The zero to one B2B marketing playbook | Alex Kracov (Lattice, Dock)

Brett Berson: Thanks so much for joining us.

Alex Kracov: Thanks for having me.

Brett Berson: So wanted to kick the conversation off by winding back the hands of time. And as we were talking about earlier, before we started recording, one of the reasons I was excited about having you join is that there's so little that's been open sourced about doing very early stage marketing well in the world of B2B. And so maybe we could start by talking about what the first maybe year looked like when you joined Lattice. What was going on at the company? What are the experiments you ran? Maybe what are the, some of the early learnings or things that really worked for you?

Alex Kracov: No, would love to talk about it. So I joined Lattice as the third employee and the first marketing hire, and the timing I think it was like roughly 2016. And I was like 25 years old. I had a little bit of marketing experience, but I had no SaaS experience. I didn't even know what an MQL was or anything like that.

Lattice at the time. Yeah, there was just three employees, right? So Jack, Eric, you know, the two co-founders. And then Wes was doing, a little bit of customer support and sales. But I was really brought into, okay, how do we grow leads at Lattice?

And so a lot of that first year was me just experimenting and trying a lot of new things. and also building what I thought of as like the marketing foundations at the time. And so my first project as like most first projects I think for marketers, is actually standing up a better website, right?

A website that sort of explains our position in the market, but then also sort of has the backend infrastructure to accept leads and nurture leads and get a sense of attribution. So that was sort of one step of the foundation was the website. 

Part of the website, a big part, and, and I think a website as sort of like your, your brand um, manifestation to the world, right? It's your homepage to the world, obviously. Was figuring out our positioning at the time, and we can get into Lattice's positioning and how it evolved. But Lattice started as an OKR and goal company and then we transitioned into performance management.

And so I sort of used the website as a medium to figure out, okay, how do we want to explain our, our ourselves to the world? So that was kind of like the more product marketing side of things that I did. And I was running little growth experiments, right? Spend a little money on Google AdWords, see what happens.

Spend money on Capterra ads, see what happens. Start writing some LinkedIn or Facebook ads, see what happens. Sponsor an event, kind of see what happens, and see what leads. And place all these little bets and just to get the marketing flywheel going and start running a bunch of different growth experiments.

 The first year of Lattice was just me, and happy to get into kind of more of, of what we found that worked well, but that's what it looked like in the early days.

Brett Berson: Was everything, when you think about the first couple years, the North Star metric was meeting set or leads generated? You were stretched so thin, there's so many things that you could be doing. What was the orientation where you were able to say, I am gonna do X or Y, I'm gonna double down on Y, I'm gonna stop doing X, sort of that type of stuff?

Alex Kracov: So the way I thought about it was like we had sort of loose short-term goals, right? You know, It was really like the standard startup milestones, right? Of we want to get to a million ARR, right? That was like the main thing that sort of Jack said okay, as a company, this is what we were marching towards. 

We didn't have a good sense of the funnel. There wasn't really MQL metrics or anything like that. It wasn't like I need to drive 50 MQLs per month. That's not what it looked like in the early days. It was just like, how can we get leads in general? And so, you know, I was looking, let's say if we start running a couple of Google ads, what is the quality of those signups? Who's coming in? Are they more old school companies? Which they were. And that was probably like one of the more, more failed experiments. 

But it was like all these little direct response programs that, trying to hit those short term leads and just give Seth, who was our first sales rep, some "at bats", right? And just getting a sense of, okay, how's the product resonating with people who are outside of, you know, the founder's network. cause the first group of customers usually come from people around the founder. And then when I was brought in, we were sort of moving towards like a bunch of cold leads. So that's kinda how it worked on the direct response side of things, running these little bets.

But then looking back, I think I made a really good decision of also focusing more on kind of, the long term, how can we make ourselves look really like a thought leader in the community? Like a destination for HR people. And my methodology at the time was okay, there are not a lot of websites out there in the, in the world that are dedicated to HR people.

And the ones that were, were really like old school and Lattice was selling to HR folks. And so how can we kind of build a media brand within Lattice that was focused on HR people, and if we could build a media brand that was focused on HR people, that's our distribution. And when I say media brand, it can mean a lot of different things.

But I thought of it in terms of franchises, right? We had a blog series. We had a Slack community, which we can get into. One of the early things that we did with Jack was a podcast and video series just like this, where we started interviewing different heads of people. And so some of those, like long-term bets they started like really small and simple, right?

We, we wrote one blog post, we filmed one episode, but over time we sort of built that marketing muscle and got pretty good at it.

Brett Berson: How did you decide how to break down your time between the things that would take years to sort of blossom into something really valuable versus the thing that would get a meeting for your first sales rep?

Alex Kracov: I would try and time box by day. Mondays I would be focusing on paid ads, right? And trying to figure out, okay, what's the creative we're gonna put in them? What are the campaigns we're going to run?

And then, you know, the way I think about is paid ads, you know, if you get them going, they're running in the background, you don't need to do much. You know, they can run for a week and you can check in them later. Maybe on Tuesdays I was working on marking automation and figuring out, okay, how do we set up uh, autopilot, which is our marketing automation system at the time, and the different emails. 

On Wednesday I was figuring out, okay, what landing pages do we want, wanna add to the website? I was also meeting with Jack to figure out, okay, how's the product evolving, what are the product launches and the different sort of marketing moments that were coming down the pipe. And then, the whole time I'm also thinking of, what are, new bets or different things that we could try, webinars was another example and partner marketing, things like that. The problem with marketing is there's so many different directions you can take it and you eventually sort of need to do all of them, but you need to stick with a few that really worked. And I would say the through line for us was content, community and events.

I had come from this marketing agency, Blue State Digital, which was really good at kind of building communities online evangelizing people around a certain goal. And so all of my marketing funneled back to that idea of, how can we build this community of HR people online. And, you know, the goal, you know, and what we stood for was like this modern HR person, and just give them a bunch of free learnings and lessons.

Once you build that kind of media property, if you will, the nice thing about SaaS is like there's only one advertiser, and that was Lattice. And so we could sort of use that as a bridge between providing value to the folks before they were ready, to buy performance management.

Brett Berson: Do you have any thoughts on instrumenting those specific efforts? And how you start to map inputs to outputs, whether it be community efforts, early podcasts, this community driven marketing, which you know, since you got this off the ground many years ago, has really become something that a lot of companies do.

I think one of the more interesting questions is, how do you know if it's working in the first year or two? Should you do it one day a week? Should you do it four days a week? Should you hire two people to do it? Sort of All of those types of things.

Alex Kracov: I generally think like nothing is gonna work right away. Things work when you stick with it, right? The beauty with either content or community is that they compound very much like software. And so pretty much all of your early results are not going to be like, aha, this is the channel, this is the silver bullet.

You'll have like little signals around it, right? And it's probably a little bit maybe more qualitative feedback in their early days where, okay, wow, a really good person signed up for the community. Or someone said something really nice about the blog and those things, you can start to get a feel and a sense for, okay, this works.

