood out to me, I joined Dock maybe a year and a bit in, and I think when I first joined, we were kind of selling to everybody. Like, yes, we landed on digital sales room as a term, but I think at the beginning you were kind of thinking just like customer workspace, two companies working together. And I think that created kind of some interesting challenges, right? Cause it was on one hand, you wanted to like build something with a really wide TAM.

On the other hand, was like, how do you build something for everybody? I think that was like a challenge we grappled with for a couple of years. Maybe you could like say more about that.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. Yeah, like I'm a VC startup nerd, right? Like all I do in my free time is like listen to podcasts about VC and all this stuff, right? And so obviously what I've been incepted with is like build a big ass company, right? Build a company as big as you can tackle the hardest problems that you can, right? Like that's what you should be doing as a startup, which I do agree with. But so my point of view when I initially started Dock was, okay, I, you know, at Lattice I was working with the sales team, but I was like, Ooh, this could be bigger.

This could be all B2B communication. This could be not just companies have intranets, this could be an extranet, which really never became a thing. This could be an email replacement and a Slack killer. This could be a new way that just B2B companies communicate. And so the initial frame for Dock was, OK, let's not just tackle sales and onboarding, but let's investor relationships. Data rooms was like an interesting use case and a big market and the providers are all pretty crappy.

There's like recruiting, there's agency to marketing relationships. There's so many relationships between a company and the external people, is you could have one workspace to kind of rule them all and rule all those different relationships. So that was like the initial framing. And I think the headline on the website was something like the best way to work with anybody outside your company or something, or the new way to work with people outside, or something along those lines. And it like worked and we did get some people like using us for data rooms. There was some, you could feel it there, but clearly the big thing was like the customer relationship, right? Like the customer relationship was the one relationship where there needed to be something like a tool like a Dock to solve. And that's where we've kind of felt the most market pull and all the other things. Like it just didn't feel the pull that much. It didn't feel like people were wanting to pay. And then it also just led to like really hard.

Product decisions in marketing and positioning decisions. If you try and sell to everybody, you're kind selling to no one. And that makes it really hard. And then from the product perspective, when we're looking at our roadmap, it's like, man, we could either make our Salesforce integration really, really good, or I could go build integrations with HRS systems because I want to also help with recruiters. And so as a startup, you've got to niche down and find that initial swim lane.

Alex Kracov: Goes back to that original vision. I think we've kind of settled on a new vision, which I know we'll talk about, like, but yeah, I don't know. It was a really interesting lesson of like trying to be really ambitious, but then the market kind of telling you, hey, like you should go in this direction, which we did.

Vitamins vs. Painkillers: Finding the Real Pain

Eric Doty: Yeah. And preparing for this episode, I went back and actually read a bunch of your updates to investors, like every quarter. And at one point, I think it was a year or two in, said, you know, we're a vitamin right now. We're this like, but we need to be a painkiller or this nice workspace that if you're an agency or something like that, yeah, this is better than an email or a Google doc. But the people who are really feeling this pain is like really complex onboarding scenarios and long, difficult sales cycles.

So I think like, yeah, we had, once we got closer to like the pain and also the money, I think too, was, was interesting too. Like the teams with like sales has a very clear ROI with Dock. Like, yeah, shortens the sales cycle, better win rate, all these very clear things that you can point to and say, yeah, let's get a budget line item for this. I think it was more obvious than like the agency use case, let's say.

Alex Kracov: Totally. And like it is way easier to reinvent a category and to build like a better mousetrap than to create a new one. And just creating a new category is so hard because people you have to just expensive and it might not work right. Like you have to educate people like what this category is, why they need it. Then you need to convince CFOs and all the execs like, hey, create budget for this thing. And it's way easier to just be like, hey, you already have that line item.

In your budget, like we're better than what you're doing there, just replace us. And like that was Lattice, right? Like Lattice was not a new category. It was a reinvention of the category, right? Like it was modern performance management and Success Factors had done that in the early 2000s. And we were like, let's do a better version of that. And I think what you can do though, and this is maybe my advice to other folks is like, like in the reinvention, you can combine things that are unique. Like Lattice combined, you know, performance management and employee engagement in the same suite. And we were the first provider to do that. And that's when Lattice really started to take off because now you can answer the question like, are my top performers happy? And it used to be that the happiness data set lives somewhere else and the top performer data set lived elsewhere. And this was the first time it was all combined, which is like a really important question that everyone wants to know. And Dock, at least in the sort of first act, combined sales and customer onboarding in one place, right? Where the only place where you can manage your whole sales cycle and seamlessly transition over to customer onboarding all in a client-facing way. And that's when Dock, I think, really started to work. It kind of became more of that painkiller. But we still have a lot more work to do to get there.

