Five years in, most startups have tried a dozen marketing channels and have war stories to show for it.
Alex and Eric have stayed deliberate: pick a channel, go deep, and layer in complexity only when the foundation is solid. This episode is the unfiltered version of that journey.
In this episode, we break down Dock's content strategy from day one—the decisions that paid off, the ones that didn't, and what we'd do differently, including:
Enjoy the show!
Eric Doty: Today we're going to talk about marketing because it's a topic that we're both very familiar with. Alex and I have been working together for almost five years now on Dock's marketing, so we have a lot to talk about. We've learned so much. We've failed a lot. We've succeeded luckily more than we failed, otherwise we wouldn't be here to be making this podcast today. So we thought we'd share lessons from what we learned so far. Sound good, Alex?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's going to be fun. Excited to talk marketing.
Eric Doty: Perfect. Okay, so let's talk about before I got here. So when you were founding Dock and thinking about Dock's marketing objectives, obviously you were a VP of marketing at Lattice. Before you founded Dock, how were you thinking about the sort of zero to — not even zero to one, just like zero to 0.1 — marketing objectives? Like how were you thinking about Dock's marketing before you started?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I was really excited to do marketing at Dock. I had just come off this experience — I was the third marketer at this company called Lattice and helped that grow into a big company. And so I felt like I knew a lot about SaaS marketing and kind of how I wanted to approach it, because I messed up so many different things at Lattice. So I was like, I can do this right at Dock right from the beginning. And so that was kind of my mental model coming in.
Then the other dynamic was marketing was only like five, ten percent of my time. I needed to spend all this time on building out the product and talking to customers and doing sales. At Lattice, I got to spend full time at marketing. At Dock, it was a really small percentage of my time. So with those two dynamics — and we didn't have a lot of money too when we first started, right? We hadn't raised money yet and different things. So I was like, what do we need to do?
I wanted to focus on things that really compounded over time. And the big one was content and SEO. Because what I noticed at Lattice was it just takes a long time for that stuff to work, for it to pay off. It's super valuable when it does work, but it can take like years for you to build up your domain rating, to get the content flywheel going. And so that's when we first met — I hired you as a freelance contractor to help write some of the content. But that's really where we wanted to start, on the SEO and content side of things. Part of that was to get that flywheel going because I knew it would take a long time.
My mental model was like: okay, whenever we run out of money or we stop raising money, whatever happens, we'll have that so we'll always get leads into the future. And then the other thing we started to do was LinkedIn was a big channel and continues to be. I wasn't that formulaic or serious about approaching LinkedIn, but it was a place where we could post a little bit to get some of the early momentum going with Dock. So that's where we started.
Eric Doty: Can I push back on the SEO thing a little bit? Most of the time people say don't do SEO because it takes so long to have results. You normally don't have that kind of runway as a startup. What was your argument for how did SEO feed both the short-term and long-term goals of Dock?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, it's a great thing to push back on. I don't know if it really helped the short-term goals at all. I looked at starting Dock — it's a minimum a ten-year journey for me personally. And so this wasn't like, I'm just going to try something and see if it works. I'm going to build a company. I'm going to do everything it takes to get it there. And so I wasn't optimizing for let's try some things and see if it works in a year or two. I was optimizing for what it takes to build a big company over ten years.
And if you look at any big SaaS company — and this is pre-AI so we can get into that — HubSpot, all these big companies, PandaDoc had a giant SEO presence driving a lot of leads. So it was more about the mid to long-term strategy. And in the short term, yeah, I didn't think of SEO as a big thing, but it also wasn't a big lift. It cost some money to hire you as a writer, but I could give you a brief on a topic, you write it, and I don't have to think about it every day.
I think the marketing stuff that was a little bit more short-term oriented was the product launch, product moment sort of stuff — hey, we're a new company, here's the thing we built, making some noise around that. Putting up a nice website was obviously really important, one of the first things we did. Social media and LinkedIn was sort of the short-term stuff and SEO was just a long-term investment.
And then the reality is in the early days, the way you got to start going looks a little bit more like sales rather than marketing. Most companies are just grinding it out to get those first hundred customers. That's more of what it looked like at Dock. Marketing started to build up the flywheel, but it was really more like sales via LinkedIn or email that got the first batch of customers.
Eric Doty: I really appreciated about our SEO strategy from the beginning is it was very kind of like reverse-engineered from our runway and the business plan. In other companies I've been in, it's like you do SEO and make as much money as fast as possible. You came in with: okay, this is going to be a one to five to ten year plan. If we're going to be a billion-dollar company, we're going to have to have an SEO strategy in place. Here's how much runway we have, here's our rough revenue model, this is what the SEO numbers have to look like to match that.
I think we took a very business-oriented approach. Normally SEO is more like let's try something, see if it works. And I don't think you can really succeed with SEO with one toe in the water. I think you have to go all in and say, five years from now we're going to be successful — what is the path from A to B look like?
Alex Kracov: Totally. The unfair advantage that I had starting Dock was I knew what each marketing channel feels like to run. I really believe every marketing channel works. Maybe that's a hot take, but every single one of them works. It's just a matter of investment and time and how good you are at approaching that channel. Of course, channels decay over time and some have different properties, but they all work.
One really popular one with B2B is events — doing sponsorships, going to conferences, doing the booth thing, or hosting your own events. I knew that was one: expensive, both in terms of money — sponsorships can be ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty K — and then time. I think time was actually the more expensive part. I didn't really want to go to all these conferences and do events, especially when it's really early days and we're still building out the product. So SEO felt like a better fit for our budget and aligned with those long-term goals.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I totally agree that every marketing channel works. I think our closest competitors for a while were Aligned, who did really well with influencer marketing on LinkedIn — that seemed to be their entire marketing strategy, just hire influencers to talk about Aligned, and it worked. They created a lot of buzz. And then Arrows was another competitor and they went very hard on the HubSpot partner marketplace thing, closely aligning themselves with HubSpot partners, and that worked for them.
Not to say our products were all the same, but we're all similar products and we all did completely different marketing strategies. I'd say we all succeeded, especially from that zero to one marketing mode, with completely different tactics. A really good lesson here is: choose a marketing channel, stick with it, and go all in rather than hedging your bets. You don't have to have the perfect marketing strategy, you just have to have one that you stick to and have some confidence with.
Alex Kracov: And then over time you can add more channels and have more complexity as you have more budget and people to help.
Eric Doty: Yeah, we'll talk about that more in a second. So let's go back to SEO. One of our goals at the beginning — I don't want to say misguided, but our targets changed — when you hired me, you said you wanted an SEO strategy that gets us 100,000 page views per month. I don't even know if we get 100,000 page views per year now, honestly.
It turns out we never needed those numbers to succeed. Partly — we've talked before on the show — our ACV changed a lot. We thought we were going to be more of a product-led business where we'd get a lot of $50 users and needed millions of site visitors to convert. We turned more into a sales-led organization with five-plus figure contracts, so the volume of traffic wasn't really needed to get to our business goals. Looking back on our SEO strategy — what do you think we got right and what do you think we were a little misguided about?
