Dock's Content Marketing Strategy: 5 years of lessons for start-ups

Speaker A: The number one advice I have for any founder, they got to build a brand around themselves. Founders need to figure out a channel that works well. And I think we found a really good rhythm, honestly, with this podcast. I really believe every marketing channel works. Like, maybe that's a hot take, but every single one of them works. It's just a matter of investment and time and figure out a channel that works well, that doesn't feel like a slog to do all the time. Like, there were so many days where I would be like, oh, I got to write a LinkedIn post. I have nothing smart to say. What am I going to say here?

Speaker B: Major pillar, I think, of our content philosophy we have was to, like, add one channel at a time. Why did you want us to take that strategy?

Speaker A: You only got so much time to work on things and so much budget to deploy. And if you have, let's say, $100 to spend on marketing, you spread that, you know, $10 across each channel. You know you're going to get a worse return than if you just put $100 into, like, one channel. It's same with time.

Speaker B: If you were talking to another founder today, who's like, where should I start with my marketing? What are, like, the three bullet points you would give them?

Speaker A: I would say,

Speaker B: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another EP of Grow and Tell. I'm Eric Doty here, head of marketing at Dock. I'm with Alex Krakov, CEO and co founder of Doc. Welcome back, Alex, for another episode.

Speaker A: What's up, Eric?

Speaker B: Today we're going to talk about marketing because it's a topic that we're both very familiar with. Alex, uh, and I have been working together for actually over four, almost five years now on Docs marketing. So we have a lot to talk about. Like, we've learned so much. Uh, 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, uh, thought we'd share lessons from what we've learned so far.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to be fun. Excited to talk marketing.

Speaker B: Perfect. Let's talk about before I got here. So when you were founding Doc and thinking about Doc's marketing objectives, obviously you were a VP of marketing at Lattice before you found a Doc. Like, 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 are you thinking about Doc's marketing before you started?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I was really excited to do marketing at Docs. I had just come off this experience of, you know, I was the third marketer at this company called Lattice, and helped that grow into a big, 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 mean, I messed up so many different things at Lattice. I was like, ooh, I can do this right at Doc, right from the beginning. And so that was kind of my mental model coming in. But then the other kind of dynamic was marketing was only, like, 5, 10% of my time. I needed to spend all this time on building out the product and talking to customers and doing sales. And so, uh, at Lattice, I got to spend full time at marketing. At Doc, it was like a really small percentage of my time. So with those sort of two dynamics, I was like. And we didn't have a lot of money, too, when we started, right? We hadn't raised money yet and different things. So it was like, what do we need to do? And I wanted to focus on things that really compounded over time. And the big one was like, content and SEO. Because what I noticed at Lattice was, you know, 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, right, for you to kind of build up your domain rating to get the content flywheel going. And so that's when we first met. You know, I hired you as a freelance contractor to help write some of the content. But that's really where we wanted to start was, you know, on the SEO kind of content side of things. So it was a little bit of that, um, was kind of to get that flywheel going because I knew it would take a long time. And my mental model was like, okay, whenever we run out of money or we stop raising money, just in case, whatever happens, we'll have that. So we'll always sort of get kind of leads into the future. And then the other thing we started to do was, I guess, like, LinkedIn was a big channel and continues to be. So, you know, wasn't that, um, like, formulaic or, like, serious about approaching LinkedIn? But it was a place where we could, like, post a little bit to kind of get some of the earliest momentum going with Doc. So that's where we started.

Speaker B: Can I push back on the SEO thing a little bit? So most of the time people say, don't do SEO, because it takes so long to have results. And, like, you don't. You normally don't have that kind of Runway as a startup. So like how did SEO feed both like the short term and long term goals of Doc?