Digital Sales Rooms as a Category

Eric Doty: Yeah. So I think what's interesting you said is it's easier to build in an existing category than create a new one. But I think in some ways, digital sales rooms as we were building Dock was still an emerging category. And so I think in some ways people thought treating it maybe as a nice to have, you know, it's like, how could you tell while we were building Dock there that like, I think also there's some education of the market happening.

Like buyer enablement is also important, not just sales enablement. And so it felt like there's a little bit of tension between like educating the market versus like serving a real need that people maybe didn't know they had yet. And I think a couple of years later now it's an established category that people know about, like how did you think about that sort of building in an emerging category play?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, digital sales rooms is a funny category. Like, and as I kind of said before, I didn't even know what we had built was that, right? I didn't ever thought of it like that. But basically like the big sales enablement players, Highspot and Seismic, Showpad, I think Showpad was the first one who like did true digital sales room. They put that on their website and one PSA for Gartner and all the people like, let's please rebrand this to sales deal room. I hate digital sales room. It's like, of course it's digital.

But anyways, so I think these big incumbents had this thing that they had called the digital sales room. It was the same category of Dock, but the product was radically different. And it's still the case today. And this is why Dock has been successful is the big digital sales room companies, it really was this static landing page where you could pull in the content from your content library and maybe rearrange it a little bit and maybe add a block of text and stuff. But it really was this static page.

And then what we had built at Dock was this really flexible, you know, like website builder experience where you could really personalize, you know, this this workspace is what we call it to the customer. And there's a lot of like a notion style editor in there. You can pull in content from your library. You can pull in content pretty much from anywhere on the Internet, any types of embeds. You can hide and show different pages. It's hooked up to your CRM in a really fancy way. And so it's just a much more advanced version of what some of these, you know, the legacy players had done. And Dock and there's a few other emerging competitors like, you know, Aligned and Trumpeter are some of the ones that we would compete against. I think have all together really helped create, I think what I would describe as like the modern sales deal room category. And that's really kind of shifted people's minds in the market. Now, I think what's interesting about sales deal rooms as a category, and I think this has changed though, is I would like get on calls in the early days and sales leaders like just wouldn't get it. Like most of them wouldn't get the value of it. It would like took some more convincing, like some percentage of them were like, my God, where have you been all my life? You're a genius for starting this company. And that's like, that gave me the energy to keep going. But like a bunch of them, you know, are kind of just like, I don't get it. Like, why can't I just do other ways to do it? Well, and actually the biggest objection is will the client ever click on the link? And I'd be like,

Alex Kracov: Well, do you click on links? And they'd be like, yeah. And I'm like, boom, it's just a link on the internet. This is not rocket science. But I think that tone has really shifted. Now people, I think, believe in deal rooms more. They see the value of it. There's more proof points of it working in the market. But it's still an aspirational way to do sales. Is sales deal rooms a requirement to closing a big deal? No. You could do the old school way.

Definitively a better way to do sales? Yes. Like we have enough data at this point to say it's better. And look, it's not going to be a silver bullet, but it's another tool in your toolkit. It's another channel that you can use to sell into your customer base, get more data about your sales cycle. And maybe not every client's going to click on it and use it in the same way, but a large percentage of them will and a large percentage of them will love it. And I think that's what has somewhat created this big market and hype around the sales deal room or digital sales room category.

The Pivot to Revenue Enablement Platform

Eric Doty: That was an amazing pitch for sales rooms. And as we say that Dock made the decision to position reposition. We made the decision to reposition away from just like we're a digital sales room too. I mean, it's still part of our product category, but now we've moved up market in a way to tackling the whole rebel revenue enablement platform space. And so can you walk through like how you came to that decision? What did you notice was happening with customers, things like that.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's still like much to my frustration. It still feels like the market thinks about like they put Dock in this point solution bucket, right? Like it was you're a deal room and you're this one part and hey, I have all these other problems and you're just going to solve one part of it. And I still was holding on to this. Want to make something new and interesting, right? But I'm going to do it in the customer relationship and we're going to do it for sales and onboarding. Excuse me.