And you know, even if it's not the thing that's going to make the business worth a billion dollars right away. It's not bad for the business. Right? A blog post, an extra thing, and you know, all these little things, incrementally help the go-to-market function. But then of course, you have real numbers and you, and you need to, set up that interpretation as you said, to kind of attribute, okay, what is working or not. We started it really simply, like the digital ads and direct response stuff is a lot easier, right? You can set up your UTM tags and hidden fields on forms and then pass that through to your marketing automation software. Or you can use different attribution stuff like HockeyStack, HubSpot does this really well out of the box today. And that's like what we're using now. At Dock. So the digital stuff is a lot easier. And then, you know, we were using, Salesforce was our CRM at Lattice, and a lot of what we did was um, using the campaign object in Salesforce, we would take um, like lists, right, of the people who are in our Slack community, let's say.

Upload it into Salesforce, you know, either once every week or whatever. And then see, okay, how did that population move from, from there? Did it go on to create pipeline? Did they become, close one revenue and stuff? And then you could kind of look back and say, okay, 30%, I'm making up this number, 30% of our revenue was coming from, from the community itself.

Brett Berson: When you look across other, B2B companies today, many years since you got everything off the ground with Lattice, are there general areas that you think are still under exploited?

Alex Kracov: I still think inbound marketing is generally under utilized by early stage companies. Especially on the engineering side, if you're an engineering leader and becoming a founder, it's very foreign to them and this idea of the indirect impact of marketing, cause a lot of this stuff just takes such a long time to mature. Like people want a silver bullet, like every early stage founder wants to just find a channel that's gonna take them to the moon. And I think that can work on the consumer side, right? Like I hear about e-commerce companies who scale all the way with just Facebook ads, for example.

But with B2B, the buying journey is all over the place. And so it's really just, picking a few channels and building, building that marketing muscle. And I think like things like SEO as a good example, it can just take so long, you know, multiple years to compound, that people are scared to invest in it early on.

But the reality is like when you're early stage, it's sometimes the best stage to to invest in it because you need SEO to be working when you're $2, $3, $5, $10 million in ARR. If you just start making those investments later, it's gonna, you know, really hurt your growth in the future.

Most founders today are focused on like outbound. The way you build a company in a lot of ways as you go out and talk to a lot of people. And outbound is a really useful tool and I've been using it at Dock. But I think some of these inbound marketing bets, because they take a long time to mature, you should invest in it early on. And you know, it, it works. Like some of the best companies today, HubSpot is a great example, you know, built it all on the back of inbound marketing and I think more companies should, focus on doing that today because it does take a long time to mature.

Brett Berson: Let's go back to a couple of the things that you mentioned that you stood up in that first year as you were working towards getting to a million in recurring revenue. What are some of the things you figured out about creating your first website? 

Alex Kracov: So the best thing about a website is you can do like a magic trick in the market, right? You can just feel so much bigger than you are if you nail your website. And so if you would just invest a little bit more into the design of your website, but if you even also make your website like bigger, right?

Go look, you know, extreme examples, go look at SAP's website, and then go copy a bunch of those different types of pages. You can do a magic trick in the market and just feel a lot bigger than you are. And so the classic pages people stand up, at least in the early days, is just like, you know, single landing page on their website.

But I think it actually makes a lot of sense to build out more sections. So, you know, have a full product section that explains your different product offerings. Solution section is another really good one where you talk about the different use cases. Customer case studies is obviously another one.

You know, and these are all really obvious low hanging fruits, but when people land on your website, they can get a sense of like how big you are. And so if you, the faster you can kind of make your website look bigger, the better. And then the other piece of this puzzle is this, like SEO content side of things.

So setting up a CMS and a library or blog on your website where you can start to host content. And just, you know, you don't have to have a hundred blog posts right away. Start with one, hire a few freelancers, just get the marketing muscle going. Because these things take a long time to compound and all of these things will just make everything a lot easier for you.

Brett Berson: Can you talk in any more detail about some of the specific messaging to get right as you're kind of starting to build a website, tell your story publicly. And I guess maybe in the context of Lattice, it would also be interesting to explore what you figured out when you're in such a crowded category.

Alex Kracov: So I think the first step when it comes to messaging and positioning, especially for an early stage marketer, is to just partner with the founder, right? The founder has done so much pre-work, right? They are talking to customers all of the time. They have unique insights about what they're wanting to build.

And in a lot of ways, the job of the first marketer is to kind of take what's in the founder's brain and tease it out into, you know, something that looks like a marketing message that you were to put on the website, right? Something that's maybe a little bit more snappier, a little bit more, punchy and something that, that stands out in the market.

That's like step one, downloading the information from the founder's brain. The second part is shadowing calls, and talking to customers as much as you can. Really getting a sense of, okay, how does your ICP, your Ideal Customer Profile, describe the things that you're trying to sell them?

 In some ways with your messaging you want to share that back with them. And so in some ways the evolution for Lattice's messaging in the early days, we can get into the full story, is Lattice started as like an OKR and goals company. When I joined that's what it was. And if you look at the first like TechCrunch article about Lattice, it's like slay squad goals or some ridiculous headline like that.

And Jack started talking with customers and realized that like goals are interesting, and Lattice still is in the goals world today. But performance reviews and performance management was something that the HR team kept bringing up again and again. And so that was like the original pivot of Lattice, was adding that new product into the suite.

And that's kind of what the first year was about. And I'm sitting next to Jack listening to all of this, and then trying to figure out, okay, what's the change that's going on in the world? Why now? Why is this important? And what I realized was, performance management was going through this big transformation.

It used to be, right? Like kind of the GE Jack Welch style of performance management, where it was like, you know, stack rank all of your employees, fire the bottom 20%. There was a once a year annual review that everyone dreaded. And there was this big shift in this, in the industry for, to continuous performance management.

And so we started to use some of that, that language. And like the original headline on Lattice that I think really worked was, " performance management that employees love", it was like a little bit of a joke because no, no employee ever actually liked performance management.

But this was the first, platform that was gonna deliver on that promise because we were making it more employee centric. So that was one type of messaging. Another big thing that was happening was HR people, historically it was Toby from the office, right? You know, it was like everyone shadowed HR. It was like compliance. It was like payroll, you know? Like it was not fun. It was not strategic. 

But there was this big shift. And they even changed the name. It's not HR anymore, it's people, right? And it became a much more strategic function. And HR folks and people teams had a seat, at the executive table and in the board meetings and stuff.

And so we wanted to position Lattice as kind of like this new age brand that helped with that transition for this modern HR person. And I looked at a lot of the other competitors, like one of my favorite ways to kind of figure out messaging and positioning is just go on all your competitors' websites. Just constantly stare at them, figure out, okay, why are they saying things in a certain way? And so we were able to figure out, okay, how do we position ourselves in the market against these companies? One way was through design. You know we hired Luke as a brand designer who's actually my co-founder now at at, at Dock.

And he really helped us, build a really a, a differentiated brand. And then, you know, you combine that with sort of a little bit more fun messaging, if you will, and something that makes people go, huh, that's different. We were able to kind of stand out in the early days.