Speaker A: I don't know if it really helped the short term goals at all. I mean I, you know, look, I looked at starting Doc. It's a, at a minimum a 10 year journey for me personally. And so this wasn't like, oh, I'm just going to try something and see if it works. Like I'm going to build a company, I'm going to do it 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. It was like I'm optimizing for what it takes to build a big company over 10 years. And if you look at any big SaaS company, this is kind of pre AI so we can get into that. But like HubSpot, all these big companies, PandaDoc, whoever had a giant SEO presence kind of driving a lot of. We were really product led growth at the time. So it was like that really worked well. So it was more about the sort of mid to long term strategy and in the short term. Yeah, like I didn't think of SEO as a thing but also it wasn't a big lift like it was, it cost some money to hire you right as a writer but it was like, oh, we get on a call and I brief you on a topic and you write it and I don't have to think about it every day. It's not something I sort of was like it took up a lot of mind share. I think the marketing stuff that did was a little bit more short term oriented was you know like the product launch, product moment sort of stuff where it was like hey, we're a new company, hey here's the thing we built and sort of making some noise around that. Putting up a nice website was obviously really um, important one of the first things we did. But you know I was I guess like social media and like LinkedIn was sort of the short term stuff and SEO is this like long term investment. Um, and then look, the reality is in the early early days the way you get a startup going looks a little bit more like sales rather than marketing. You know there's like some examples of you know, I think like Dropbox posts on hacker news and boom, it goes viral and that's like, you know, you know, good earned media, like um, you know, sort of marketing or viral marketing maybe but most companies are sort of just like grinding it out to get those first hundred customers. And that's more of what it looked like. You know, at Dock, um, you know, marketing started to kind of build up the flywheel. But um, it was really more of like sales via LinkedIn or email and stuff was sort of the, the first, first batch of customers.

Speaker B: What 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. So like in other companies I've been in, it's like, okay, you do SEO and like make as money as fast as possible. And you know, how long will it take until the line goes up? You came in with like, okay, this is going to be a uh, 1 to 5 to 10 year plan. If we're going to be a billion dollar company, we're going to have to have an SEO strategy in place. And then, okay, here's how much Runway we have. We have this many years to get here. Here's our rough revenue model. This is what the SEO numbers have to look like to match that. And so it was like, I think we took a very like, not to say like, business oriented approach. That sounds kind of silly, but it's true. Like normally SEO is more of like, uh, let's try something, see if it works. If it doesn't, then, you know, we'll, we'll hedge our bets, we'll try something else. And I don't think you can really succeed with SEO. Of course, AEO is like a whole different thing. We'll get into that. But I don't think you can really succeed with like one toe in the water. I think you have to go all in and say, okay, five years from now we're going to be successful. What does the path from A to B look like?

Speaker A: And uh, like the unfair advantage that I think I had starting doc was like, I knew what each marketing channel feels like to run. Like, I really believe every marketing channel works. Like maybe that's a hot take, but every single one of them works. Um, it's just a matter of investment and time and how, how well, how good you are at sort of approaching that channel. Of course channels decay over time and some have different properties than other, but they all work. And so like one really popular one with B2B is events, right? Like doing sponsorships and going to conferences and doing the booth thing or host your own events. And like, I knew that that was one expensive, um, both, um, in terms of like money, right? Like sponsorships, you know, can be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50K. Right? Um, and then flying and hotels and all of that. But then time too. I think that was actually the more expensive part about that strategy was like 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. And so yeah, SEO sort of felt like a better, you know, fit for kind of what, what I wanted to do and our budget and again long aligned with those long term goals like, like we had talked about.

Speaker B: Yeah, I totally agree that every marketing channel works and we've, we might have talked to us talked about this before on the show. I think our closest competitors for a while uh, were like Aligned who did really well with influencer marketing on LinkedIn. Like that seemed to be their entire marketing strategy was just hire influencers to talk about aligned. It seemed to work. They created a lot of buzz, so good for them. And then Arrows was another competitor and they went very hard like the HubSpot partner market thing and very closely align themselves with like HubSpot partners. And that worked for them. And not to say our products were all the same, but we're all similar products. We all did completely different marketing strategies and I'd say we all succeeded sort of especially from that zero to one marketing mode with completely different tactics. So I, I think a really good lesson here from us and our competitors is uh, that like choose a marketing channel and like stick with it and go all in on it rather than like hedging your bets and probably anything. Like you don't have to have the perfect marketing strategy, you just have to have one that you stick to and you uh, some confidence with.

Speaker A: Totally. And then over time you can like add more channels and have more complexity as you have more budget and people to help you and different things like that.