And I wanted to create something like new and interesting. And I was really, wait, let me restart over. You know, I think the market really positioned Dock as like a point solution, right? And so we were just like this sales deal room and our sales cycles were sort of split, right? Like we were competing against other deal room point solutions. And then there was oftentimes like these big enablement category players that we were going up against, like Seismic and Highspot and Showpad and those big players and more and more our customers were asking us for not just deal rooms but content management was like another big place to play and then you know today it's also like learning management side of things and so we sort of realized okay. There's a lot of customer demand to go beyond just like a point solution. That's a deal room, even though we thought of it as a much bigger category. I think the market put us in that bucket and we said, okay, we need to build a much broader enablement platform. And it goes back to reinventing the category, right? It goes back to how can we, you know, we realized a bunch of people had a big line item in their budget for enablement platform and Highspot and Seismic haven't shipped a lot of new functionality, you know, in a few years. And so how can we like reinvent that category by being a deal room first solution, an AI first solution. And I think we're starting to do that and we're going to launch an LMS in a couple months and I think that'll kind of be like the final piece of the puzzle of building out the product surface area that we need to really compete against those guys. And I think we also just like realized our biggest and easiest customers often had an enablement person involved. Like when we analyzed our customer base, the people who paid us the most and who had the least of like, or the most happy with Dock really had an enablement person. Cause I think what we realized was if you sell to just sales people,

Alex Kracov: They are distracted. They are actually salespeople are not good at like getting work done for the most part. They are good at selling deals, but they are not good at implementing software. They're not good at setting up a template. Some of them are like you find your your your sales ninja at the company who will do stuff like that. But it's really hard to find and you really need that enablement doer. And so both like the market telling us our own customer feedback, our own data was like, OK, you know.

Let's stop trying to be this new special snowflake and let's go build a proper enablement platform because we're really close. I know if we just add a couple of things, it's going to be a really exciting time.

Narrowing the ICP & Sales Motion

Eric Doty: Yeah. So that's an interesting choice because how do you know, say we're the best sales room in the market. How do you know when you're getting into enablement that you're not losing your wedge there that you're like diluting too much or like with your sort of product manager hat on, how are you thinking about that?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's an interesting balance. I would say, like when we think about the roadmap, we're not just like, Hey, not supporting deal room anymore, not investing over there. Like it's still our unique differentiator. So we still invest like resources and engineers into building out the deal room and the functionality and making it better. We just have a couple other engineers now working on, you know, the other parts. So we try and kind of, I guess, find the balance there as I think about kind of the product planning and the roadmap side of things. Yeah, I don't know. That's kind of how I think about it.

Eric Doty: Cool. Let's, before we talk more about like the revenue enablement category, I think kind of two interesting things happened with our sales process too that changed over the last couple of years. So one was like counter-intuitively kind of when we moved upmarket and became like an enablement platform, it actually helped narrow our ICP because now, like you said, it's just enablement leaders. And I think that relieved a lot of pressure on the sales team.

Right. Because before we had all these, someone would come in and be like, this is, I want this customer onboarding platform you have. And you kind of have to put on your like, yeah. Okay. I'm selling it on onboarding platform hat. Can you walk through what that change meant for the sales team?

Alex Kracov: Totally. To be good at go-to-market, you need repeatability. Everyone needs to be saying the same things. You need to be really confident in saying your solution is going to solve those problems. I think of building a startup, often like a video game, where I'm building different features, and then I'm talking to someone who I'm demoing, and then I'm just trying to fill in all the gaps of the product that they're going to bring up with me. Then Dock has gotten way better over time of saying, we used to not have any permissions in the deal room.

But then we built that and then we solved that problem. And like, it's this constant game of iterating based off feedback and like trying to make it so there's no reason for somebody to say no on a call, right? From like a future perspective. That's my product hat on, right? But then what often would happen is we would get into radically different conversations in a demo. So to be talking to, you know, a founder who's doing founder led sales, we'd be talking to a mid stage, you know, sales leader, you'd be talking to an enterprise sales leader.

We'd be talking to onboarding use cases. We'd be talking to an agency who wants to use Dock in a certain way. We'd be talking to people who wanted to use content management or we'd be talking to enablement person. So we'd have a radically different set of personas. And what that meant was that our sales team had to know completely different competitor sets, right? Each one of those categories, like people would come to us from like a sales deal room perspective and onboarding perspective and enablement perspective.