Alex Kracov: I mean, the 100,000 thing was me trying to be a CEO who sets big audacious goals, right? I don't regret saying that, but yeah, it's funny to look back on. And then the other dynamic is that AI came out halfway through this journey and completely changed how people are searching. That's a macro change we didn't control.
But I think what actually worked: focusing on backlinks was really, really helpful for getting our domain rating up. We hired a great agency to help us, got a lot of backlinks, and the only way we were able to get those backlinks was because we had a lot of high-quality content that you were leading. That one-two punch did well.
And then the stuff that seemed to work better was much more mid-to-bottom funnel type content — like digital sales room templates and things like that. The generic "what is sales enablement?" type stuff we didn't invest that much into, which was actually good because AI crushed all of that traffic. What we did better was more mid-to-bottom funnel content. Curious for your take.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I took a bunch of notes before so I could remember what went well and what didn't. I think that goal of 100,000 page views was very motivating to have a really good focus on speed and quantity and output from the marketing side. It's very easy as an SEO marketer to say SEO takes a long time, slow and steady. Even though we had foresight to say this is going to take years, we were also like, let's move as fast as possible.
What that did for me is it gave me enough experiments happening all very quickly and all at once to see: this type of content doesn't work, this type does. To your point on what content we saw success with — at the beginning, yeah, we tried the top-of-funnel articles like "what is sales enablement" or "B2B sales guide." We had some success with those. But what I found ultimately was that things that were not always a recipe for success in SEO more broadly — very problem-solution oriented searches. How do I make a sales proposal? How do I build an onboarding plan? Very tactical things that we could attach to the product.
From an SEO perspective, Google had incentive to rank us highly for those terms because we were also the real solution to the problem. It's not just that we had the content — we could also say, here's a template in Dock that helps you do that. So our content wasn't just serving up an answer, it was serving up the solution. Once that clicked, it was: what are all the possible searches where not only can I tell them something useful, but can I give them something useful with the product?
That ultimately long-term turned into anything we can build a template for, like software comparison articles. And a kind of hidden nugget I didn't expect was emerging terms in our industry. A really good example was asynchronous sales or asynchronous customer onboarding — really big companies like HubSpot with amazing SEO presences weren't close enough to the customer to be paying attention to what's the new term that's hot right now. Anywhere we were really close to the customer and the leading edge of what they were thinking about, those topics actually did have some SEO success and conversion, surprisingly, as well.
And then long-term, once we're more established, competitor comparisons and things like that have been performing well. One big lesson for me too is that you can have as much taste as you want with SEO, but sometimes you just have to play by the rules. I think when I came in I was like, we're not going to do a "what is X" article, I'm going to make my SEO content really opinionated. We made a sales enablement software guide that was Alex's take on the industry — very opinionated and honestly very good content — but it just never did anything for us for SEO. The second I went and changed the article to "here's 20 tools and a list," it was instantly ranking. So the big lesson is that you can be a tastemaker with some things, but there are some channels where there are very defined rules, and SEO is one of them.
Alex Kracov: Sad but true.
Eric Doty: You have to learn what rules you can break and then be more impressive than everybody else. On the other hand, there are some rules you just have to play. Same with LinkedIn — what performs well in the LinkedIn algorithm, you kind of just have to play by the rules sometimes.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, but like your taste was a really important insight because I do read our blogs and they're not just crap. You're a good writer and a good editor and you really cared. That does shine through even in the more SEO content — it might have that SEO-y headline, but it's good writing. And I think one of the things you did to scale all this was hire a ton of different freelancers to help you write, and you acted as the managing editor. You were really thorough about working through each freelancer to make sure they were actually good. I think too often people in your position will see that 100K goal and just get anything up. You didn't do that, which was really positive. You've got to maintain some quality bar because it's part of your brand at the end of the day.
Eric Doty: One of my philosophies was to over-invest in onboarding the freelancers. I'm in a big community of content marketers called SuperPath and almost nobody ever is talking about onboarding freelancers. People are looking for them, they hire them, and then they just give them a project brief. I would spend a couple hours with them demoing the product, talking about our customer, what are the customer pain points. And for each article I'd give hours and hours of feedback on the first few. I treated them more like an employee than a freelancer, and that really paid off long-term because two, three years into a relationship with a freelancer, they could achieve the quality bar we were looking for. The lesson is: over-invest in them as you would with customers, as you would with a new sales rep. Treat them more like an employee than a contractor and it will really benefit you long-term.
Eric Doty: Okay, our next major pillar — I think of our content strategy or just our philosophy — was to add one channel at a time. Number one goal: get the SEO up and running, onboard a bunch of freelancers, get the blog going, and then add something else. I want us to talk about that strategy. I had a vote in it, but I think it was mostly your plan of let's do one channel at a time.
Alex Kracov: It's just focus, right? It was just me and you. There's only so much time we have to work on things and how much budget to deploy. If you have a hundred dollars to spend on marketing and you spread that ten dollars across each channel, you're going to get a worse return than if you just put a hundred dollars into one channel. Same with time. And that said, we weren't only doing SEO — we were posting on LinkedIn, we were doing product marketing stuff — but it wasn't the growth focus of the business for a while.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I mean, the ratio changes over time too of what we're focused on. Like once we have thousands of customers, product updates make sense to take up more airtime versus when we have very few customers and the goal is get people in the top of the funnel. Over time we've covered more of the full funnel, but at the beginning it was very much: the blog, SEO, case studies, the website, LinkedIn, ads — those were the big focus.
I think one thing that's interesting about our strategy from the beginning too is that you've always been at the center of our content strategy. It's been very founder-led. You're hosting this podcast, you're on all of our product demo videos, you are our LinkedIn channel. We don't really post anything from the Dock account — we just post from your account. Founders are busy, you also have to focus on product. What makes it worth your time, and why is it worth making you, five years in, the face of Dock?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a form of marketing that I believe in and have noticed other people do. Dave Gerhardt is maybe the classic example of this with Drift — not the founder, but he wrote the book Founder Brand — and I really believe everything in that book. I think people buy from people. And the best way, especially in the early days, to give personality to a company is for it to be the founder.
I have some legitimacy in this industry, having come off of Lattice and had some experience with marketing and sales. So I thought I had some smart things to say, and I could sort of — no one knows what Dock is, but they maybe knew who Alex was a little bit. And so I was able to put myself out there and be the trusted person that maybe they want to buy from.
It's hard at times. It can be distracting to do marketing and do the podcast and it does take time away from other priorities. But I think it's really important because people buy from people. It's both time-consuming but also the easiest way to do something — I'm the one who's building the product, especially in the early days, so who better to demo it than me? We didn't have much as a company and I had the most followers, so I should probably post and talk about it.