Lattice definitely didn't create a new category. We redefined a category. And I think that is, that's honestly one of my biggest recommendations. It is really hard to just go out and create a brand new category, and Lattice did it a tiny bit later, which we can get into. But we really redefined categories and that's, I think, a much easier way to get your traction in the market. Because we could go to companies and they already had a line item in their budget for performance management, but when you're trying to create a new category, you actually have to create that line item in the budget, which gets a lot harder.

Brett Berson: How does that idea of instantiating itself apply to Dock? I, I think that a lot of people like the idea of category creation because they think it gives them a chance to kind of be the monopolist or the category king. But I think one, to your point, it's very hard. And two, most people confuse category creation with trying to redefine the category in some way.

And so maybe you could talk more about it in the case of Dock, or go through some other examples of people who are doing it really well and what does it look and sound like.

Alex Kracov: So when it comes to Dock, Dock is in some ways like a bundled platform play, right? And maybe I'll set a little context on what Dock is. Dock is like a customer facing workspace. Think of it as like a private website between your company and your customers. And sales and customer success teams are using it to kind of manage the customer life cycle.

So sales teams use it to share content and sales proposals, do security reviews, mutual action plans. Customer onboarding teams are using it to onboard customers. You can manage renewals through it. And with Dock we basically have taken a bunch of different software categories. Digital sales room, client portal software, customer onboarding software, sales enablement software, and there's a lot more we can get into, and have packaged it up in a new way. 

And so, you know, you know, our pitch is obviously, you know, we can, we can save you money, but then also provide a lot more benefits in terms of how your company's collaborating, both internally, but then more importantly, how you're collaborating with customers. And so we've taken some of the old ways of doing things where most companies today rely on internal productivity tools, think of Google Docs and Asana and ClickUp and so on and so forth, and try and use those to work with customers. Dock is sort of this first external productivity software where it's purpose built to work from, your company to, to your customers or most important relationships.

And so, you know, I can go to someone and say, we're customer onboarding software, and people really understand what that is and they have a line item in their budget for it. But the way we approach that and the things around the software look really different.

Brett Berson: And I think kind of Rippling has made some of this strategy maybe slightly more in vogue. When you're thinking about messaging and positioning, how do you think about going after the wedge solutions? Versus the more abstract idea of like the all in one workspace for go-to market or customers or whatever it might be?

Alex Kracov: Definitely makes it harder and it's something we've been working a lot at and I love what Parker's doing with Rippling and take a ton of inspiration from that. The way I think about it, is that, you know your hero on the website, right, the first thing people see, that messaging should stand for kind of like the broader umbrella of what you're trying to do. And that's actually the hardest messaging to get, right? Cause it needs to be flexible enough to include all the different things. But then if you're, too specific, like you're leaving out a lot.

And so, You need to kind of have a broader umbrella messaging for us. And how do you describe what it is? And there's kind of two ways to think about messaging. There's like the what, like what is this thing that people are buying? And then there's also the outcome that you're driving. 

So the what for Dock is, you know, a customer workspace is like the easiest way to describe it. And then the outcome we're driving is, you know, sales velocity, sales close rates, time to value, right? Like these different metrics. And so, on the homepage, and you can, my team makes fun of me, like I'm updating it all the time to try and figure out what's that right combination of words to kind of describe both the what and the why and that outcome, and I go back and forth. 

But then what you can do with your website, and this is why I'm a huge fan of like product and solutions pages, is you can have pages that speak directly to each of those subcategories. Keep going with the Dock example, we have a, you know, a page around customer onboarding. We have a page around digital sales room. We have a page around client portals. We have a page around mutual action plans. And so each of those little things, speaks to a specific audience. And oftentimes people find us through those pages, not even the homepage, and they come to us for that specific solution.

It makes the sales process a lot harder too. cause you just, you're, as a sales rep, you have to be trained to be able to speak to a lot of different use cases and you deal with wildly different competitive sets. So that's like a danger, of this approach. But I think it ultimately will build, you know, a much, much bigger business at the end of the day.

Brett Berson: When you're tinkering with the homepage positioning, for example, how do you know if it's working?

Alex Kracov: It's a good question, I honestly don't too much uh, like I don't have like a perfect way to do that. I generally am not looking though at conversion rates that crazily. Like I am not saying on my homepage, am I trying to increase this from 3% to 4%, I'm trying to say what's the best way we're going to explain this end market?

And then I'm looking at like the overall business and saying, okay, is our ARR increasing as we're, explaining ourselves in this way? cause the homepage is just the manifestation of a lot of other ways we're explaining. If we're updating the homepage that way, we're changing the way we talk about Dock and sales conversations, or changing the way we use, you know, our pitch decks.

And even changing the way we're building the product. And so I don't have a good scientific way to do that. And like at a certain scale, you can, in the early days, it's really just gut and instinct to be honest.

Brett Berson: Going back to some of the early strategies and tactics at Lattice. What are the kind of campaigns or concrete things that you did back then that had an outsized impact? 

Alex Kracov: so one thing that worked really well, and it actually scaled all the way up, but it just got bigger and bigger was like partner marketing and webinars. You know, in HR there's like a lot of different like, I think of them as like frenemies, right? There's like, um, these HRIS systems, like Bamboo for example, who would integrate with Lattice, but would also sell a little piece of Lattice.

And so we would go to Bamboo, for example, and say, let's do a webinar together. We'll make all of the contents, or we'll do most of the work here. You have a much bigger email list than we do. I'll do my best to drive leads, but like, let's work together to drive a bunch of leads to this webinar. And then we'll, we'll like split the leads afterwards and we can follow up with them.

And so that was like one tactic that really helped us build an audience, in the early days is we would go to all these companies that were bigger than us. And, you know, we would be able to sort of piggyback on their brand, get in front of their audience, and we would pick partners based off of who we knew they worked with.

Like Bamboo was a great one because they worked, you know, sort of our like upper SMB lower mid market, which was exactly where we wanted to be. That's not a tactic I've actually used yet at Dock, this partner market. Eventually I think it will, but I think like people are tired of webinars a little bit after Covid where it was just like, webinar bonanza.

And so that's one tactic and one example of a way, that we were able to leverage that brand. I think something that's more in vogue now is a lot of this like influencer marketing that's like happening, especially on LinkedIn where a lot of companies are spending money on different podcast brands or different people with big like LinkedIn influencers.

And it's the same concept, right? It's the same idea of like, how can you kind of steal someone's audience away from them, and bring it over to you. That was one really like tactical program that worked. 

And just to give you a sense of like how much that scaled, flash forward five years, we had a virtual event with 40,000 people. And we called it Resources for Humans Virtual. That was after years and years of doing these webinars monthly. These things scale all the way up.

We started just really small. You know, I was literally sitting in Jack's house doing the first webinar, but then, you know, over time you're able to professionalize it and make it a lot better.

Brett Berson: I think that's such an interesting story and that sort of type of user conference feels like something that people do in years three or five or seven once they get to some scale as opposed to doing it incrementally. And so I'm curious what's sort of the, the sort of more substantial story there and maybe are you applying any of that to, to your current company?