Speaker B: Yeah. So let's go back to SEO a little bit because I, I think one of our goals at the beginning that was, I uh, don't want to say misguided but like our targets changed is when you hired me you were like, I want you to make an SEO strategy that gets us a hundred thousand page views per month. And like I, I don't even know like not to like throw ourselves under the bus. I don't even know if we get a hundred thousand page views per year now. Probably, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it turns out like we never needed those numbers to succeed. Partly we've talked before on the show like our ACV changed a lot so we Thought we were going to be more of a product led business where you know, we're getting a lot of $50 users and we needed millions of site visitors to convert to $50 users. I mean we turned more into a sales led organization with you know, uh, five plus figure contracts. And so like the volume of traffic wasn't really needed to get to um, get to our business goals. But like, I guess looking back on our SEO strategy, uh, I'm happy to comment too. Like what do you think we got? Right, and, and what do you think we were a little misguided about?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think the a hundred thousand thing was, you know, me trying to be CEO of you know, big audacious goals. Right. And so, you know, I don't regret saying that, but yeah, it's kind of funny to kind of look back on and think about that. And I think the other dynamic that just radically changes maybe halfway through this journey. It's like AI comes out and completely changes how people are searching. So there's like things that you don't expect and that's like, you know, that's a macro change that we didn't control that relates to kind of this. But yeah, I mean I think focusing on backlinks was really, really helpful, um, getting our domain rating up and we hired a great agency to help with us do follow and we were able to kind of get a lot of backlinks and the only way we were able to get those backlinks though is we had a lot of high quality content as well that you were sort of, you were leading that effort at sort of leading that effort. Um, and so yeah, I mean I think that sort of one, two punch did well. And then I guess the stuff that seemed to work and I'm actually really curious for your take on it was much more of like mid bottom funnel type of content. Um, you know, like the generic like you know, what is sales enablement, what is marketing we didn't invest that much into which was good because AI crushed all of that traffic. And what we sort of did better was a little bit like the more mid bottom funnel content, digital sales and templates and different things like that. Um, yeah, that seemed to work better. I don't know. Curious for your take.

Speaker B: I think like that goal you gave me of a hundred thousand page views was very motivating to have like a really good focus on speed and quantity and output from the marketing side. I think it's very easy to uh, as like an SEO marketer person to say SEO Takes a long time and you know, slow and steady. Uh, and you kind of gave me, even though we talked about like you had foresight to say this is going to take years, you were also like, you know, let's move as fast as possible. And what that did for me is it gave me like enough experiments happening all very quickly and all at once to say, oh, this is, this type of content doesn't work. This type of content works. This doesn't. And so yeah, to your point on like what content we saw success with I think like at the beginning, yeah, we did try the sort of top of funnel articles, like what is sales enablement? Or B2B sales guide and like all that stuff. And you know, we had success with some of those. But uh, I think some things that were, that I found ultimately that were sort of not like recipes for success because it's still not every time. But it was like very solution, like problem solution oriented searches of like how do I make a sales proposal? Or how do I build an onboarding plan? And it was very like tactical things that we get attached to the product that like from an SEO perspective, Google had incentive to rank us highly for those terms because we were also like the real solution to the problem. So it's not just that like we had the content. We could also say, oh, and here's a template in Doc that helps you do that. So our content wasn't just like serving up an answer, it was serving up the solution. So once that kind of clicked in it was like, okay, what are all the possible searches that like not only does can I tell them something useful, but can I give them something useful with the product? And so that like ultimately long term turned into like anything we can build a template for um, like software comparison articles. Uh, and kind of like a hidden nugget that I didn't expect was kind of like emerging terms in our industry. So a really good example was like asynchronous sales or asynchronous, asynchronous customer onboarding where like really big companies like HubSpot with amazing SEO presences, like they weren't close enough. Like whoever's doing their SEO is I'm sure doing an amazing job, but they're managing a hundred thousand blog posts and they're not paying attention to like what's the new term that's hot right now? Or at least they weren't five years ago. Maybe they're listening now with AI, but, but um, so there, there was like an anywhere where we were like really close to the customer and, like, the leading edge of what they were thinking about. Like, those topics actually did have some SEO success too. And, like, conversions, surprisingly, as well. Um, and then, and you know, long term, once we were more established, then stuff like competitor comparisons and things like that, uh, have been, uh, performing well. I think one big lesson for me too is that, like, you can have as much, like, taste as, as you want with SEO, but sometimes you just have to play by the rules. Like, I think when I came in, I was like, no, we're not going to do, uh, a what is X article. And I'm going to make my SEO content really opinionated. I think, like, we made a sales enablement software guide where it was like, it wasn't a list of tools. It was like Alex's take on the industry. And it was like, very opinionated and very good, honestly. And it's, it was like a very good piece of content, but it actually just like, never did anything for us for SEO. And the second I went and just changed the article and it was like, here's 20 tools and a list. And it was like, bam. Instantly. Like, yeah. So, like, the big lesson for us is that, like, you can be a tastemaker with some things, but there are some channels where there are, like, very defined rules, and SEO is one of them. Um, and so you have to learn, like, what rules can you break and then, you know, be more impressive than everybody else. Uh, on the other hand, like, there's some rules you have to play like, like, same with LinkedIn. What performs well on the LinkedIn algorithm? You kind of just have to play by the rules sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah, but your taste was. It was a really important insight because I read our blogs and they're not just like, crap. Uh, I'm sure there's a couple that are. But you're a good writer and you're a good editor and you really cared, and that does shine through even in the more SEO Y content. So it might have that, I don't know, spammy headline or whatever, but it's good writing. And I think, you know, I guess one of the things you did to scale all this was hire a ton of different freelancers, right, to help you write. And you sort of act as, like, the managing editor and edited stuff and like, you were really thorough about how you worked through each freelancer to make sure, like, hey, they're actually good. This is high quality, or I'm not going to publish this because this is bad. And I think too often people in your position will see that 100k goal and just be like, oh God, I got to get anything up. And you know, I think you, you didn't do that, which was really, really positive because you do got to maintain some, you know, talent bar, quality bar. Cause it's part of your brand at the end of the day.