That has clearly been a huge trend. Everybody now is posting on LinkedIn, promoting their businesses. I think there's a fine balance of how much you're self-promotional. It's totally okay to be the Dock guy and to post Dock demos and try to talk about your product in an authentic way, but also try to give back to the community and share interesting stuff. Because that's how you build trust. Marketing's whole job is just to get people to think about you when they're ready to buy something. You just stay top of mind, and whatever random stuff I can say that's hopefully useful helps us stay top of mind as a company.
Eric Doty: Yeah, and I think there are different models of the founder-led content. What's made you and us successful with that is that you're an active operator in the system. You're not just the face that's being ghostwritten for behind the scenes. Yes, at this point I'm helping write a lot of your LinkedIn content, but it comes from real things you've said to me, or it comes from the show, or it comes from our internal meetings where you're leading an enablement session with our team and I take notes and think, that's something other people would want to hear Alex say. But it's not just me taking what you say and writing it up fancy. You're actively contributing ideas and your time. I think that makes it a much more successful model than a handoff to marketing.
Alex Kracov: Totally. And I think like, I mean, this is how I learned how to do anything — there are so many good blog posts out there on the internet from operators. Think about how much Paul Graham has given back to the startup community through his essays. That's the top example of this. Heading into Dock, I have a little blog out there, and it was always like: how can I give back for the stuff that I know about — marketing for a startup, enablement, different things? Then that's naturally the top of funnel for Dock.
That strategy has worked well. There's a two-pronged approach — we do the SEO long-term thing and then I can post on LinkedIn and build the brand to attract more short-term people. And then we're running other marketing campaigns we can get into.
The number one advice I have for any founder starting a business: build a brand around themselves. That's just how business works today. You probably know the founder of most businesses. And founders need to figure out a channel that works well for them, that they're excited about, that doesn't feel like a slog to do all the time.
There were so many days where I'd be like, I've got to write a LinkedIn post and I have nothing smart to say. And I think we found a really good rhythm with this podcast — it's very easy for me to answer a question and riff on something and hopefully say something intelligent. And then that becomes nice content that feeds the rest of our flywheel. Even my wife makes fun of me — it's very hard for me if you just say "tell me about marketing" with no context. My memory doesn't work like that. You have to find the workflow that gets you to produce content at a fairly high rate.
Eric Doty: Yeah. Okay, I have two reactions to what you just said. One is that founders have a special permission to self-promote and people will still be interested in it because it's like they're invested in their personal growth story. It's a hero's journey kind of thing to have a founder talk about building their business. You said people buy from people, but I think people also root for founders to succeed versus a brand or even a marketer at a company. It feels more like a personal quest and people are cheering you on. So you do have permission to get away with more marketing than anyone else, basically.
And then the second thing — we had to develop a working relationship over time where I could figure out how to be the extractor of Alex ideas. I hear from a lot of marketers who say: my founder wants to do founder-led marketing but they're not actively involved enough. My advice for marketers is you have to insert yourself into their world. They're almost definitely talking at your all-hands. They're training the team, talking at product sessions. Go find the places they're already talking day to day and see how much you can extract from that. Lots of companies have call recorders now — go see if you can extract stuff with AI from those calls. But also just find the mode that your founder likes to communicate in.
For us it's been this podcast — riffing for forty minutes about a topic. I can come up with like six months worth of ideas. Then I take that, I do the content myself, throw it back at you, you leave some comments, and I've taken most of the work off your plate without putting ideas in your mouth. I think that's the big trick.
Alex Kracov: Totally. And I think the other side of that is project managing each other — mostly you project managing me — and making it easy for me to create things. I think about my relationship with Jack at Lattice and we'd want to get podcast guests, and I'd literally have to lock him in a room and say open up your email and you're going to email a bunch of people to invite them on the podcast. You write all the questions for the podcast for me, which you do. That type of stuff — trying to make it really easy for the founder to create content is very, very, very helpful. In a lot of ways, an important part of the early content marketing person's job is: how do you enable the founder to talk about stuff?
Eric Doty: Yeah, and it should feel easier for you over time. I should be taking more and more off your plate so you can just show up and have good ideas.
Eric Doty: Okay, next I want to talk about what I'm calling our biggest strategic marketing mistake to date. That's probably a little harsh, but I think in 2024 we kind of broke our own rule of focusing on fewer channels and we took on a bunch more channels at once. We did a sales enablement community, a rev ops community, a sales community. I started dabbling with LinkedIn influencers. We started sponsoring a few in-person conferences. Not to say they were all failures, but I think we stretched ourselves a little thin. When you think back on that — was it the right move or were we just under-resourced?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I was curious what the mistake was going to be. It's interesting. I think with marketing especially, you've really got to mess something up for it to be a mistake. It's all positive sum. Maybe it's not the highest ROI performing channel of all time, but doing things you learn and it's getting your brand out there. But I think you're spot on with the call out.
We tried to get our brand out there a little bit more and I do think it was helpful — we partnered with a community that was fine. Did we get a lot of leads from it? Meh. And it was definitely distracting for me and you. And then the LinkedIn influencer thing — yeah, that was definitely a failure, although I'm still bullish that it could potentially work.
Looking back on it, we didn't quite have the demand gen engine around these types of campaigns. To make conferences and events really work, you really need to have a system around how you reach out to people before the conference, how you follow up with them at the conference, and then post-conference. We were doing it, but I was doing it with a little bit of my time, half-assing it. You get what you put in. And we also didn't have as mature a sales team at the time. Our product wasn't as far along. So it was maybe a little too soon to do some of those things. It probably would have been better to either just keep focusing on SEO, keep focusing a little bit more on our own LinkedIn content, or build up the demand gen muscle, or just wait and be patient.
What's really hard, especially with all the startup VC grow-grow-grow narrative, is as a founder you're pressured to run your company into a wall — grow as fast as you can, spend a bunch of money, see what happens, if it fails, lay people off. That's not my style at all. And so it probably would have been better to be patient and not try to invest a ton. It's not like we went absolutely crazy, but it would have been nice to wait and save until we were a little more mature as a business.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I think one of the fundamental issues is that we have much better product-market fit now than we did two years ago too. We were still very much pushing on the digital sales room thing, which is still a very important part of our offering, but not necessarily the leading story. So there was some friction around educating the market at the same time as doing all these channels.
I think also some of it was reactionary — our competitors had successful LinkedIn influencer programs and our salespeople were hearing about it a lot. And not that it was a hundred percent motivated by competitors, but we were maybe not listening to our own strategy enough and just focusing on the channels that were already doing well. We should have just doubled down on SEO rather than spreading ourselves thin.
Eric Doty: Let's talk about this podcast too. Of all the things that a one-and-a-half person marketing team could spend their time on, why do you find this podcast worth it for us?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I think it goes back to the founder brand building thing. Giving a platform for me to talk about stuff and creating the content flywheel is very, very helpful. I also think it's just a great way to build your brand and be seen as smart. Each person you interview on a podcast — you can kind of say I interviewed somebody at LinkedIn, at Apple or Amazon or whatever. You get a little bit of that brand cache. It's also really nice to interview people who could potentially be your customer. Even if no one ever listens to the podcast, it's a great way to build relationships within your ICP, especially with senior leaders. It's an excuse to reach out and build relationships with those folks.