Alex Kracov: So it goes back to this idea of, HR was changing, HR was becoming, you know, sort of more modern strategic, you know, we thought about it and we actually, we wrote a, wrote a book eventually, people strategy is your business strategy, right? And so the function was changing. And so we wanted to build a media brand around that.

And so we called it Resources for Humans, you know, a fun, fun play off of HR. And there was a lot of different components that went into it. It started with a Slack community. And that's, you know, something I'm not doing now at Dock cause I think there's a lot of them now, but we were one of these sort of first Slack communities. And it was a great way for people to jump into a shared Slack channel and network, like HR can be a pretty lonely function.

And so it was a place for people to ask questions. And we made a mistake at first. We first started the Slack community trying to go after VPs of HR. And we were like, let's make it a VIP community, and it fell flat. Like no conversation, nothing happened. But once we sort of broadened it up to sort of more all HR people, what we found is people, HR folks more early stage in their career were the ones asking the questions and needing the help, and then the more senior people would jump in with the advice.

So that was kind of like one of the franchises we built. And that went from, you know, zero to like 20,000, people in the Slack community I think it is today. And that was like one of these franchises. And so there was a bunch of other things like that. We did a people dinner series, right? So it's not just connecting online, it was connecting in person. So we would, rent out a room at a fancy restaurant like foreign cinema in SF and invite a bunch of HR people in there to talk and have different discussion topics around that. We turned the conversations that were happening in the Slack community into a newsletter. And we created a little online magazine around it.

And so there was like digital content around this. We had like a podcast and video series where Jack would sit down, we spent $3,000 a video, we would go into people's offices, I would rearrange their furniture, we had a film crew, and we would go in and interview folks like, Katelin who is the head of HR at Reddit, and other leaders who were really kind of modern, you know, who were good examples of this modern people leader.

And you know, in the early days it was really small, right? It was like, just me doing it at first, and then I hired Aaron, who is helping lead the community and event side of things. And then eventually I was able to convince Annette Cardwell to join, who runs all this today, still at Lattice. Um, And my pitch to her was like, you're working at a media company, and media is kind of this like hard industry where you are constantly trying to fight for, eyeballs for advertising dollars, come work at a SaaS company. I won't care about eyeballs for advertising dollars. I'm gonna let you do a lot of creative, interesting programming. And that's kind of, you know, the program has, has, has blown up since then.

Brett Berson: When you think about these specific campaigns or activities, do you think they have a life? In the sense of there are so many things that you did five or six years ago, or six plus years ago now, whether it be the way you thought about dinners, Slack, newsletters, podcasts that now feel like part of the normal repertoire of most companies.

Do you almost think they get arbed away? And so now when you're starting a new company, you go back to basics and say, what a Slack community was six years ago we're gonna reinvent it in some way. Or do you think they're just more evergreen opportunities and they're kind of part of the set of plays that you run that are evergreen now?

Alex Kracov: I, it's a great question. I think about this a lot. I think in some ways both are true. A lot of these things go out of style and like, like at Dock I'm not starting a Slack community. There are way too many of them. They get noisy. It's hard to scale. There's still value and I'm sure some people can still make it successful, but for me, I just don't think that like arbitrage exists anymore.

One interesting thing and we'll see how it plays out, like LinkedIn, you know, has been a really good platform, to drive growth for Dock and to build my own brand presence and things like that. And so that's like a channel that we're investing in, a little bit more heavily for Dock than we did at Lattice.

Although, that's also somewhat my market. I sell to salespeople who are hanging out on LinkedIn all the time. HR people aren't maybe hanging out on there. So I think there's some of these things that are evergreen. Like dinners will always be good. Meeting up in person, hanging out with your target audience, you know, spending an hour with them drinking, drinking a little bit. You know, that builds really good relationships with people.

I also think like content generally will never go out of style. Now the formats of content can definitely, change, right? Like maybe TikTok is like, you know, the, the emerging channel now and short form video is blowing up, and is more important in a way that it wasn't before. And you know, I started a little podcast too, and it definitely feels a lot harder than it did at Lattice.

So, yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting balance and that's like the fun and hard part about being a marketer is you're just constantly looking for, okay, where can I get that alpha, where's like the next channel or thing where I can just get a little bit more of a competitive edge? Going back to the LinkedIn example, they, you know, I think they've changed their algorithm a lot recently, you basically have to start paying for content now. But you can start running ads as a person now on LinkedIn.

And so that's a really interesting arbitrage potentially where you can spend a lot of money and promote content as a person on LinkedIn, not just as a company. So that might be one idea in the future. 

Brett Berson: Why don't you share the million dollar Jack story?

Alex Kracov: So there's a few times at Lattice where Jack would come and be like, we're gonna raise money. I have a million dollars, or whatever it is that we'll just use a million as a prompt. And like, how are we gonna come up with this? Like, how are we going to grow? And each year at Lattice we would look at the goals for the following year, and be like, how are we gonna do that? Like, how are we gonna have million dollar months? We're only at $300,000 months. Like how is this gonna scale? Right? Like, It always, it was really, really crazy. I think the best multi-channel campaign we did at Lattice was, you know, didn't have the best name for it, but it was what we called like the ABM City Campaign, Account Based Marketing City Campaign.

And what we generally did was say, okay, who are the HR people we want to go after? Started with the companies, there's probably like 15,000 companies, 18,000 HR people that we wanted to go after. 

 We mapped them in specific geographies, where the city element came in. So think of all the big tech cities. New York and San Francisco. And Seattle, and Austin, all these different hubs. And Miami. There you go. Although I don't think Miami was included.

Uh, So yeah, we had this huge list of people and then we basically ran this crazy multi-channel campaign. I think it was like a $1 million campaign where I, we bought 18,000 coffee mugs that said, "I love humans" on them. And sent direct mail to those 18,000 HR people. So they were getting these like personalized, I thought of them as like personalized billboards delivered to their offices.

And so we combined this direct mail, huge direct mail push with billboards in their cities. So we put billboards in each of those different cities. I filmed like a real commercial, which was really fun. And like geo targeted the ads right on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitter. And so there was this environment, and we time boxed it, right?

It was all within like a six week period in the fall. And so there was this moment where every HR person in our ICP in all the major cities we're just getting overwhelmed with like Lattice, right? They were getting a mug delivered on their desk. They were opening up YouTube and seeing our commercial.

They were on the subway and seeing an ad. And then what we did was pair it with different events. So then our SDR and outbound team was emailing them and saying, Hey, come to this event in the city, come to this dinner, come to this meetup, so on and so forth. And this campaign generated millions and millions of pipeline and, and revenue. And, you know, attribution was interesting, but we basically just uploaded this list of HR folks into our CRM and sort of watched how they performed over time. So, uh, yeah a lot of different elements in it, but that was probably one of the more successful things that, that we did.

Brett Berson: How did you come up with that idea?

Alex Kracov: I guess I had worked at an agency in the past. My first job and what brought me to California was I um, was a con, a consultant for Google, and I was involved with like Google fibers rollout in different cities. And so I had a background in sort of these um, integrated marketing campaigns where there was a lot of different elements going into it.