Speaker B: Yeah. One of my, uh, philosophies was to over invest in onboarding the freelancers. I think, uh, you know, I'm in a big community of content marketers called Superpath, and almost nobody ever is talking about onboarding freelancers. Like, people are looking for them and they hire them and then they just give them a project brief. But to like, I would spend a couple hours with them, like demoing the product, talking about our customer, like, what are the customer pain points? And then for each article, I'd give like hours and hours of feedback on the first few. And then so I treated them more like an employee than a freelancer. And that really paid off long term because like two, three years into a relationship with a freelancer, then they could sort of achieve the quality bar that we were looking for. So, uh, if they're, that's another great lesson. It's just like over invest in, um, as you would with customers, as you would with a new sales rep, like, treat them more like an employee than a contractor. And like, it will really benefit you long term. Our next sort of like major pillar, I think, of our content strategy or just philosophy we have was to like add one channel at a time. So number one goal was get the SEO up and running, onboard a bunch of freelancers, get the blog going, and then add something else. So like, why did you want us to take that strategy? I mean, I had a vote in it, but I think it was, it was mostly your plan of like, let's do one channel at a time.

Speaker A: It was just focus, right? Like, you only got so much, you know, just me and you, right? There's only so much time we have to work on things and almost budget to deploy. And if you have, let's say, $100 to spend on marketing, you spread that $10 across each channel, you're going to get a worse return than if you just put $100 into one channel. And it's same with time, right? And so I wanted to be sort of really thoughtful about how we did it. And that's like, I think that statement's somewhat true. Like, we did do a couple. Like, we weren't only doing SEO, right? Like we were posting on LinkedIn, we were doing product Marketing stuff. But it wasn't, I would say, like the growth focus of the business for. For a while.

Speaker B: Yeah. And the relationship or the sort of ratio changes over time too, of what we're focused on. Like, once we have thousands of customers, then product updates, like, it makes sense for that to take up more airtime and our focus when we have very few customers. Like, the goal is get people in the top of the funnel. So, like, you know, uh, I think over time we've covered more. Yeah, total funnel marketing. But at the beginning it was very like, just how do we get in front of people? And so, um, yeah, like the blog and SEO case studies, the website, LinkedIn ads, like, those are really the big focus at the beginning. Totally. I think one thing that's interesting about our strategy from the beginning too, is that, like, you've always been at the center of our content strategy. It's been like a very, like, yes, product led, but also founder led. So, like, you're hosting this podcast. You're on all of our product demo videos. You're our. You are our LinkedIn channel. Like, we don't really. Like, we don't post at all from the dock account. We just post from your account. Founders are busy. You also have to focus on product. Like, what makes it worth your time to sort of. And why is it worth making you kind of still to five years in like the face of Doc?

Speaker A: I mean, I think it's just a form of marketing that I believe in and have noticed other people do. I mean, like, Dave Gerhardt is maybe the classic example of this with drift. Not the founder, but marketing over there. And he wrote, I think the book founder, brand or something like that. Um, and I really believe everything that book. And like, I think people buy from people. And the best way, especially in the early days, for you to, you know, kind of give personality to a company is for to be the founder.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And, um, you know, 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, you know, no one knows what Doc is, but they maybe knew what Alex was a little bit. And so I was able to kind of like, put myself out there and be the trusted person that maybe they. They want to buy. And it's hard at times. It can be distracting to do marketing and to do the podcast. And it does take time away from other channels or priorities or whatever. But I think it's really kind of important because it's like what I said before, people buy from people. Um, and it's also, it's both time consuming, but it also is the easiest way to do something. I mean, I'm the one who's building the product, especially the early days. And so it's like, 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 that and talk about it. Um, and so in some ways it was a simple decision, um, just to do that. And I think that has clearly been a huge trend. I mean, everybody now is posting on LinkedIn, promoting their businesses, and I think there's a fine balance of how much you're self promotional. Um, because I think it's totally okay to be the doc guy and I'm the guy who posts doc demos and trying to talk about my product in an authentic way, but then also try and give back to the community and share interesting stuff. Um, because I think that's how you build trust. Right? Marketing's whole job is just to get people to think about you when they're ready to buy something. And so you just got to kind of stay top of mind and stay in front of their face and, um, whatever random stuff I could say it's hopefully useful. Um, helps us stay top of mind as a company.