And maybe the last thing: especially in the world of AI, when the written word feels very cheap and you can just pump out blog posts, there's something authentic about us actually talking and being real, not AI. I think that really helps. It feeds the content flywheel and helps to build the brand. And it gives us stuff to talk about on LinkedIn, which you need. There's only so much smart stuff I can say, but people I interview say a lot smarter things, so I can use their ideas on my LinkedIn as well.
Eric Doty: Yeah, and from the marketing operator perspective, the podcast has been the best source of ideas that feeds everything else. There's the repurposing of the content itself — we do video clips from the show that we can use on LinkedIn, we post them to YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. It's a good way to take one asset and get a whole bunch of reach from it in various forms.
But then there's also the repurposing of ideas, which I think is actually more important. When I used to write SEO blog posts for Dock, I would sit down with you and interview you about, say, learning management systems for an hour. And then I would take those insights and try to squeeze them into an SEO blog post. Now what I can do is interview you on the show — where the audience also benefits — use it for all those other purposes, and then go and write a very informed article where I'm not just repurposing the assets but also repurposing the ideas.
I think that's one of the lessons for lean teams. If you're going to take on a channel or some sort of marketing task, always make sure you can make double or triple use of it. If nobody listens to this show, will it still be useful for us? In our case the answer is yes — there are all these other uses for it. SEO content is a great example of the opposite: if it fails, it will be useless and serve no purpose to the company. Other things I've written — like guides to digital sales rooms — it's content that serves some middle funnel thing, but our customer success team can also give it to customers. Whenever we're taking on pretty much any channel or asset, I'm thinking: can this be used in two or three different ways to make sure it's worth our time no matter what?
Eric Doty: Okay, last big question. AI is obviously changing marketing. At Dock, we've had a very SEO and content-led strategy. How do you think AI and AEO and LLMs are going to impact that strategy and how are we thinking about it going forward?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's a very big question and it's definitely going to impact all the different functions of marketing. I think maybe one of the first places it came for was outbound — now marketing teams are often running outbound for companies and doing mass personalization at scale with AI SDRs. That trend will keep going.
Then there's obviously the way it's impacted content marketing with AEO, GEO, whatever we call it. What does next-gen SEO look like, and the way you want to show up and get recommended in ChatGPT and Claude, is very, very different.
One of the interesting things I've heard elsewhere and really believe is that the future is actually about how do you get agents to recommend your product, not humans. Which is very weird to think about. A good example is when you're setting up Lovable, they're just going to set you up with Supabase as their database, and Supabase has exploded in growth getting recommended by the Lovable agent as part of setup. How does your product fit into that is super interesting to think about. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I think that's a really interesting dynamic.
Then all the creative production is going to be really interesting — creating ad creative, videos, images — it's kind of there. I was playing around with ChatGPT trying to create some ad creative and it's not quite there yet. I still want to export it as a Figma file and make little edits. But that'll definitely work in the future, you can kind of squint and see it.
And then product marketing — this is an area where Dock is actually trying to make an impact. How do you manage all the content you're sharing with your sales team? How do you organize it? What should you create? Where are your gaps in your product and sales enablement strategy? How do you create better client-facing documentation? AI is going to really change all of that.
And then maybe the flip side of AI is that events are going to be more and more important. That in-person IRL connection is the last remaining place where you can actually make sure you're talking to humans and not agents. So I think that'll make that channel even more important. Yeah, it's a really interesting time to try and do marketing because it's all evolving very, very fast. What do you think?
Eric Doty: Yeah, I have a few AEO thoughts. One of the first realizations I had for us at Dock is that I've done really well at SEO via content on our own website. When I first went into the AI analytics tools tracking how often you're cited and mentioned, Dock had a really high citation rate because we rank really well on Google. And so our content is getting sourced for AI, which is great.
The downside is that AI more often uses third-party information about your brand than what you say about yourself. So one of our challenges is: even though we're ranking well with the content, we also need everybody else on the internet to be talking about us. Our SEO strategy has to evolve to what's also happening off our site. For me, that's a big challenge to figure out for 2026 — we can say whatever we want about Dock, but other people also have to be saying things about Dock.
I think there was also a leak of Google's algorithm a couple years ago that talked about how much the author entity matters more than it used to — who's giving the advice and what's their reputation. That goes back to the founder brand thing: posts from Alex Kracov about sales enablement are probably going to be more successful than posts by Dock about sales enablement. So building up the brands of people — making sure our head of sales is posting content about Dock, our customer success people — not just the founder brand, but version 2.0 where all this employee-led content is going to be important.
Then to your point about content production — version one with AI was: we can all write blog posts with AI now. Version two will be all the systems that get built behind these things. I've built a competitor database that scrapes information about every feature of all our competitors from their websites, and that helps me make content that's more deeply researched. I have a huge AI system behind this podcast that can help me spin up content sourced from our own first-party material.
And then there's the video assets and things like that — our designer Luke is working on a design system for the product, and AI can read our design guidelines and build prototypes. We're not that far away from being able to hand that to Claude or some other tool and have it make on-brand videos with motion graphics. I think we're maybe a year away from all of that feeling more accessible to us beyond just writing. And for lean marketing teams like we have, that's going to make a big difference.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's a crazy time. What's hard is it's changing so fast. Now everyone's a Claude MCP expert, but if you asked people six months ago, most had no idea what an MCP was. It's a very funny dynamic, but it's a fun time to be building and you've got to stay in the loop on all the different trends. Very, very fun times.
Eric Doty: Yeah. Okay, very last question. You're talking to another founder today who asks, where should I start with my marketing? What are the three bullet points you'd give them?
Alex Kracov: Let's scope it down to a B2B founder. I would say: post on LinkedIn three to five days a week at a minimum. Make an amazing website that looks really good and is outsized for your brand. And then make sure you talk about the product you're building — create product moments for different things you're releasing. Nothing is too small, nothing is too silly, but try to create little moments where you can package up and talk about what you're launching. You can launch your product multiple times and talk about it a lot. So yeah, get that product marketing flywheel going. Especially in the software industry, people want to see product momentum and doing that on the product marketing side is a great way to do that.
Eric Doty: Perfect, great advice. Thank you so much, Alex, for chatting with me about marketing — our favorite topic. Thank you, audience, for listening to us talk about marketing for an hour. If you want to subscribe to the show, go to growintelshow.com. You'll find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, we have a newsletter, and YouTube as well. We'll be back next week with another episode. Thanks, Alex.
Alex Kracov: Thank you, Eric.
Alex Kracov is the founder and CEO of Dock. He was the third employee and VP of Marketing at Lattice, where he spent five years helping grow the company from zero to over $50 million in ARR—ultimately building it into a $3 billion business. Before Lattice, Alex worked at Blue State Digital (the political adtech firm that helped elect President Obama) where he led projects for Google, and he started his career as a sales rep at Yelp.