And so yeah, I kind of took a page from, from that playbook around city, city launches. SaaS is funny because you can just like take customers from everywhere, but I thought a lot of great go-to-market strategy is how do you make sure, like everyone in New York is using Lattice and then everyone in Austin is using Lattice.

And so I kind of took a page out of, out of that playbook.

Brett Berson: Lattice is one of the few examples I think, of a company that was super scrappy in the first couple years in a crowded space, and you managed to really capture mindshare. And you were not a traditional, you know, the normal thing, which is I'm gonna hire a marketing manager or director of marketing at another SaaS company and give them the number one spot that I think most people do when they think about building, effectively new functions in a startup.

Why do you think you were so impactful?

Alex Kracov: The short answer is incentives were really aligned. Like I knew I wanted to start a company after Lattice. I joined Lattice to learn how to start a company. Like I had felt like this was my personal big opportunity for my career and be successful.

And so I really worked hard to figure it out. And I, I had this sort of more entrepreneurial mindset. I acted like a founder of the company where I was like, I'm going to try a lot of different things. I'm gonna bounce around. I'm going to bear hug as much of marketing as I can. Like, I think from Jack's perspective, he hired me as like a cheap bet, that I come in from a friendly referral.

But from my perspective, I was like, I am the VP of marketing. I am not letting this go. I am going to do everything I can to, to learn and get better and to figure this out. And that came with some personal sacrifice and nights and weekends and whatever. But like I knew that this was sort of, you know, like I felt like it was my chance.

I, for some reason in college, I was like, I wanna do internet business. I wanted to start a company. And, I felt like I got very lucky with getting my foot in the door with Lattice and kind of figuring out. And so, yeah, I dunno, that was kind of, at least I think what, what made me successful.

Brett Berson: What are the spiky parts of your own abilities that mapped to like, there's a lot of examples of where you could be completely aligned, but there's a capabilities gap. And there's obviously something about the way that you operate that worked really well in terms of the zero to one marketing.

Alex Kracov: I think it's two things. So the Blue State Digital Agency experience really taught me how companies work and operate and how to do project management and how to talk to people. And so there was this sort of like professionalism that I could bring that, you know, allowed me to sort of scale over time.

But I think a lot of people have that. The other thing that I was constantly doing on the side was trying like to start a company and do like tiny little projects. And so, you know, I had like a dog treat delivery business at one point, I started a marketing agency, had an electronic music search engine.

Right before Lattice I was trying to do like a group travel planning app. And so I developed a lot of these little weird skills like learning Figma or Sketch, you know, was sort of the first one. Or how do I actually build a website? I like figured out how to like click buttons online to actually do things.

So it wasn't that I could just talk about marketing, and I learned that from like the Blue State side of things, but then I was able to actually do marketing myself. And I think one of the biggest mistakes people make with early marketing hires is they have someone who can like talk the talk, and they seem really good in the interview and all that stuff.

But when it comes time to actually doing things, they gotta go hire people to do it. And I just had this, like all my little side projects taught me how to like, figure things out that were, were hard. You know, If I didn't know how to do something, I'd watch a YouTube video, I'd search on Google, and I just had this like knack for kind of figuring out systems and, and stuff.

And like, you know, I was like a really big early SaaS adopter, I guess, and using SaaS tools to kind of help me. And, And you know, design was a good example of that. Like I joke with, Luke, who's now co-founder of Dock and was the first brand uh, designer at, at Lattice, like I was the, I was the marketing design intern the whole time. Because I was constantly designing and doing things and creating things on my own.

And it was, they were crappy designs, but it was enough to communicate to, you know, Luke, who could make it look good. And so I was willing to like click the buttons uh, to actually do marketing. So I think that made me a little different.

Brett Berson: Can you walk through kind of your first 10 hires or five hires on the team? Why you sequenced it in that way, maybe what you were looking for in that person that might be a little bit underappreciated.

Alex Kracov: So Lattice was my first like real management experience. So the first year of Lattice was really just me. And then I had some contractors and freelancers helping me and Luke, who I've mentioned a few times was one of those on the design side, cause I could like write words, but I couldn't make things look nice. Uh, hiring an early designer is really important and, you know, he was a contractor and eventually became a full-time employee. So that was kind of the first move. After the series A, I was able, I had a bigger budget, I was able to start hiring a little bit more.

And so, I don't know if this was the right move or not, but I started with things that were personally really time consuming for me. So writing a blog post, I'm a decent writer, but like writing a blog post, I can't just get done in a half a morning, it takes me a couple days to work through it.

It was pretty time consuming. And so I, I hired a content writer as one of the first hires. Same thing. The next hire was like community and events. Aaron joined to lead community and events. And he's still with the company today. But yeah, traveling around the country and doing events and just managing all the different things that were happening in the community were, were pretty time consuming.

So yeah, they were time consuming for me personally, but then also areas where I knew I wanted to like place this strategic bet as we, as we've talked about. Then sort of as we, you know, scaled as a business and got a little bit more money, you know, I guess this whole time I was like a player coach, right?

And so I was like filling in the gap. So people were doing content and community and events. I was like doing more demand gen, right? As a simple example. But then as we got more money and started to scale the company, I needed to hire strong leaders. I needed to hire people who were like honestly better than me at their specific functions.

And that's the only way to scale yourself. And this is where Jack was super helpful in like, pushing me to do this, but like Annette Cardwell, who I had mentioned earlier, brought her in to run all the content and she's a much better, media exec than I will ever be and really good at content.

I brought in Charlie to lead our demand gen function, who's an incredible demand gen marketer, Julian, to lead product marketing who's kind of like a rising star. So I was able to, I think it was maybe like after series Bish, go from just like a player coach to having this like strong group of leaders around me who could kind of build their specific functions.

And then after that and sort of like my last two years at Lattice, it went, uh, into VP World, which is really interesting where you're not just like, you know, when I still had the lieutenants, if you will, around me, I could still like do the work with them and go back and forth. But when you're a VP you're really working through managers and you can't actually do any of the work yourself.

You have to be a leader and kind of inspire and set of team culture that gets the work. And that was like a really, interesting experience for me as well.

Brett Berson: What was the indication that you were, other than you had the capital to do it, you were ready to hire the more professionalized leads for these different practice areas?

Alex Kracov: So we just saw signals of different things that we were working. When it came to the content and community side of things, we saw increasing pipeline being generated from people reading our blog post or in the community. Running all the different paid ads, it got to a point where I was like, these are driving leads, but I don't have enough time to um, manage it.

And if we had someone in there who had enough time to manage it, could we increase the leads? Same with product marketing, not necessarily on the lead side of things, but it was like, certain things were breaking down in our process. Where it was like, okay, product launches were getting delayed because the marketing team was, strapped for resources and we weren't able, to sort of keep up with the product velocity of the company.

So it was just like where we're feeling a lot of pains. And Lattice was fortunate enough to like have decent funding the whole time through, there's like, Series B was a little bit harder, but, and Jack was incredibly supportive and trust me to say, okay, here's the places where we're struggling And, and you know, the task was how do we build a really professional marketing organization? And there were some tough moments along the way where, you know, Jack maybe didn't quite necessarily, know if I was the guy to lead things forward, I'm happy to get deeper into that, but, yeah, it was an interesting journey trying to figure out, all right, how do you construct a, big boy marketing team?