Speaker B: There's different models of the founder led content. And I think what's made you and us successful with that is that like, you're an active operator in the system. You're not just like the face that's being ghostwritten for behind the scenes. Like, 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 this show, uh, or it comes from our internal meetings where you're leading an enablement session with our team. And I take a bunch of notes. I'm like, ooh, that's a good thing that, that other people would want to hear Alex say. So I think the fact that you're like, actively, um, but it's not just me taking what you say and writing it up fancy, it's you're actively contributing, uh, ideas and your time. And I think that makes it like a much more successful model than like a handoff to marketing.

Speaker A: I mean, this is how I learned how to do anything right. There's like so many good blog posts out there on the Internet from operators. And maybe these blogs, personal blogs, are somewhat of a dying art, but like, you know, think about like how much Paul Graham has given back to the startup community and ideas through his essays is probably the top example of this. And so heading into Doc and I have a little blog out there, it was always like, okay, how can I kind of give back for stuff that I know about, um, marketing for a startup, um, enablement, different things like that. And then that's naturally kind of like the top of funnel for Doc. Um, and that strategy has worked well. I mean I think to very put it simply, there's like a two pronged and multiple, maybe more than that. But it's like we do the SEO long term thing and then Alex can of post on LinkedIn and build the brand and attract more short term people on LinkedIn. And then you know, we're running other marketing campaigns we can kind of get into. But um, but yeah, that's been a good channel. And honestly like the number one advice I have for any founder who's starting a business, like they got to build a brand around themselves. Um, that's just like how I think business works today. I mean look at, you know, like any most businesses, you know, you probably know the founder. Um, and um, I think what's important is the founders need to figure out a channel that works well for them, that they're excited, that doesn't feel like a slog to do all the time. Some people like writing, some people like talking. There are so many days where um, I would be like, oh, I got to write a LinkedIn post. I have nothing smart to say, what am I going to say here? And I think we found a really good rhythm honestly with this podcast. I mean this gets very meta. Uh, but it's very easy for me to, you ask me a question and I can riff on something and hopefully say something intelligent. Um, and then that becomes nice content that kind of feeds the rest of our flywheel. Um, but even my wife makes fun of me. It's very hard for me to like if you're just like, you know, tell me about marketing. I'm like, I got nothing to say. What do you like? My, my memory doesn't work like that. Um, and so we've, you know, you have to kind of find the workflow that, that, that, that gets you to produce, you know, content at a fairly high rate.

Speaker B: Okay, I have two reactions to what you just said. One is I think there's like founders have a special permission to self promote and where people will still be interested in, in it because it's like they're invested in their personal growth story. Like, it's a hero's journey kind of to have a founder talk about building their business. And like you're, you know, you said people buy from people, but I think people also like, root for founders to succeed versus like a brand or even like a marketer at a company. Like, oh, uh, there's Eric doing marketing. Like, it's, it feels more like a personal quest and like people are cheering you on. So, like, you do have permission to get away with more marketing than like, anyone else, basically. So I think that's a really interesting dynamic. Uh, and then I think the second thing that's interesting there is that we had to develop a working relationship over time where I could figure out how to be like the extractor of Alex ideas. So for any, I think I, uh, hear from a lot of marketers who say, yeah, my founder wants to do founder led marketing, but they're not actively involved enough. And so I think my advice for marketers is you have to like, insert yourself into their world. So they're almost definitely talking at your all hands. They're training the team, they're talking at, uh, like product sessions. Like, go and find the places that they're already talking day to day and see how much you can extract from that. Obviously lots of companies have call recorders now. Go see if you can like extract stuff with AI from those calls. Um, but also like, just find the mode that your founder likes to communicate in. Just like you said, Alex. Uh, and like, for us it's just been this podcast, but also also just like riffing for 40 minutes about a topic. I can come up with like six months worth of ideas and then I can kind of. Then I take that. I, you know, I do the content myself and then I throw it back at you and you leave some comments and then. But I've taken most of the work off your plate without taking like putting ideas in your mouth. I think that's the big trick.