Eric Doty is the Head of Marketing at Dock. He joined Dock over three years ago as the company's first and only marketing hire and has been building the content engine ever since. Eric has been the first marketing hire at three different startups. He's also Head of Community at Superpath, a community for content marketers.
Five years in, most startups have tried a dozen marketing channels and have war stories to show for it.
Alex and Eric have stayed deliberate: pick a channel, go deep, and layer in complexity only when the foundation is solid. This episode is the unfiltered version of that journey.
In this episode, we break down Dock's content strategy from day one—the decisions that paid off, the ones that didn't, and what we'd do differently, including:
Enjoy the show!
Eric Doty: Today we're going to talk about marketing because it's a topic that we're both very familiar with. Alex and I have been working together for almost five years now on Dock's marketing, so we have a lot to talk about. We've learned so much. We've failed a lot. We've succeeded luckily more than we failed, otherwise we wouldn't be here to be making this podcast today. So we thought we'd share lessons from what we learned so far. Sound good, Alex?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's going to be fun. Excited to talk marketing.
Eric Doty: Perfect. Okay, so let's talk about before I got here. So when you were founding Dock and thinking about Dock's marketing objectives, obviously you were a VP of marketing at Lattice. Before you founded Dock, how were you thinking about the sort of zero to — not even zero to one, just like zero to 0.1 — marketing objectives? Like how were you thinking about Dock's marketing before you started?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I was really excited to do marketing at Dock. I had just come off this experience — I was the third marketer at this company called Lattice and helped that grow into a big company. And so I felt like I knew a lot about SaaS marketing and kind of how I wanted to approach it, because I messed up so many different things at Lattice. So I was like, I can do this right at Dock right from the beginning. And so that was kind of my mental model coming in.
Then the other dynamic was marketing was only like five, ten percent of my time. I needed to spend all this time on building out the product and talking to customers and doing sales. At Lattice, I got to spend full time at marketing. At Dock, it was a really small percentage of my time. So with those two dynamics — and we didn't have a lot of money too when we first started, right? We hadn't raised money yet and different things. So I was like, what do we need to do?
I wanted to focus on things that really compounded over time. And the big one was content and SEO. Because what I noticed at Lattice was it just takes a long time for that stuff to work, for it to pay off. It's super valuable when it does work, but it can take like years for you to build up your domain rating, to get the content flywheel going. And so that's when we first met — I hired you as a freelance contractor to help write some of the content. But that's really where we wanted to start, on the SEO and content side of things. Part of that was to get that flywheel going because I knew it would take a long time.
My mental model was like: okay, whenever we run out of money or we stop raising money, whatever happens, we'll have that so we'll always get leads into the future. And then the other thing we started to do was LinkedIn was a big channel and continues to be. I wasn't that formulaic or serious about approaching LinkedIn, but it was a place where we could post a little bit to get some of the early momentum going with Dock. So that's where we started.
Eric Doty: Can I push back on the SEO thing a little bit? Most of the time people say don't do SEO because it takes so long to have results. You normally don't have that kind of runway as a startup. What was your argument for how did SEO feed both the short-term and long-term goals of Dock?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, it's a great thing to push back on. I don't know if it really helped the short-term goals at all. I looked at starting Dock — it's a minimum a ten-year journey for me personally. And so this wasn't like, I'm just going to try something and see if it works. I'm going to build a company. I'm going to do everything it takes to get it there. And so I wasn't optimizing for let's try some things and see if it works in a year or two. I was optimizing for what it takes to build a big company over ten years.
And if you look at any big SaaS company — and this is pre-AI so we can get into that — HubSpot, all these big companies, PandaDoc had a giant SEO presence driving a lot of leads. So it was more about the mid to long-term strategy. And in the short term, yeah, I didn't think of SEO as a big thing, but it also wasn't a big lift. It cost some money to hire you as a writer, but I could give you a brief on a topic, you write it, and I don't have to think about it every day.
I think the marketing stuff that was a little bit more short-term oriented was the product launch, product moment sort of stuff — hey, we're a new company, here's the thing we built, making some noise around that. Putting up a nice website was obviously really important, one of the first things we did. Social media and LinkedIn was sort of the short-term stuff and SEO was just a long-term investment.
And then the reality is in the early days, the way you got to start going looks a little bit more like sales rather than marketing. Most companies are just grinding it out to get those first hundred customers. That's more of what it looked like at Dock. Marketing started to build up the flywheel, but it was really more like sales via LinkedIn or email that got the first batch of customers.
Eric Doty: I really appreciated about our SEO strategy from the beginning is it was very kind of like reverse-engineered from our runway and the business plan. In other companies I've been in, it's like you do SEO and make as much money as fast as possible. You came in with: okay, this is going to be a one to five to ten year plan. If we're going to be a billion-dollar company, we're going to have to have an SEO strategy in place. Here's how much runway we have, here's our rough revenue model, this is what the SEO numbers have to look like to match that.
I think we took a very business-oriented approach. Normally SEO is more like let's try something, see if it works. And I don't think you can really succeed with SEO with one toe in the water. I think you have to go all in and say, five years from now we're going to be successful — what is the path from A to B look like?
Alex Kracov: Totally. The unfair advantage that I had starting Dock was I knew what each marketing channel feels like to run. I really believe every marketing channel works. Maybe that's a hot take, but every single one of them works. It's just a matter of investment and time and how good you are at approaching that channel. Of course, channels decay over time and some have different properties, but they all work.
One really popular one with B2B is events — doing sponsorships, going to conferences, doing the booth thing, or hosting your own events. I knew that was one: expensive, both in terms of money — sponsorships can be ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty K — and then time. I think time was actually the more expensive part. I didn't really want to go to all these conferences and do events, especially when it's really early days and we're still building out the product. So SEO felt like a better fit for our budget and aligned with those long-term goals.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I totally agree that every marketing channel works. I think our closest competitors for a while were Aligned, who did really well with influencer marketing on LinkedIn — that seemed to be their entire marketing strategy, just hire influencers to talk about Aligned, and it worked. They created a lot of buzz. And then Arrows was another competitor and they went very hard on the HubSpot partner marketplace thing, closely aligning themselves with HubSpot partners, and that worked for them.
Not to say our products were all the same, but we're all similar products and we all did completely different marketing strategies. I'd say we all succeeded, especially from that zero to one marketing mode, with completely different tactics. A really good lesson here is: choose a marketing channel, stick with it, and go all in rather than hedging your bets. You don't have to have the perfect marketing strategy, you just have to have one that you stick to and have some confidence with.
Alex Kracov: And then over time you can add more channels and have more complexity as you have more budget and people to help.
Eric Doty: Yeah, we'll talk about that more in a second. So let's go back to SEO. One of our goals at the beginning — I don't want to say misguided, but our targets changed — when you hired me, you said you wanted an SEO strategy that gets us 100,000 page views per month. I don't even know if we get 100,000 page views per year now, honestly.