Brett Berson: What are the big crystallized insights that you have through that? Said a little bit differently, if you have another friend who is the first marketer at a company and is not a prolific executive, learning by doing as the company's growing, what are the most important things for them to get right? In terms of basically growing that function from you being the jack of all trades, to hiring ICs and managers, and kind of setting up, as the company's growing, the marketing function to grow in the best possible way.

Alex Kracov: I think you need to hold the mirror up to yourself and see what you are honestly really good at. Like where do you spike? Like where is your personal strengths? And then start sort of building out complements around you. And so maybe your background is a little bit more on the product marketing and content side of things. And so maybe your sort of complement or your first hire, and that this is probably what I would do now looking back on Lattice, would be more of like a demand gen generalist, right?

Someone who could, bear hug that side of the business. And then you sort of keep, keep doing that and start looking at the marketing program and say, okay, this thing seems to be working, but being really honest where it's like if we had someone who actually knew what they were doing, if we had someone who was really good at running paid ads or really good at doing events, could we get better at that?

And so it's just holding up a mirror to yourself around your own personal skills in the early days, but then holding up a mirror to like the overall program, and seriously evaluating it and saying, what are these little bets I wanna make? And where are we sort of not fulfilling it with either the personnel or the programs that we, we have, and filling in those gaps over time.

Brett Berson: What did you figure out about communicating effectively with a founder and CEO across kind of all those different stages?

Alex Kracov: Super direct, honest transparency, just talking all of the time. Like over communicate is maybe the simplest way to think about it, right? I just wanted Jack, I wanted to be on the same wavelength of Jack around the moves I was making, the programs I was building.

Not necessarily what I was doing, but why, and I think I built up a lot of trust with Jack by not just talking, but by doing and shipping, right? We had a huge shipping mentality on the marketing team, and I was able to say, go into a meeting, you know, my one-on-one, one week and say, Hey, here's what, how I'm thinking about stuff.

And then have, not necessarily the output of it, but at least the input and the thing that I had, accomplished or shipped in that week. And so it was just like staying really on the same page about how I'm feeling about building the program. But then also my own ability to scale.

So like, I think the, probably the toughest moment for me at Lattice was, I think it was like series Bish, like right before I really started hiring some of these more strategic leaders. Jack sort of went to me and was like, Hey, are you the guy? Like, are you the guy who's gonna, can you do that next stage of growth?

Are you gonna be a VP? And I sort of went to him I'm like, dude, I've been doing it. Like everything you have asked me to do, I have done, I have hit my goals, I have crushed it. And we just kind of had a little tough conversation where, you know, and I get where he's coming from, where it's like, Hey, are you gonna be able to scale with the company?

And yeah, I remember a really tough conversation. I went on a long walk afterwards and just thought about it. And we took a little time and both thought on each side. I agreed to make, maybe interview a few other, like more experienced marketing execs to kind of see if we should bring someone in. 

And where it ended up was I actually got a marketing coach. And so we sort of came to this agreement where, I had never done this before, but I was doing things all the right ways. And so if I got a marketing coach and somebody who had done it before who could talk to me and advise me and I could meet with, that would be really helpful.

And so I started working with Francois Dufour, who's incredible. He was like an early marketing exec at LinkedIn and Twilio and a bunch of other companies. And he was incredibly helpful for me. I could go to him and say, am I crazy? Am I doing things in the right way? How do I talk to a board?

I'm being pulled in a million different directions. How do I prioritize things? And he was like a marketing, you know, marketing coach, but honestly a marketing therapist for me that really helped me kind of scale myself. And I don't think I would've been able to, to grow without his help.

Brett Berson: Do you remember any of the highest impact conversations you had with him, and what did he impart on you?

Alex Kracov: One of the most memorable exercises we did was like around priorities and like, as I described it, it sounds pretty simple. But the, the general idea is like, marketing has a million different things you could do, right? Inbound, outbound marketing, within that world, you could be doing videos, content, all the things we've been talking about, right?

There's so many different things and like, you know, there's a reality around resources and the team and how you build the team against those goals and stuff. And so, you know, this was a, a frustration I was voicing to him cause I would try and communicate to Jack and J Zac, who was the COO, uh, about what the marketing goals were.

But then they would always bring up like, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we doing that? Why aren't we doing this? You know, it was like, constantly felt like that. And so there was a priorities exercise where I wrote out on a whiteboard every single thing that we were doing, every single thing that we could be doing.

And then we kind of went down the line and said, okay, what are the five things we are going to put above this line? What are the five things we're gonna put, you know, below the line. And anything below the line we're not gonna do. And then it was kind of like a promise between me and Jack and J Zac,, where it was like, if Alex does the five things above the line, that's success.

And of course we can rearrange and redo things, but being able to have that priority conversation was so important. Because it helped me get alignment with the exec team around what I was doing. And then, you know, when sales or customer success was asking us to do different things, I was able to really clearly say, okay, this is what marketing's focused on, you know, at this, this moment in time.

And not be defensive about it too. Just be really strategic about saying, here's what we're doing and here's why it's gonna impact our goals.

Brett Berson: One of the things that I've noticed is in the context of a startup, when you're building something out for the first time, it's often hard to know if something is working because of something you're doing or in spite of something you're doing. And so you kind of have one set of experiences and you're like here's the five most important things to get right, because they worked at Lattice. But when you get to go do something again, you get to pressure test those things and you get to sort of say, was it working in because of, or in spite of, you get to say, was there a certain set of conditions where something worked at Lattice? But it's not a meta lesson that I can take with me for the rest of my career.

And it could be something at the tactics level, it could be something at the strategy level. Now that you're starting kind of the next set of experiences at Dock, are there things that you've now increased conviction because you've been able to do it across two environments, and you know that it works in this sphere of early marketing, zero to one marketing?

And are there certain things that you changed your mind about because you've gotten to rerun it in the context of another company? 

Alex Kracov: I think one thing that I've had a lot of conviction on going into Dock and like, you know, there's many different ways to build a company and be successful, right? And there's many different go-to-market, you know, methodologies that you can do. But something that I had a lot of conviction on with Dock was, you know, trying to replicate what we did for, with the Resources for Humans community at Dock, I mean at Lattice, and and apply some of those lessons at Dock.

So like the first big marketing bet we've been making has been SEO, right? How can we put a bunch of content in the world and have that compound over time? And that maps back really nicely with like our product led strategy, which, you know, a lot of other companies like, you know, ClickUp for example, has a huge SEO presence, and that has been a huge feeder for their product.

And so that's a, like one example of something I had a lot of conviction in. And it's also something I can do. You know, and I started Dock in the middle of Covid and stuff like I could do at home with my laptop, you know, I knew how to like, the amount of work that was involved in that, especially as I'm a founder now and doing a million things beyond marketing.