And we're mostly inbound marketing driven. So people sort of did their own research, came to their own conclusions about Dock and said, you're an onboarding tool. Like, let's go talk about that. And we were pretty good onboarding tool. Like we have a bunch of onboarding customers. And so, but what would happen is it was just added so much complexity across the entire business. So sales is having to manage different competitors and understand how you pitch, you know, against Rocket Lane or Arrows or whoever the competitors, you'd have to learn how we pitch against Seismic and Highspot.

And then, you know, that complexity flew through the entire business. So it meant that we had a, you know, service customers in different ways and we had to build the product in different ways. And the product team gets pulled in a lot of different directions that are like, you know, do we build enablement stuff or do we build more professional services, things like time sheets and, and, reporting right around that. And resource management, excuse me. And, you know, it is made the decision like this focus has made like.

Alex Kracov: The whole company feel easier because now it's like, hey, the sales team can sell in sort of one way and marketing is attracting one type of person. Sales is selling one type of, you know, deal. And we still have like these interesting, unique differentiators of, we do onboarding too. But it's not always like what we lead with and the focus and it's less and less the type of people who are coming to us. And it's added a lot of clarity on the product decisioning, right? Where it's like, yeah, we're not building time sheets. We're not building resource management anytime soon. We're going to go build a learning management system because that's what enablement people want. They don't care about the resource management side of things. And then it obviously makes customer success a lot easier because the product is just ultimately a better fit for what people want. Yeah, for what they actually bought. And you sort of have more of similar type customers signing up. Like the more, like I used to think it was a real benefit to have radically different customer types. It's like, it's so cool, a law firm's using us and a marketing agency and a SaaS company. And I've actually realized that's kind of bad. If you really want similar companies, and then it becomes a lot easier because everyone has the same problems. I mean, if you can just keep, you can get good at solving those problems again, then you have a really good company.

PLG vs. Sales-Led: How Dock Makes Money

Eric Doty: I remember I used to have a competitor list and there was like 50 to 60 competitors we had because in each category there'd be 20 competitors and there was a whole bunch of categories. I think another thing that happened is that you started with a vision of being way more product led. I think, I mean, it was just, just out of COVID and like product led growth was all the thing or was all the rage. And we ended up being, or, you wanted it to be kind of like a complete self-serve experience, or at least mostly self-serve. But now we've almost flipped that. Like we still have a sign up for Dock for free. We have a free trial. Have the kind of freemium thing, but we've become much more like top down sales led motion. Like what led to that realization and what impact has that had?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I always just like wanted to make money while I slept, you know, like I thought that was cool about internet businesses. And so I was like, okay, when I build my company, I don't want to have to build a big sales team. You know, a big sales team is expensive and it actually slows your growth in some ways because you you can only grow sort of at the clip of quota and how many sales reps like at Lattice, so many board meetings were like, let's hire more like we want to grow faster, hire more sales reps.

And that always somewhat frustrated me as a marketer. It's like, can't we just open up the floodgates and like not have that limiting factor on the business? So that was my first iteration of Dock was like, let's do that. And so we put a lot of emphasis on product like growth, which made it more challenging too, because the first impression of the product was like somebody using a half thought out, half built product. And so you'd lose a lot of people.

That way. And it like we did that for like maybe it was two years or something like that. And it like kind of worked. We got a couple hundred K in revenue. It was kind of working, but it was like really small customers. And then, you know, I mean, all these stories we're telling about are kind of converging at the same time. But we, you know, realize, OK, our best like our best customers or we actually realize like Dock requires a more of a top down implementation. Like, sure, you can get people kind of using it and you can get some generate revenue that way. But our best implementation is a Dock. It's when a sales leader or an enablement person really believes in the product and they say, hey, sales team, this is how we're doing it now. Or hey, onboarding team, here's how we're going to onboard all of our customers. And so with that insight, we made a few hires. Hired like Joey to lead sales and Matty to lead CS. And we really started to move in more of like a sales led functionality, like method where like we still are PLG. Like you can sign up through Dock. Can actually buy Dock without ever talking to us.