It turns out we never needed those numbers to succeed. Partly — we've talked before on the show — our ACV changed a lot. We thought we were going to be more of a product-led business where we'd get a lot of $50 users and needed millions of site visitors to convert. We turned more into a sales-led organization with five-plus figure contracts, so the volume of traffic wasn't really needed to get to our business goals. Looking back on our SEO strategy — what do you think we got right and what do you think we were a little misguided about?
Alex Kracov: I mean, the 100,000 thing was me trying to be a CEO who sets big audacious goals, right? I don't regret saying that, but yeah, it's funny to look back on. And then the other dynamic is that AI came out halfway through this journey and completely changed how people are searching. That's a macro change we didn't control.
But I think what actually worked: focusing on backlinks was really, really helpful for getting our domain rating up. We hired a great agency to help us, got a lot of backlinks, and the only way we were able to get those backlinks was because we had a lot of high-quality content that you were leading. That one-two punch did well.
And then the stuff that seemed to work better was much more mid-to-bottom funnel type content — like digital sales room templates and things like that. The generic "what is sales enablement?" type stuff we didn't invest that much into, which was actually good because AI crushed all of that traffic. What we did better was more mid-to-bottom funnel content. Curious for your take.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I took a bunch of notes before so I could remember what went well and what didn't. I think that goal of 100,000 page views was very motivating to have a really good focus on speed and quantity and output from the marketing side. It's very easy as an SEO marketer to say SEO takes a long time, slow and steady. Even though we had foresight to say this is going to take years, we were also like, let's move as fast as possible.
What that did for me is it gave me enough experiments happening all very quickly and all at once to see: this type of content doesn't work, this type does. To your point on what content we saw success with — at the beginning, yeah, we tried the top-of-funnel articles like "what is sales enablement" or "B2B sales guide." We had some success with those. But what I found ultimately was that things that were not always a recipe for success in SEO more broadly — very problem-solution oriented searches. How do I make a sales proposal? How do I build an onboarding plan? Very tactical things that we could attach to the product.
From an SEO perspective, Google had incentive to rank us highly for those terms because we were also the real solution to the problem. It's not just that we had the content — we could also say, here's a template in Dock that helps you do that. So our content wasn't just serving up an answer, it was serving up the solution. Once that clicked, it was: what are all the possible searches where not only can I tell them something useful, but can I give them something useful with the product?
That ultimately long-term turned into anything we can build a template for, like software comparison articles. And a kind of hidden nugget I didn't expect was emerging terms in our industry. A really good example was asynchronous sales or asynchronous customer onboarding — really big companies like HubSpot with amazing SEO presences weren't close enough to the customer to be paying attention to what's the new term that's hot right now. Anywhere we were really close to the customer and the leading edge of what they were thinking about, those topics actually did have some SEO success and conversion, surprisingly, as well.
And then long-term, once we're more established, competitor comparisons and things like that have been performing well. One big lesson for me too is that you can have as much taste as you want with SEO, but sometimes you just have to play by the rules. I think when I came in I was like, we're not going to do a "what is X" article, I'm going to make my SEO content really opinionated. We made a sales enablement software guide that was Alex's take on the industry — very opinionated and honestly very good content — but it just never did anything for us for SEO. The second I went and changed the article to "here's 20 tools and a list," it was instantly ranking. So the big lesson is that you can be a tastemaker with some things, but there are some channels where there are very defined rules, and SEO is one of them.
Alex Kracov: Sad but true.
Eric Doty: You have to learn what rules you can break and then be more impressive than everybody else. On the other hand, there are some rules you just have to play. Same with LinkedIn — what performs well in the LinkedIn algorithm, you kind of just have to play by the rules sometimes.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, but like your taste was a really important insight because I do read our blogs and they're not just crap. You're a good writer and a good editor and you really cared. That does shine through even in the more SEO content — it might have that SEO-y headline, but it's good writing. And I think one of the things you did to scale all this was hire a ton of different freelancers to help you write, and you acted as the managing editor. You were really thorough about working through each freelancer to make sure they were actually good. I think too often people in your position will see that 100K goal and just get anything up. You didn't do that, which was really positive. You've got to maintain some quality bar because it's part of your brand at the end of the day.
Eric Doty: One of my philosophies was to over-invest in onboarding the freelancers. I'm in a big community of content marketers called SuperPath and almost nobody ever is talking about onboarding freelancers. People are looking for them, they hire them, and then they just give them a project brief. I would spend a couple hours with them demoing the product, talking about our customer, what are the customer pain points. And for each article I'd give hours and hours of feedback on the first few. I treated them more like an employee than a freelancer, and that really paid off long-term because two, three years into a relationship with a freelancer, they could achieve the quality bar we were looking for. The lesson is: over-invest in them as you would with customers, as you would with a new sales rep. Treat them more like an employee than a contractor and it will really benefit you long-term.
Eric Doty: Okay, our next major pillar — I think of our content strategy or just our philosophy — was to add one channel at a time. Number one goal: get the SEO up and running, onboard a bunch of freelancers, get the blog going, and then add something else. I want us to talk about that strategy. I had a vote in it, but I think it was mostly your plan of let's do one channel at a time.
Alex Kracov: It's just focus, right? It was just me and you. There's only so much time we have to work on things and how much budget to deploy. If you have a hundred dollars to spend on marketing and you spread that ten dollars across each channel, you're going to get a worse return than if you just put a hundred dollars into one channel. Same with time. And that said, we weren't only doing SEO — we were posting on LinkedIn, we were doing product marketing stuff — but it wasn't the growth focus of the business for a while.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I mean, the ratio changes over time too of what we're focused on. Like once we have thousands of customers, product updates make sense to take up more airtime versus when we have very few customers and the goal is get people in the top of the funnel. Over time we've covered more of the full funnel, but at the beginning it was very much: the blog, SEO, case studies, the website, LinkedIn, ads — those were the big focus.
I think one thing that's interesting about our strategy from the beginning too is that you've always been at the center of our content strategy. It's been very founder-led. You're hosting this podcast, you're on all of our product demo videos, you are our LinkedIn channel. We don't really post anything from the Dock account — we just post from your account. Founders are busy, you also have to focus on product. What makes it worth your time, and why is it worth making you, five years in, the face of Dock?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a form of marketing that I believe in and have noticed other people do. Dave Gerhardt is maybe the classic example of this with Drift — not the founder, but he wrote the book Founder Brand — and I really believe everything in that book. I think people buy from people. And the best way, especially in the early days, to give personality to a company is for it to be the founder.
I have some legitimacy in this industry, having come off of Lattice and had some experience with marketing and sales. So I thought I had some smart things to say, and I could sort of — no one knows what Dock is, but they maybe knew who Alex was a little bit. And so I was able to put myself out there and be the trusted person that maybe they want to buy from.
It's hard at times. It can be distracting to do marketing and do the podcast and it does take time away from other priorities. But I think it's really important because people buy from people. It's both time-consuming but also the easiest way to do something — I'm the one who's building the product, especially in the early days, so who better to demo it than me? We didn't have much as a company and I had the most followers, so I should probably post and talk about it.