Marketing is like the easy part of what I'm, what I'm doing now. But I'm able to kind of make those more long-term bets with conviction. You know, like we started a podcast, we've published 10 episodes. That's another one of these things. We barely have anybody listening to it. But I know that if I can keep at it and if I can be consistent, three, five years from now, this thing could be a monster, and it could grow a huge brand presence for the company. So those are things that I have more conviction in. Then there's other things where like events and conferences, like there's so many conferences you can go to. And they work and you can stand at the booth and you can talk to people, but it's like kind of expensive and it's kind of time consuming and it can work.

And those were things that I did in the early days of Lattice cause I didn't know and you were supposed do it. Not to poo poo conferences, and it can work, but like I, that's not something we're doing now at Dock, and I don't think we'll do that for a while. You know, I wanna focus on sort of building up our own brand and our own media properties, if you will, before we kind of go other things.

So that's one small example of something I've been trying to, to avoid. And there's also just only so many things you can do uh, as a founder of a company. And we have a one person marketing team right now. So we've just decided to kind of go all in on the content side of things.

Brett Berson: On the point of conferences, we haven't talked as much about making the most of going to other people's conferences. Do you have a certain set of plays that you'll always run when you're trying to get the most out of the conference that you're not hosting yourself?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, so, I mean, it starts with your booth, right? And it starts with, you know, having like a nicely designed booth, and everyone loves swag and, you know, swag is a funny thing. Uh, you know, I got made fun of a lot for getting fidget spinners at, at Lattice, but you know, it, it worked. So yeah, it starts with the booth presence, but that's maybe a more obvious uh, play.

I think what's most important around conferences and the way to do it right, and I would say we only kind of did this at Lattice, was you want to try and like dominate a conference, you know, from a brand presence perspective. So you have the booth, but then you're, you know, you have your founder on stage speaking, you have a happy hour afterwards.

Your sales team is setting up a bunch of meetings ahead of time. And so it's kind of like turning the conference, not just as a booth and I'm gonna stand there and talk to people, but having a more integrated marketing campaign around it. One of the things I never got to do because of uh, the pandemic was, and I had already kind of have paid for it, but I had to back out, was I had bought a lot of petty carts.

You know, the guys who ride the, the bike and then, you know, drive people around. And I, I think I, like 50 of them to go hang out at a conference and drive people around. And they would be branded with Lattice and I never got to actually run that campaign, but I I really want to. But that's an example of the type of thing where it's like, you had the booth at the conference, but really probably what built the brand was like being around the conference.

And I think there's a lot of brands that, that do that well today.

Brett Berson: How do you think about that idea of like focused, putting all of our emphasis on a channel or a strategy or a tactic versus letting a thousand flowers bloom in the context of being a, a resource constrained sort of marketing department and a marketing effort?

Alex Kracov: In the early days you have to pick a few channels. You have to pick a few programs and things that you're gonna really invest in and build a marketing muscle and get good at. You don't have enough budget to do it well, you don't have enough people. And I think the best advice I can give to other founders or marketing teams is to pick something that you like, enjoy doing yourself.

Because if it always feels like a chore, you're not gonna want to do it. I don't personally love going up to doing networking and meeting dinners and things like that. Like I can do it, it's fine, but it, it mentally exhausts me in some ways. And so doing content and things fits a little bit better with my personality. And in some ways that's why I've picked that. And I think there's other benefits that we've talked about there, but you want to pick things that you personally enjoy doing that you can actually stick with and do. And then obviously you need to do things that work and where you have more of a, of a natural skillset.

For me, like I'm decent enough at running paid ads and I can do that when I'm like watching TV at night and setting it up. Um, and it doesn't take a lot of like brain power for me because I'm maybe spending overall in marketing 10% of my time or something like that today, because I gotta build a product, I gotta do all these other things, you know, I'm talking to customers all the time.

So, yeah, I don't know. It's been a interesting journey with Dock where marketing is actually the, the easier thing for me because it comes a little naturally and I know what's working well, and I can kind of time box our efforts. But I do know the inevitability is that eventually you do all of the things, most likely. Like a grownup marketing program, you're gonna be putting out content, you're gonna be doing events, you're gonna have your own conference. Like, there's a reason why it kind of grows, because at a certain point your budgets get big enough and you're gonna tap out each of these channels. There's only so many blog posts you can put in the world. There's so only so much ads you can run, you know, digitally. At a certain point your budget gets big enough where you need to go to conferences and, and explore all the different, different channels.

Brett Berson: Something we didn't talk about as you mentioned what you did with early hiring on your marketing team is maybe talk about how you ran that process and what you were looking for in those people. And I'd be interested to hear what are the differential things that you looked for that tended to correlate with the people that really worked exceptionally well?

Alex Kracov: I definitely made a lot of mistakes early on, and I would not say I had an incredibly professional process. Uh, you know, like, especially in the, the early days. I think one interesting thing was I sort of like believed in people a little bit too much, that especially that they could like change from their background or history or things that would like spike in the interview, I thought I could like overcome that and like turn them into something else.

And like one hire, you know, I sort of made a mistake on, was somebody who was maybe a little bit more of like a creative writer. And I thought, oh, they could apply this, like really creative writing and they had done a lot of other, you know, like really interesting for, you know, like Vogue or Vanity Fair, right? The really like high powered writing. But it was more creative. It wasn't like B2B writing. And I was like, oh, well they could learn like SEO side of things, right? They could learn like the B2B writing style that actually drives leads. And that didn't really work out that well. She was awesome, worked really hard at it, but like she wasn't able to sort of overcome, you know, some of that skillset.

And so I think where I, where I learned, and especially in this world of like I needed to surround myself with people who were better than me, is I tried to find experts in each domain. It actually, the profile looked very different than me as the first hire. I was trying to find, okay, who's, who's somebody who has done demand generation before with proven success and has done it also in our sort of ICP and our, our market and our style of demand gen. Or with Annette, somebody who's actually run a big content program.

So they had some experience doing their specific function and I really looked for that expertise. Now, I think one function I took more of a bet on was Julian Clarke, who ran product marketing or was like one of the first product marketing hires, and runs product marketing today at Lattice. He had a couple years of experience at Medallia, think it was uh, Medallion um, but he was pretty junior.

But then, you know, I took a chance on him as somebody who was just exceptionally smart and indexed high on this like, entrepreneurial and kind of go-getter mentality to come in and run a lot of our, our, our product marketing function. And that, you know, he's worked out really well partly cause he just is like, works really hard and is really smart.

And so, yeah, I don't know. I started to look for a little bit more expert people and that's how I leveled myself up. 

Brett Berson: For founders who are maybe more product or technically oriented, when they're hiring their first marketer, how do you think about hiring somebody of your archetype versus somebody who maybe has a more obvious marketing background or was an early marketer at a SaaS company that's similar to yours, or something like that?

Alex Kracov: I get this question a lot as I talk to different founders and it is really hard and I, you know, uh, in some ways I think there are just unique people out there who spike. I mean, I think the first index is like entrepreneurial, right? Are, can they just do a lot of things? Do they feel a lot like a founder themself?

And then my favorite, you wanna separate the talkers from the doers. And so the way I think about it is like the button clicker test. You wanna make sure that they can actually sit behind a laptop and do marketing. And what does that mean?

