How Dock found its product category (after trying to be everything first)

TABLE OF CONTENTs

TABLE OF CONTENT

Most startup advice says go wide. Here's what happened when we finally went narrow.

Hey folks, Eric here—Dock's Head of Marketing. Alex and I have been meaning to tell the full Dock origin story for a while.

We just relaunched the Grow & Tell podcast, and for our first conversation back, we told the story of how Dock found its product category.

Not because it's particularly glamorous—it involves a dog treat delivery business called Doggy Style Treats, a Webflow site held together with duct tape, and a couple of years of selling to anyone who would listen.

If you're building a startup or running a GTM team, you've heard the advice: go big, cast a wide net, maximize your TAM. Dock did all of that.

But the biggest lesson from four years of building is that wider isn't always better. The business got easier—sales, product, CS, all of it—once we narrowed down to one category, one buyer, and one set of problems worth getting really good at solving.

Growth Bytes

Top takeaways:

Build a prototype and get it into people's hands as early as possible—even if it's embarrassingly rough. The strongest early signal for Dock was a handful of Lattice reps who swore by a crappy Webflow prototype and kept giving feedback on how to improve it.
Selling to everyone means selling to no one. Trying to serve every B2B relationship type created complexity that nearly stalled the company.
Reinventing an existing category beats creating a new one. Dock combined deal rooms and customer onboarding; Lattice combined performance management and employee engagement. Both took off when the combination clicked.
PLG worked as a lead-generation strategy, not as a revenue strategy. Dock's best implementations required top-down buy-in from a sales or enablement leader.
Narrowing our ICP to enablement leaders simplified sales, product, and CS simultaneously.

A marketing hack that became a product

Before Dock was a company, it was a side project. Alex was running marketing at Lattice—he'd joined as the third employee and helped build it into a $3 billion business—and he kept hitting the same wall:

He'd create collateral for the sales team, and nobody could find it. When reps tried to share materials with champions, it was scattered across email threads.

The Lattice sales cycle made this especially painful. The buyer was usually an HR leader who then had to sell Lattice internally—to the C-suite, managers, and end users. The champion needed a shareable package and was working with nothing.

So Alex hacked together a Webflow microsite where reps could toggle content on and off and send it as a private link. For a product with barely any functionality, it was an instant hit with reps.

"For a pretty crappy product—no analytics, very limited functionality—it started to take off. A few of the reps just swore by it."

The product was crude, but it exposed a real gap. The Lattice sale was inherently multithreaded—one champion had to convince a dozen stakeholders.

But the sales team was treating it as a series of one-to-one conversations, sending materials piecemeal over email.

What the champion actually needed was a one-to-many asset: a single, polished package they could share around the organization. Alex had essentially applied a marketing mindset to the sales process.

Alex's advice to other founders: get people using the product far earlier than feels comfortable.

The first real version of Dock shipped in July 2021, and the editor broke every few clicks. But the feedback that came back wasn't the high-level strategic kind—"what feature should you build?"—it was the ground-level kind: "when I press enter three times, the whole thing crashes."

That's the feedback that actually tightens up software. People think of early feedback as visionary product direction. More often, it's someone telling you your product is broken in a way you couldn't have found on your own.

Selling to everyone meant selling to no one

When Alex left Lattice in 2021 to build Dock full-time, the ambitions were enormous. The initial framing wasn't just sales and onboarding—it was all B2B communication. Investor data rooms, agency-client relationships, recruiting, vendor management.

The pitch was something like "the best way to work with anyone outside your company."

It kind of worked. Some people used Dock for data rooms. Agencies poked around. But one use case kept pulling harder than everything else: the customer relationship. Sales and onboarding—that was where people would pay, where the pain was sharpest.

Meanwhile, the broad positioning was wreaking havoc internally. We used to maintain a competitor list with 50 to 60 names on it, because each use case had its own set of 20 competitors.

The sales team had to context-switch between completely different pitches depending on who showed up. One demo was against onboarding tools like Arrows and Rocketlane. The next was against Seismic and Highspot. Then an agency would want something different entirely.

The complexity cascaded everywhere. Our Product team got pulled in contradictory directions—should they build time sheets and resource management for professional services, or double down on CRM integrations for sales?

Marketing had to speak to radically different personas. CS had to support customers who'd bought Dock for fundamentally different reasons.

And because we were mostly inbound, prospects showed up with their own conclusions about what Dock was. One person would say, "you're an onboarding tool," the next would say "you're a content management platform," and our team had to put on a different hat each time.

Alex realized that for many of these use cases, Dock was a vitamin, not a painkiller. Nice-to-have for agencies and data rooms, but a genuine pain solver for complex onboarding and long sales cycles. The lesson was clear: follow the pain and the money.

"We realized our biggest and easiest customers often had an enablement person involved. The people who paid us the most and were the happiest with Dock always had an enablement person."

Reinvent a category instead of creating one

Once Dock narrowed to the customer relationship, the market had its own label for what they'd built: a sales deal room.

Alex hadn't even thought of it that way, but the category already existed. The big enablement incumbents—Highspot, Seismic, Showpad—had something they called a "digital sales room," though it was essentially a static landing page where you could pull in content from a library.