That has clearly been a huge trend. Everybody now is posting on LinkedIn, promoting their businesses. I think there's a fine balance of how much you're self-promotional. It's totally okay to be the Dock guy and to post Dock demos and try to talk about your product in an authentic way, but also try to give back to the community and share interesting stuff. Because that's how you build trust. Marketing's whole job is just to get people to think about you when they're ready to buy something. You just stay top of mind, and whatever random stuff I can say that's hopefully useful helps us stay top of mind as a company.
Eric Doty: Yeah, and I think there are different models of the founder-led content. What's made you and us successful with that is that you're an active operator in the system. You're not just the face that's being ghostwritten for behind the scenes. Yes, at this point I'm helping write a lot of your LinkedIn content, but it comes from real things you've said to me, or it comes from the show, or it comes from our internal meetings where you're leading an enablement session with our team and I take notes and think, that's something other people would want to hear Alex say. But it's not just me taking what you say and writing it up fancy. You're actively contributing ideas and your time. I think that makes it a much more successful model than a handoff to marketing.
Alex Kracov: Totally. And I think like, I mean, this is how I learned how to do anything — there are so many good blog posts out there on the internet from operators. Think about how much Paul Graham has given back to the startup community through his essays. That's the top example of this. Heading into Dock, I have a little blog out there, and it was always like: how can I give back for the stuff that I know about — marketing for a startup, enablement, different things? Then that's naturally the top of funnel for Dock.
That strategy has worked well. There's a two-pronged approach — we do the SEO long-term thing and then I can post on LinkedIn and build the brand to attract more short-term people. And then we're running other marketing campaigns we can get into.
The number one advice I have for any founder starting a business: build a brand around themselves. That's just how business works today. You probably know the founder of most businesses. And founders need to figure out a channel that works well for them, that they're excited about, that doesn't feel like a slog to do all the time.
There were so many days where I'd be like, I've got to write a LinkedIn post and I have nothing smart to say. And I think we found a really good rhythm with this podcast — it's very easy for me to answer a question and riff on something and hopefully say something intelligent. And then that becomes nice content that feeds the rest of our flywheel. Even my wife makes fun of me — it's very hard for me if you just say "tell me about marketing" with no context. My memory doesn't work like that. You have to find the workflow that gets you to produce content at a fairly high rate.
Eric Doty: Yeah. Okay, I have two reactions to what you just said. One is that founders have a special permission to self-promote and people will still be interested in it because it's like they're invested in their personal growth story. It's a hero's journey kind of thing to have a founder talk about building their business. You said people buy from people, but I think people also root for founders to succeed versus a brand or even a marketer at a company. It feels more like a personal quest and people are cheering you on. So you do have permission to get away with more marketing than anyone else, basically.
And then the second thing — we had to develop a working relationship over time where I could figure out how to be the extractor of Alex ideas. I hear from a lot of marketers who say: my founder wants to do founder-led marketing but they're not actively involved enough. My advice for marketers is you have to insert yourself into their world. They're almost definitely talking at your all-hands. They're training the team, talking at product sessions. Go find the places they're already talking day to day and see how much you can extract from that. Lots of companies have call recorders now — go see if you can extract stuff with AI from those calls. But also just find the mode that your founder likes to communicate in.
For us it's been this podcast — riffing for forty minutes about a topic. I can come up with like six months worth of ideas. Then I take that, I do the content myself, throw it back at you, you leave some comments, and I've taken most of the work off your plate without putting ideas in your mouth. I think that's the big trick.
Alex Kracov: Totally. And I think the other side of that is project managing each other — mostly you project managing me — and making it easy for me to create things. I think about my relationship with Jack at Lattice and we'd want to get podcast guests, and I'd literally have to lock him in a room and say open up your email and you're going to email a bunch of people to invite them on the podcast. You write all the questions for the podcast for me, which you do. That type of stuff — trying to make it really easy for the founder to create content is very, very, very helpful. In a lot of ways, an important part of the early content marketing person's job is: how do you enable the founder to talk about stuff?
Eric Doty: Yeah, and it should feel easier for you over time. I should be taking more and more off your plate so you can just show up and have good ideas.
Eric Doty: Okay, next I want to talk about what I'm calling our biggest strategic marketing mistake to date. That's probably a little harsh, but I think in 2024 we kind of broke our own rule of focusing on fewer channels and we took on a bunch more channels at once. We did a sales enablement community, a rev ops community, a sales community. I started dabbling with LinkedIn influencers. We started sponsoring a few in-person conferences. Not to say they were all failures, but I think we stretched ourselves a little thin. When you think back on that — was it the right move or were we just under-resourced?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I was curious what the mistake was going to be. It's interesting. I think with marketing especially, you've really got to mess something up for it to be a mistake. It's all positive sum. Maybe it's not the highest ROI performing channel of all time, but doing things you learn and it's getting your brand out there. But I think you're spot on with the call out.
We tried to get our brand out there a little bit more and I do think it was helpful — we partnered with a community that was fine. Did we get a lot of leads from it? Meh. And it was definitely distracting for me and you. And then the LinkedIn influencer thing — yeah, that was definitely a failure, although I'm still bullish that it could potentially work.
Looking back on it, we didn't quite have the demand gen engine around these types of campaigns. To make conferences and events really work, you really need to have a system around how you reach out to people before the conference, how you follow up with them at the conference, and then post-conference. We were doing it, but I was doing it with a little bit of my time, half-assing it. You get what you put in. And we also didn't have as mature a sales team at the time. Our product wasn't as far along. So it was maybe a little too soon to do some of those things. It probably would have been better to either just keep focusing on SEO, keep focusing a little bit more on our own LinkedIn content, or build up the demand gen muscle, or just wait and be patient.
What's really hard, especially with all the startup VC grow-grow-grow narrative, is as a founder you're pressured to run your company into a wall — grow as fast as you can, spend a bunch of money, see what happens, if it fails, lay people off. That's not my style at all. And so it probably would have been better to be patient and not try to invest a ton. It's not like we went absolutely crazy, but it would have been nice to wait and save until we were a little more mature as a business.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I think one of the fundamental issues is that we have much better product-market fit now than we did two years ago too. We were still very much pushing on the digital sales room thing, which is still a very important part of our offering, but not necessarily the leading story. So there was some friction around educating the market at the same time as doing all these channels.
I think also some of it was reactionary — our competitors had successful LinkedIn influencer programs and our salespeople were hearing about it a lot. And not that it was a hundred percent motivated by competitors, but we were maybe not listening to our own strategy enough and just focusing on the channels that were already doing well. We should have just doubled down on SEO rather than spreading ourselves thin.