It means they have good writing skills. They can write a blog post. They know how to build a website. If they don't know how to build a website themselves, they know how to work with other people who can build a website, or they can at least build a crappy website. Um, They can run ads themselves, or if they can't run ads, they can teach themselves.

So people who, if they can't do something, they know how to use the internet or the people around them to go learn it. But they won't just come in and say, I need to go hire a bunch of, especially full-time employees to do it, it's okay if they wanna hire a few little like, contractors to help. And so there's some of this project management skills that you need.

But I just always go back to that button clicker test. Um, you know, it's like, look for people who are kind of similar to you as a founder, and then can they actually do things on their laptop that produce marketing and they're not gonna go rely on some agency to do that for you.

Brett Berson: What do you think today is a good early stage marketing stack? And so let's say you're selling a product that's between $25,000 and $50,000 in terms of ACV in some sort of B2B context, is there sort of a favorite stack that you've kind of figured out after trying dozens of tools over the last few years?

Alex Kracov: I'm a huge Webflow fan. Um, In terms of building your website, that has been incredibly helpful. Like pre-Webflow, I always had to work through a developer to like, change a little headline or something on the website, and now I'm like constantly changing it. Uh, maybe to my own detriment, but that has made me incredibly fast and, and, and powerful when it comes to like the website side of things.

So Webflow. Um, HubSpot has been incredible. Like we didn't use it at Lattice, but I'm using it now at Dock and it has been amazing both in terms of like honestly the sales CRM side, but in terms of like marketing automation and most of what you need in early stage marketing honestly comes in, in HubSpot when it comes to sending emails and forms and attribution and organizing lists like, I've been very impressed with what they've built. When it comes to like the SEO and content side of things, generally what I would recommend is you get a tool, like Ahrefs, where you can look for keywords. Use a tool like Clearscope to make sure that um, you're actually writing really, really good content. And that's kind of like maybe the two, two sides of it. And then, you know, one community and thing we've been using a lot to kind of find different writers is Superpath and Jimmy Daly has done an, an awesome job with that community, but like finding some, some freelancers on that side of things.

Figma is one of my absolutely favorite tools um, in terms of thinking about all the different aspects of marketing, like building the web, webpages, but then also our ads or coming up with different programs. 

Airtable. We use Airtable a lot to like organize a lot of our content and project management. Eric, who leads our marketing now, it's pretty impressive what he is built in there.

Brett Berson: Maybe we could wrap up with over the years, I'm sure you've had dozens and dozens and dozens of founders reach out to you who are trying to figure out zero to one marketing. What are some of the things that you find that you say a lot in those conversations? And maybe the next time somebody reaches out, you can use this as an opportunity just to send them a link to this. Have them listen to this first, so you don't kind of have to go through the script that you generally go back to when they're asking for a advice.

Alex Kracov: The main advice and maybe a little higher level, but like I talk to founders that are always looking for a silver bullet. Like you can tell they're just talking to you and trying to figure out, okay, what's the channel that's gonna make this work? They want a silver bullet that they can perfectly attribute back to dollars.

Um, and I sort of try to get rid of that fantasy right away. And that's probably my biggest advice for, for founders in a lot of ways is that there, especially in B2B, there are no silver bullets. The buying journey is incredibly complex. It is not a linear buying journey. It is not a journey where, you know, if someone just sees an Instagram ad and buys a pair of shoes these things last 6, 9, 12 months, right? And the modern buyer today, does so much research before they're ever coming to your product or talking to a sales rep. They are searching on Google. They're going to G2 to read reviews. They are in a community. They're in a webinar. They're listening to a podcast. They're talking to their friends.

There are so many different places where buyers are going to get information and they're creating an opinion about your product and service without them even maybe consciously knowing. And so you know to do B2B marketing well, you need to really think about that buyer journey and think about the places where, you know, your audience is hanging out and where they're talking and how they're researching it.

And you can map it out across, right? The classic marketing funnel, but it doesn't look like an actual marketing funnel where it's really linear. They're bouncing back and forth between all the different, different stages. And so, to put it succinctly, like the founders, I think really need a mindset shift here where it is not a linear buying journey.

People are everywhere. There's no silver bullets, and you need to just be in a lot of different places at once, and constantly be providing value at each of those different stages. And I think that's like, generally the philosophy you should have around marketing. And I think most people also think things are like finite decisions, right?

If I start doing one channel, I can't do another. I make one hire, and I can't fix that. And it's like nothing is, is finite. You can constantly just be iterating, experimenting and, and sort of wiggle your way to figure out what works best for your business. 

Brett Berson: I feel like in building a company from scratch that's successful there are so few silver bullets in any part of the business. Why is it founders tend to think there is some sort of silver bullet with enterprise marketing?

Alex Kracov: I think it's just like a lot of advice like you read online, right? A lot, there's all these little blog posts and stories about, you know, X company's program that grew them like crazy, and there might be truth and there might be element that like that campaign did really well, but just because that campaign worked for that company five years ago doesn't mean it's gonna work for your company today, right? The marketing landscape is evolving. The internet has evolved like crazy. And so, yeah, I think there's just a lot of advice out there that feels like a silver bullet. But it's not. And I bet you it wasn't even for that company, right? There's a lot of things that go, go into that. Um, you know, Especially like on the product side, right?

Like there's only so much you can do with marketing with a shitty product, right? Putting lipstick on a pig. And so, a lot of the benefits of, you know, leaving Lattice's marketing program came back to the product itself and like the amazing word of mouth, you know, that was generated from people having a really great product experience.

So yeah, it's never just one thing. It's, it's a sum of all these different things that goes into, to building a really strong company.

Brett Berson: one other thing that came to mind as you were sharing that is I've noticed that getting marketing working in the early days might be the hardest thing, once you kind of have a product that's working. And it seems like if you score the business that's a $100,000 in ARR and a $1m or $2m, it feels like marketing is always the lagging function that isn't working. I don't know if you've noticed that or if you have any reflections on, what's going on there in this world of B2B company scaling.

Alex Kracov: It's an interest, interesting observation. I think like, marketing just can feel more indirect. It's like less tangible, right? Like sales are pretty, way more obvious, right? As to compare marketing and sales. Like sales is just way more of a transactional type of function where you know if someone's hitting their numbers, you know if the process is working. And it's also a thing that you really have to if you don't have any sales, it's this thing is not gonna work at all. And so I think founders may be indexed to focusing more on like the sales side of, of, of the business and then maybe put marketing aside and say, Hey, we'll figure that out later.

And I think it can work. And it's true. You do need sales to work. But I think what happens is companies stall out at a certain point. If you don't invest in marketing in the early days, you're gonna stall out. And it might not be at a $1m ARR, it might not be at $2m, but it's definitely gonna happen as you get past $10m and $50m and and so on and so forth. These marketing bets that you make in the early days that might not pay off on your journey from zero to 1 million.

But they will pay off in in the future. And there are like transactional marketing channels, the direct response side that you can get some of those, those early wins from. But yeah, I don't know. I think that's kind of like the dynamic that happens at a lot of these companies.

Brett Berson: Well, Thanks for spending the time with us.

Alex Kracov: Awesome. Thanks Brett.