But we don't view our moneymaker as PLG. We view it more as like lead generation. And so it's just a way for people to come in, start to play around with the product. But the way we make money is through a real sales led process where our sales team will reach out to you or you reach out to us. And then it goes into a proper demo, right? And we're going to demo your team and qualify you and run you and hold your hand throughout that process. And the cool thing is you can actually use the product as you're doing it. And it's been a great

Alex Kracov: Shift and I think it's a really nice like balance this kind of hybrid because yeah like we generate some revenue without people ever talking to us which is cool but it just makes the sales process easier like we just close I guess I can't say the name but like one of the hottest AI companies out there as one of our customers didn't even realize that they were a customer at first to be honest because they were just signed up on our standard plan they built out like an awesome deal room which was like fantastic and then we were like wait that's that company, we should reach out to them. And now it's like, you know, a giant deal for us. Like, like, and I was actually just talking to Maddie, who runs CS, and she's like, yeah, easiest implementation ever so far, because they've already built it all. And so then we found this really nice balance of like, PLG kind of at the top of the funnel, but then the way we really get the big, you know, big revenue and really make your money looks more sales led. So that's kind what we've evolved to right now.

Using Dock in Our Own Sales Process

Eric Doty: Yeah. You touched on this a bit too, but I think we get to model how to use the product in our sales process. Like, yeah, you're getting like a demo of Dock, but you're also getting this meta demo of watching our sales reps use it. You you get the experience of being tagged in the workspace. So there's, sort of like accidental benefit of us of having a sales process too, and that you kind of get the best practices of using it modeled back to you.

Alex Kracov: Totally. Like you get so exposed to Dock if you buy from us, if you use us. And it's funny, I get frustrated when customers, you know, sometimes will happen when they buy Dock and then they start using it they're like, wait, I didn't expect this thing or that thing or whatever. And it's like, well, you had every opportunity to play around with it if you want, like, like you could use this as much as you want. And I think that's like a real benefit to the business. And it's forced us to get really good at product, right? Like if you open yourself up from a PLG perspective, like you got to be really clear about your onboarding flows and how you onboard people. Like, I mean, we're still like ground zero for that. Like we're still getting a lot, a lot better at how do you onboard people into Dock. And that's a place where I think we're going to try and apply a lot of AI to make it happen. But, but yeah, it's kind of a fun little puzzle and I, and I still get to have that PLG dream of I wake up in the morning and boom, we got a little deal closed.

Betting on Revenue Enablement

Eric Doty: Totally. Yeah. It's amazing seeing it come through on Slack for sure. Okay. Let's end, let's spend the last few minutes of the episode here talking about the revenue enablement or like sales enablement space. Cause I think you've touched on it a bit, but you know, it's a really big decision for the company of basically saying, okay, we're to land in the space. You're going to, you're a founder of this company. You're kind of like dedicating your life to this category now. So like what makes you so willing to bet on this as a category and like what makes it ripe for disruption.

Alex Kracov: There's this concept I've heard of founder market fit. Are there good founders who are the right person to go solve that problem or really good for that business? And I think actually Dock and the enablement category is a really good founder market fit for me personally. I've spent my career in sales and marketing and I'm building a product to solve all the different problems that I have felt myself along the way. And so yeah, it wasn't like my original vision with Dock as we had talked about, but it's something I'm really comfortable with and excited about the opportunity to say, all right, this is something I spent my whole career doing. How do I, you know, both scratch the itch of I want to start a company and feel what that's like, but then do it in a product space where I feel like intimately familiar with the subject matter, right? There's other companies I could go start where it's like, I, you know, know nothing about farming. I can't go create a farming software company, like that would be weird, but I know this space really well. And that adds a lot of like, just like fast decision-making, I think, around everything that we do when it comes to like what products we build, what features are useful. Like I'm my own user. And so that makes, a lot of like the decisions we make, a lot easier, at Dock and it's, yeah, I don't know. It's been a fun, fun journey, but did I think I'd started an enablement company? No, that was not my goal when I officially started Dock.

Competing Against the Incumbents

Eric Doty: Yeah, it started as your use case and then you kind of went really wide and then you kind of came back to it, which is it's almost full circle. And let's talk about sort of the incumbents for a sec or like competition, because like we're, we're a much smaller company or have like less of a legacy than the really big enablement players, like Highspot, Seismic, Showpad, et cetera. What, as, as the founder, like what makes you think that we can compete in this category? Like how? How are you thinking about that?

Alex Kracov: Yeah. So they're all great companies. I mean, they all are at hundreds and hundreds of million of ARR. They work with some of the biggest companies in the world. Right. And so they are doing something clearly right. Like they have found a market where there is money to be made. And so that makes it exciting. Right. And going back to what you talking about before, like reinventing an existing category, like I don't need to go prove this category. Like it is a multiple billion dollar category.