Speaker A: Totally. And I think the other side of that is like project management of each other, but mostly you project managing me and then also just making it easy for me to create things. And I think about my relationship with Jack at Lattice, and it was like, we'd want to get podcast guests for our research for human podcasts, and I'd literally have to lock them in a room and be like, open up your email and you're going to email a bunch of people to invite them on the podcast. Right? Or stuff like that. Or let me do, write all the questions for you for the podcast and what you do for me. Right? So that type of stuff, trying to make it really easy for the founder to create content is very, very, very, very helpful. Um, and so I think in a lot of ways that's like with the early kind of content marketing person, an important part of their job is how do you enable, you know, the founder to talk about stuff?

Speaker B: Yeah. And it should feel easier for you over time. Right? Like I should be taking more and more off your plate so you can just show up and have good ideas. Okay, next I want to talk about our, what I'm calling our biggest strategic marketing mistake to date. Uh, that's probably a little harsh, but I think in 2024 we kind of broke our own rule of like focusing on few and we, we took on a bunch more channels at once. So like we, we started doing community sponsorships in uh, like we did like a sales enablement community, a rev ops community, a sales community. We uh, like I started dabbling with LinkedIn influencers. We started sponsoring a few in person conferences. And not to say that they were all failures, but I think we stretched ourselves a little thin. Like what do you think back or when you think back at that, like was it the right move or we just like under resource, like how do you think about that? In hindsight, I was actually curious what, what the mistake. What was our biggest failure?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, because like, uh, I, you know, I honestly don't. I mean it was just the way I think about life. I don't think about mistakes. I feel like it's all like part of the learning journey. And then I also think, especially with marketing, like you really got to mess something up for it to be a mistake. Like it's all like positive sum. Like maybe it's not the highest ROI performing channel of all time, but like, like doing things you learn and it's getting your brand out there. But I think you're, you're spot on though. I think with your call out of like we tried to kind of get our brand out there a little bit more and I do think it was helpful. But um, you know, we partner with a community. That was fine. Did we get a lot of leads from it? Meh. Ah, I don't know. Definitely was distracting for me and you. Yeah.

Speaker B: To no fault of the community. Really. It was just. Yeah, yeah, it was just a little distracting.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then like, you know, the LinkedIn influencer thing. Yeah, that was definitely a failure. Although I'm still bullish that that could potentially work. I think like looking back on it, like we didn't quite have the demand gen engine around these types of campaigns. Like to make conferences and events really work, like 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. And like we were doing it, but I was like doing it with a little bit of my time half assing it, right. And like you just don't, you know, you get what you put in. And we also didn't have as mature of a sales team at the time. Our product wasn't as far along and so it was like maybe a little too soon to do some of those things. And 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 maybe build up the demand gen muscle or just wait and be patient. I think what's really hard, especially with all the startup VC grow, grow, grow narrative is um, especially as a founder, you're pressured to run your company into wal, essentially grow as fast as you can, spend a bunch of money, see what happens. Oh, fails, whatever, you just lay people off. That's not my style at all. And so, um, it probably would have been better to, to be patient and not try and like invest a ton. It's not like we went absolutely crazy, but it would have been nice to like, you know, wait and kind of save until we may be a little bit more of a mature, mature business.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think one of the, not to say fundamental issues, but we have much better product market fit now than we did two years ago too. Like we were still, still like very pushing hard on like the digital sales room thing, which is still a very important part of our offering, but not necessarily like the leading story. So I think that was a bit of like educating the market at the same time as doing all these channels was maybe it was a little, little more friction. I think if we went out and did this now, we'd have more success even though we'd still be spreading ourselves a little thin. I think also some uh, of it too is like reactionary to, you know, I mentioned before, or um, some of our competitors had successful LinkedIn influencer programs and our salespeople were hearing it a lot like, oh, this competitor came up on LinkedIn. So we said, oh, okay, we have to also do that. And not that it was 100% motivated by competitors, but we were definitely maybe not listening to our own, um, strategy enough and just focusing on the channels that were already doing well. We should just double down on SEO rather than spreading ourselves thin on a bunch of channels. 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, like, why do you find this podcast is worth it for us?