Eric Doty: Let's talk about this podcast too. Of all the things that a one-and-a-half person marketing team could spend their time on, why do you find this podcast worth it for us?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I think it goes back to the founder brand building thing. Giving a platform for me to talk about stuff and creating the content flywheel is very, very helpful. I also think it's just a great way to build your brand and be seen as smart. Each person you interview on a podcast — you can kind of say I interviewed somebody at LinkedIn, at Apple or Amazon or whatever. You get a little bit of that brand cache. It's also really nice to interview people who could potentially be your customer. Even if no one ever listens to the podcast, it's a great way to build relationships within your ICP, especially with senior leaders. It's an excuse to reach out and build relationships with those folks.
And maybe the last thing: especially in the world of AI, when the written word feels very cheap and you can just pump out blog posts, there's something authentic about us actually talking and being real, not AI. I think that really helps. It feeds the content flywheel and helps to build the brand. And it gives us stuff to talk about on LinkedIn, which you need. There's only so much smart stuff I can say, but people I interview say a lot smarter things, so I can use their ideas on my LinkedIn as well.
Eric Doty: Yeah, and from the marketing operator perspective, the podcast has been the best source of ideas that feeds everything else. There's the repurposing of the content itself — we do video clips from the show that we can use on LinkedIn, we post them to YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. It's a good way to take one asset and get a whole bunch of reach from it in various forms.
But then there's also the repurposing of ideas, which I think is actually more important. When I used to write SEO blog posts for Dock, I would sit down with you and interview you about, say, learning management systems for an hour. And then I would take those insights and try to squeeze them into an SEO blog post. Now what I can do is interview you on the show — where the audience also benefits — use it for all those other purposes, and then go and write a very informed article where I'm not just repurposing the assets but also repurposing the ideas.
I think that's one of the lessons for lean teams. If you're going to take on a channel or some sort of marketing task, always make sure you can make double or triple use of it. If nobody listens to this show, will it still be useful for us? In our case the answer is yes — there are all these other uses for it. SEO content is a great example of the opposite: if it fails, it will be useless and serve no purpose to the company. Other things I've written — like guides to digital sales rooms — it's content that serves some middle funnel thing, but our customer success team can also give it to customers. Whenever we're taking on pretty much any channel or asset, I'm thinking: can this be used in two or three different ways to make sure it's worth our time no matter what?
Eric Doty: Okay, last big question. AI is obviously changing marketing. At Dock, we've had a very SEO and content-led strategy. How do you think AI and AEO and LLMs are going to impact that strategy and how are we thinking about it going forward?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's a very big question and it's definitely going to impact all the different functions of marketing. I think maybe one of the first places it came for was outbound — now marketing teams are often running outbound for companies and doing mass personalization at scale with AI SDRs. That trend will keep going.
Then there's obviously the way it's impacted content marketing with AEO, GEO, whatever we call it. What does next-gen SEO look like, and the way you want to show up and get recommended in ChatGPT and Claude, is very, very different.
One of the interesting things I've heard elsewhere and really believe is that the future is actually about how do you get agents to recommend your product, not humans. Which is very weird to think about. A good example is when you're setting up Lovable, they're just going to set you up with Supabase as their database, and Supabase has exploded in growth getting recommended by the Lovable agent as part of setup. How does your product fit into that is super interesting to think about. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I think that's a really interesting dynamic.
Then all the creative production is going to be really interesting — creating ad creative, videos, images — it's kind of there. I was playing around with ChatGPT trying to create some ad creative and it's not quite there yet. I still want to export it as a Figma file and make little edits. But that'll definitely work in the future, you can kind of squint and see it.
And then product marketing — this is an area where Dock is actually trying to make an impact. How do you manage all the content you're sharing with your sales team? How do you organize it? What should you create? Where are your gaps in your product and sales enablement strategy? How do you create better client-facing documentation? AI is going to really change all of that.
And then maybe the flip side of AI is that events are going to be more and more important. That in-person IRL connection is the last remaining place where you can actually make sure you're talking to humans and not agents. So I think that'll make that channel even more important. Yeah, it's a really interesting time to try and do marketing because it's all evolving very, very fast. What do you think?
Eric Doty: Yeah, I have a few AEO thoughts. One of the first realizations I had for us at Dock is that I've done really well at SEO via content on our own website. When I first went into the AI analytics tools tracking how often you're cited and mentioned, Dock had a really high citation rate because we rank really well on Google. And so our content is getting sourced for AI, which is great.
The downside is that AI more often uses third-party information about your brand than what you say about yourself. So one of our challenges is: even though we're ranking well with the content, we also need everybody else on the internet to be talking about us. Our SEO strategy has to evolve to what's also happening off our site. For me, that's a big challenge to figure out for 2026 — we can say whatever we want about Dock, but other people also have to be saying things about Dock.
I think there was also a leak of Google's algorithm a couple years ago that talked about how much the author entity matters more than it used to — who's giving the advice and what's their reputation. That goes back to the founder brand thing: posts from Alex Kracov about sales enablement are probably going to be more successful than posts by Dock about sales enablement. So building up the brands of people — making sure our head of sales is posting content about Dock, our customer success people — not just the founder brand, but version 2.0 where all this employee-led content is going to be important.
Then to your point about content production — version one with AI was: we can all write blog posts with AI now. Version two will be all the systems that get built behind these things. I've built a competitor database that scrapes information about every feature of all our competitors from their websites, and that helps me make content that's more deeply researched. I have a huge AI system behind this podcast that can help me spin up content sourced from our own first-party material.
And then there's the video assets and things like that — our designer Luke is working on a design system for the product, and AI can read our design guidelines and build prototypes. We're not that far away from being able to hand that to Claude or some other tool and have it make on-brand videos with motion graphics. I think we're maybe a year away from all of that feeling more accessible to us beyond just writing. And for lean marketing teams like we have, that's going to make a big difference.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's a crazy time. What's hard is it's changing so fast. Now everyone's a Claude MCP expert, but if you asked people six months ago, most had no idea what an MCP was. It's a very funny dynamic, but it's a fun time to be building and you've got to stay in the loop on all the different trends. Very, very fun times.
Eric Doty: Yeah. Okay, very last question. You're talking to another founder today who asks, where should I start with my marketing? What are the three bullet points you'd give them?
Alex Kracov: Let's scope it down to a B2B founder. I would say: post on LinkedIn three to five days a week at a minimum. Make an amazing website that looks really good and is outsized for your brand. And then make sure you talk about the product you're building — create product moments for different things you're releasing. Nothing is too small, nothing is too silly, but try to create little moments where you can package up and talk about what you're launching. You can launch your product multiple times and talk about it a lot. So yeah, get that product marketing flywheel going. Especially in the software industry, people want to see product momentum and doing that on the product marketing side is a great way to do that.
Eric Doty: Perfect, great advice. Thank you so much, Alex, for chatting with me about marketing — our favorite topic. Thank you, audience, for listening to us talk about marketing for an hour. If you want to subscribe to the show, go to growintelshow.com. You'll find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, we have a newsletter, and YouTube as well. We'll be back next week with another episode. Thanks, Alex.
Alex Kracov: Thank you, Eric.