And so that's one thing that is exciting to me. It's like it's a clear prize to go after. The other interesting dynamic is in the crazy, and it's crazy to say it even at a company of a couple hundred million, but they are all like stalled out incumbent companies in a sense. Like they're probably not raising, like they all raised money in the 2021, the crazy zero era, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And these are companies who are fantastic companies, but they are most likely not going to go public.

And so they are not like the VC darlings of the world. And so they're in this like interesting phase of company where they'll get gobbled up by private equity and like Seismic has already owned by private equity. And I just think they are sort of at the life cycle stage of a company where they are a little bit more like stagnant. They're going to be less innovating around the product.

And that's just like what happens with companies, right? That is the life cycle. It's not a knock on them. They're fantastic companies, but that's just like the reality of where they're at. And they're gonna be more slow moving, right? They are a couple hundred person companies. And I think, you know, a company like Dock can really quickly build what they've built. You know, like it is amazing what, you know, when you have tools like Cursor, right?

And you have access to fantastic talent all over the world, how quickly you can build software today. And because of AI, there's this whole new, like it was originally like deal rooms is our wedge in, but now it's AI, right? And like that has leveled the ground or ploughing field from a small little startup like Dock and a big company like Highspot and Seismic, where we are now sort of on equal footing when it comes to AI because we're actually both.

Alex Kracov: Starting from scratch, if you will. And actually we have an advantage there, I would argue, because we don't have all of the baggage of people and an old code base and different things like that. Like when we built our initial version of Dock.ai, it's like me and an engineer and my co-founder Victor, like sitting in a room for days at a time, like working over the prompts and the intent layer and different things like that. Like, we can get it done pretty damn fast. And so I think like that speed of innovation, like we're to be able to build all the feature parity that they have fast, but then we're going to be able to innovate a lot faster when it comes to kind of this new technology. I and like, that's the advantage. And, and, honestly, what it takes for Dock to win is smaller than what it takes for those big companies to win. You know, like I only need X amount of revenue to double year over year, they need a lot more than that. And so it's a kind of a different, different game we're playing.

Outro & What's Next

Eric Doty: Very exciting. I'm excited for the future. You got me pumped up. I mean, that's why I love working at Dock. So, okay. So I think that's an awesome first episode back. I think just look, yeah, looking forward to future episodes and yeah, we will be talking to probably one episode talking to an enablement leader and one episode, Eric and Alex jamming, looking really forward to that. Like, I guess what's your, what's your pitch for people to listen to the rest of the, the, episode.

Alex Kracov: Yes.

Alex Kracov: This is fun.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's a question. Well, yeah, yeah.

Eric Doty: I'm putting you on the spot as your marketer. I'm telling you to do my job for me.

Alex Kracov: I think you are going to just learn about what it feels like to build a company. I think that's the goal. I think it's fun to kind of follow along. If you're a startup founder or employee at a startup who just likes what it's like to build a company, I think you'll learn a little bit about that just as we're talking about it. And then me and Eric are pretty good at marketing and go to market. So we're going to, like this episode definitely was like very Dock centric and not every episode is going to be like that. Like we want to talk about like, how do you do SEO?

Right? Like really like tactical or SEO in the age of AI, right? You know, how we're going to do really tactical episodes around growth, you know, and different things like that. And we'll try and weave in stories both from our own experience, but what we're seeing in the market. Yeah. And it should just be, should be fun. And we're going to try and record one of these like every two weeks, I think is the goal is an Alex Eric episode. And then we even a few interviews along the way and we're going to, we're going to see where it goes.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a fun experiment on our side. We're doing this because we need, I mean, just very transparently, and this is even a growth lesson here, like doing episodes like this feed our whole content engine, right? Like when we film an episode, we get clips and it helps us write content that we put in our blog and different things and write LinkedIn posts. And so it's really easy to kind of jump on a call and podcast and shoot the shit for an hour or so. And it helps to kind of fulfill our whole content flywheel. So yeah, and hopefully you learned something along the way.

Eric Doty: Sounds like a great future episode featuring your head of marketing. Yeah. And so if you listen to this episode on audio, go to YouTube and subscribe to Grow and Tell. I think it's just Grow and Tell the handle. And then if you're watching on YouTube, go to Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe to us. You can also go, we have a newsletter version of the show. You can go to growandtelshow.com and that should take you to the sign up for a newsletter where you get like a nice little summary lessons from the episode, guest bio, all that stuff. Thanks for listening to our first episode back. And we're really excited to be back next week with another one.

Alex Kracov: Thanks everybody. This was fun, Eric.