Speaker A: I mean, it goes back to the founder brand building thing. I think, number one, like putting, you know, giving a platform for, um, you know, me to talk about stuff and creating the content Flywheel is very, very helpful. Um, I also think it's just a great way to kind of, of build your brand and be smart. Right? Like, each person who you interview on a podcast, like, you can kind of be like, I interviewed somebody at LinkedIn, I interviewed somebody at Apple or Amazon or whatever. And like, you know, like, you get a little bit of that brand cachet. Um, it's also really nice to interview people who could potentially be your customer. Um, so that's like a great way for you to. Even if no one ever listens to the podcast, it's a great way for you to kind of build the relationship within your icp, especially within senior leaders. It's like an excuse for you to kind of reach out and build relationships, um, with those folks. Um, I think I mentioned the content flywheel part a little bit. That's also really, um, important. And maybe the last thing I'll say is, especially in the world of AI, when the written word feels very cheap and you can just pump out blog posts and stuff like that, um, there's something authentic about us actually talking and we're real, we're not AI. Um, but I think that really helps. Um, so, yeah, it's kind of like our, it feeds the content Flywheel, um, and just helps to build the brand. And look, maybe the last thing with the content Flywheels, it's like, 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. And so I can kind of use their, um, stuff on my LinkedIn as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. And from the marketing operator perspective, like, the podcast for me has been the best source of ideas that feeds everything else. And so there's, there's like the repurposing of the content itself. So, yeah, we do video clips from the show that we can use on LinkedIn, we post them to YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. And like, it's just a good way to take one asset and then get a whole bunch of reach from it in various forms. I write a newsletter Version, please subscribe to it if you have, uh, growandtelshow.com but then there's also kind of like the repurposing of ideas, which I think is actually more important. Where we talked about when I used to write SEO blog posts for Doc, like, I would sit down with you and interview you about learning management systems for an hour, uh, and then I would take those insights and like, try to squeeze them into an SEO blog post. Now what I can do is interview you on the show where also, like, the audience benefits from it, uh, we can use it for all those other purposes. But then I can actually then go and write like a very informed article about learning management systems or whatever it is, uh, where I'm not just repurposing the assets, but I'm also, also repurposing the ideas. And so I think that's one of the lessons for like, I'm the only marketer at Doc, anyone who's a lean team. It's like, if, if you're going to take on a channel or you're going to take on some sort of marketing task, always make sure that you can make like double or triple use of it. And, and like, if nobody listens to this show, will it still be useful for us? And in our case the answer is yes. There's all these other uses for it. Uh, if you're like, okay, if this fails, SEO content is a great example of like, if this fails, it will be useless and serve no purpose to the company. There's other things I've written, like guides that they can also help our customer. Uh, you know, like how to introduce, uh, your customers to digital sales rooms. Like, that's also something that, it's a piece of content that serves some sort of like middle funnel thing. But our customer success team can also give that to a customer. And so when, whenever we're taking on pretty much any channel or asset, I'm thinking, can this be used in two, three different ways, um, to make sure it's worth our time no matter what. Okay, so I think last big question, AI is obviously changing marketing. At Doc, we've had a very like, SEO and content level ad strategy. How do you think AI and AEO and LLMs, all those things are going to impact that strategy? And how are we thinking about it going forward?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's a very big question. It's definitely going to impact all the different functions of marketing. Marketing is so many different functions. Right. And AI is going to come for sort of each one of those in different ways. Like I think maybe one of the first places it kind of came for was you know, like, I guess it's maybe more outbound, right? Like outbound sales. But now marketing teams are often running outbound for companies and doing mass personalization at ah, scale with your AI sdr. And so marketing demand teams are starting to do that a little bit more and I think that trend will kind of keep at it. Um, then there's obviously the way it's impacted. Content marketing is very impactful with AEO Geo, uh, whatever we call it, the, you know, what does next gen SEO look like and the way you want to show up and get recommended. And ChatGPT and Claude is very, very different. Um, I think one of the interesting things I've heard elsewhere and I really believe this is that the future is actually how do you get agents to recommend your product, not humans. Um, which is very, very uh, weird to think about. But when you're, you know, a good example is like when you're setting up lovable, right? They're just going to like set you up with Supabase as their database and Supabase exploded in growth and it's getting recommended to you by the lovable agent. Right, as part of setup. And so how does your product kind of fit into that is super interesting to think about. Um, and how do you get in there? Um, I don't know how, I'm still trying to figure it out but I think that's like a really interesting dynamic. And then all the creative production is going to be really interesting like creating um, ad creative, um, videos, images. It's kind of there like I was playing around with ChatGPT trying to create some ad creative and it's like it's not quite there. I still want to export as a figma file and make little edits, but didn't quite get me all the way. But that'll definitely work in the future. Like you can kind of squint and see it working. Um, and then product marketing, I think this is an area where Doc is actually trying to make an impact. Um, where you know, like how do you manage all the content that you're sharing with your sales team? Um, how do you organize it, what should you create? Where are your gaps in your product and sales enablement, um, strategy, how do you create better client facing documentation like AI is going to really change all of that. And then I think maybe the, the flip side of AI is also that events are going to be more and more in person and are important right? Like that in person, IRL connection, right, is like the only place, maybe the last remaining place where you can actually make sure you're talking to humans and not agents. And so like that'll I think make that channel even, even more uh, important. Um, so yeah, it's a really interesting time to try and do marketing because it's all evolving very, very fast.