Dock was something different: a flexible, Notion-style editor with deep CRM integration, embeds from anywhere, and real personalization.

But leaning into that category and reinventing it was far easier than trying to convince the market that "company-to-company collaboration workspace" deserved its own budget line.

"It's way easier to build a better mousetrap than to create a new one. Creating a new category is expensive and it might not work. You have to educate people, convince CFOs to create budget for a thing that doesn't have a line item yet."

Dock reinvented the category by combining deal rooms with customer onboarding in one platform—something nobody else offered. It’s that unique combination that turned it from a vitamin into a painkiller.

And the same pattern repeated at a larger scale. The enablement category already had massive adoption and established budgets. Rather than convincing buyers that deal rooms deserved their own line item, Dock could point to the budget they already had for enablement and say "we're a better version of that." The deal room became the wedge into a much bigger, already-proven category.

Alex had seen this exact playbook at Lattice. Performance management software existed since SuccessFactors in the early 2000s. Lattice reinvented it with modern UX, then combined it with employee engagement—the first provider to do so. Suddenly you could answer "are my top performers happy?"

The lesson both times: find an existing category with budget and adoption, then reinvent it with a novel combination that unlocks something new.

The shift from PLG dream to sales-led reality

Alex always wanted to build a product-led business. Make money while you sleep—no giant sales team eating into margins. At Lattice, so many board meetings boiled down to "hire more reps to grow faster," and that frustrated him.

So the first iteration of Dock leaned hard into PLG. Self-serve signups, no salespeople. Dock got to a couple hundred thousand in revenue, but the customers were small and implementations were shallow.

PLG also meant the first impression of the product was someone using it alone—and building a beautiful in-product onboarding experience that converts self-serve users is incredibly expensive for an early-stage startup. Every click had to sell the product without a human in the room, and the editor was still half-built.

The realization was that Dock isn't the kind of product that spreads bottom-up. A single rep doesn't sign up and get their teammates hooked. It requires an org-wide process change, and that kind of decision needs a real sales conversation—not a self-serve flow.

"Sure, you can get people using it and generate some revenue that way. But our best implementations are when a sales leader or enablement person really believes in the product and says, 'hey team, this is how we're doing it now.'"

But we didn't abandon PLG altogether; we just reframed it. The free trial became a lead generator, not a revenue engine. People sign up, build something, and get familiar with the product. Then when sales reaches out, the conversation is warmer.

There's a meta-benefit too: every prospect experiences being on the receiving end of a Dock workspace during the sales process. They get tagged in it, navigate it, and see how the team uses it. It's a live demo baked into the buying process.

The hybrid creates happy accidents, too. One of the hottest AI companies signed up on Dock's standard plan, built out a full deal room unprompted, and the Dock team didn't even realize they were a customer until someone noticed the company name. By the time sales reached out, the prospect already understood the product. That turned into one of Dock's biggest deals—and CS barely had to lift a finger on implementation.

Betting the company on revenue enablement

We learned a key lesson in sequencing: Dock had to narrow its audience before we could broaden the product to a full revenue enablement platform.

Once the team focused on enablement leaders—not founders, not agencies, not onboarding buyers—it became clear that being just a deal room wouldn't cut it. The market kept putting Dock in the "point solution" bucket, and customers were confirming it from the other direction: they wanted content management alongside deal rooms, then learning management.

But expanding the product surface area only made sense because the audience was narrow. Going horizontal within one vertical is manageable. Going horizontal across five verticals is how you end up with a 60-name competitor list again.

We also realized that enablement teams were better buyers. Selling to salespeople is hard—not because they don't see the value, but because they're not the ones who implement software. They close deals; they don't set up templates. You need an enablement person, the operational "doer" who actually rolls tools out to the team. Once Dock was oriented around that buyer, the whole go-to-market motion clicked.

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

So Dock repositioned from digital sales room to revenue enablement platform—not abandoning deal rooms (that's still the differentiator), but building the broader surface area enablement leaders need.

Focusing on one persona simplified everything downstream. Sales knows who they're pitching. Product knows what to build next (an LMS, not time sheets). CS supports customers who all bought for the same reason.

The incumbents—Highspot, Seismic, Showpad—are impressive companies with hundreds of millions in ARR. But they're at a lifecycle stage where innovation slows. Several are PE-owned or headed in that direction. They have large teams, older codebases, and organizational weight. And AI has leveled the playing field in a way that favors smaller, faster teams.

When Dock built its initial AI features, Alex and co-founder Victor were in a room for days, iterating on prompts. A 500-person company can't move that fast.

Alex used to think a diverse customer base was a strength—a law firm, a marketing agency, and a SaaS company all using your product feels exciting. He's come around to the opposite view.

When your customers all look similar, they all have the same problems. You get really good at solving those problems, and then you have a really good company. Variety is fun at dinner parties. Repeatability is what makes a business work.

It's not the company Alex set out to build. He didn't leave Lattice thinking, "I'm going to start an enablement company." But the path from marketing hack to broad workspace to deal room to enablement platform is the kind of messy, market-driven journey that actually produces good companies. You start with a big vision, the market tells you where the pain is, and if you're paying attention, you end up somewhere better than where you aimed.