Speaker B: Yeah, I have a few, I have a few AEO thoughts. Um, like one of the first realizations I had for us at Doc is that uh, like I've done really well at SEO via like content on our own website. And uh, so when I first went into the uh, like the AI analytics tools that we're tracking, like how often are you cited and how often you mentioned like Doc had really high, high citation rate because we rank really well in Google. Uh, and so our content is getting sourced for AI, which is great. The downside for us is that AI does not trust or like trust is a big word there. But let's say AI more so often uses third party information about your brand than what you say about yourself. So for us like one of the um, one of the challenges is even though we're ranking well with the content, like we also need everybody else on the Internet to be talking about about us. So there's so like our SEO strategy has to evolve to like what's also happening off our site. And so that's like, for me that's like a big challenge to figure out for 2026. Um, you know, we can say whatever we want about Doc, but other people also have to be saying things about Docs. So that's kind of like big interesting pillar number one. Um, I think also there was like a leak of Google's algorithm last year or a couple years ago that was talking about how much uh, and this has been talked about for a while, but how much like the author entity matters more than it used to. So like who's giving the advice and what's their reputation? So I think that also goes back to the founder brand thing that like posts from Alex Krakov about sales enablement is going to be more successful than post by Doc about sales enablement probably. And so like building up the brands of people and even like people on our team making sure that our head of sales is posting content about Doc and other things or customer success. People like I think not just the founder brand, but like the version 2.0 of that is like all this employee led content is going to be important. That's something I'm thinking About too. And yeah, and then to your point about content production, there was sort of like version one with AI that was like, okay, we can all write blog posts with AI now. Great. I think version 2 will be like all the Claude code systems that, that get built behind these things. Like I've built a uh, competitor database that scrapes information about like every feature about all our competitors from their websites and then that helps me make content that's like more deeply researched. Or like I have a huge AI system behind this podcast that can like help me spin up content like sourced from our own first party material. Uh, and then there's the, like you said, the video assets and things like that that like our designer Luke right now is working on like a design system for the product that where like the, our uh, you know, AI can read uh, sort of our design guidelines and build prototypes. We're not that far away from like he can just hand that to Claude or some other tool and it can make like on brand videos for us using like with motion graphics and things like that. So I think we're like maybe a year away from all of that feeling really not easy. But uh, more than just writing being easily accessible to us and I think for lean marketing teams like we have, that's going to make a big difference.

Speaker A: I mean it's a crazy time and what's hard is it's like changing so fast and the paradigms and the way you build and stuff. Now everyone's a Claude MCP expert, but if you ask people six months ago, they had no idea what an MCP was most like most people. So it's like a very funny kind of, kind of dynamic that's happening. But it's a fun time to be, to be building and you gotta definitely stay uh, in the loop on all the different trends and things. Um, but yeah, very, very fun times.

Speaker B: Okay, very last question. So like really quickly, if you ah, were talking to another founder today who's like, where should I start with my marketing? What are like the three bullet points you would give them?

Speaker A: Um, I'm just gonna, let's scope it down to a B2B founder. Um, I would say post on LinkedIn every day, five, uh, days a week, uh, three to five days a week at a minimum, making um, a amazing website that looks really good and um, sort of outsized for your brand. And then um, like make sure you talk about the product you're building. Like create fake product moments for the, for the, for like different things you're releasing. Like nothing is too small, Nothing is too silly, but try and create little moments where you can kind of package up and talk about, like, you can launch your product multiple times and talk about it a lot. So, um, yeah, that kind of gets that product flywheel going because especially in the software industry, um, you know, people want to see that product momentum, um, and doing that on the product marketing side is a great way to do that.

Speaker B: 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 growandtellshow.com you'll find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. We have a newsletter and YouTube as well. And, uh, we'll be back next week with another episode. Thanks, everybody. Alex, sweet.

Speaker A: Thank you, Eric.