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Dock: How Eric Doty Scales Content as a One Person Team · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Hey, and welcome to Content Briefly, the Superpath podcast that explores how content teams operate.
• 0:06
  We'll be talking to content leaders from the world's best SaaS brands to understand how they think about strategy, org structure, KPIs, reporting, meetings, tech stack, and more.
• 0:15
  You'll learn exactly how these teams operate smoothly and efficiently. I'm your host, Jimmy Daly, founder of Superpath.
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  You can learn more and kick the tires over at writer dot com. Okay, I'll get out of the way now. I hope you enjoy this episode. [gentle music] Hey, everybody. Here today for another episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:40
  I got my friend Eric Doty here. Eric, we over the last like year or so, I guess, gotten to know each other pretty well and have had the chance to work together.
• 1:46
  We'll talk a little bit about that, but you're the content lead at Dock. That's the company that we'll be unpacking today. But before we dive into that, would you mind just giving an introduction to yourself?
• 1:55
  Tell us a little bit about who you are, kind of where you came from, background in the, in the marketing world, and then what you're doing today. Yeah. So you are correct. I am Eric Doty.
• 2:03
  So I'm the, I'm the full-time content lead at Dock. I also do freelancing on the side, m-mainly B2B SaaS blogging, kind of the standard, you know, two thousand word SEO blog post stuff. Uh, I actually...
• 2:17
  I got my start in marketing... I, I had like a Twitter account that went viral when I was in university. Uh, yeah, I was supposed to be, I was supposed to be doing grad school.
• 2:26
  I was supposed to be studying how the brain works and all this like really important stuff that matters.
• 2:31
  And instead, I was [chuckles] running a Twitter account about the Ottawa Senators, which is like an ice hockey team in Canada. I started a blog, and it started popping off.
• 2:40
  It was kinda like The Onion for, uh, for the Ottawa Senators. And then I like recruited a team of seven writers, and it was this like one blog a day operation where I was editing everything.
• 2:49
  And meanwhile, [chuckles] my studies are just going downhill, and I'm, I'm not doing the research I was supposed to do.
• 2:55
  And I was like, "Okay, wait, like, maybe I should take stock here and realize that this is what it feels like to love doing something, and maybe I should do this."
• 3:02
  And then went through a couple entry-level jobs and eventually landed a job as a, an SEO at, at a marketing agency for real estate,
• 3:11
  and then did that for a few years, became a team lead, started to learn the people leadership side of things, uh, and then eventually made a jump to being the marketing manager at a, a big translation and data company.
• 3:24
  I was, I was the only marketer there. They hadn't had marketing for three years. And then that sort of became my staple since then. It was like one person marketing team who has to do everything himself.
• 3:34
  And so last year, spent a year at Butter, which is, uh, another seed stage startup. It's like a Zoom alternative, sort of more, more fun video conferencing tool.
• 3:43
  And then now I'm at Dock, which is another sort of product-led growth SaaS company. And I'm, I'm the content lead there, and I'm also the entire marketing team. So you like that.
• 3:55
  Like, I mean, it, it seems like you gravitate towards that. I think when you work at a big company, there's so many hoops to jump through.
• 4:03
  There's, there's this like concept of constantly having to get buy-in for what you wanna work on. I love the people management side of things, but then it's...
• 4:11
  a-it also takes you away from the work too, right, and, and being in the weeds, so.
• 4:17
  L- like you, you hire a team and you think it's gonna help you scale up suddenly, but really what happens is you end up being the person's, like, therapist half the time, which, which there's a time and place for that.
• 4:27
  But, you know, it's... I like now being at this sort of nimble, I can decide my own sort of work schedule every week, um, in, in terms of like what we're delivering.
• 4:38
  Um, and when you're a team of one, like you can just stop things and start something new, and, you know, nobody's mad at it.
• 4:44
  And so it, it actually just helps you focus on, like, the work that's important to, to be doing, right? That's really cool. Okay, this is interesting.
• 4:51
  So one of the things that we hope to achieve with this podcast is to help listeners understand how different types of companies at different, uh, stages of their life cycle operate.
• 5:01
  We've talked to a couple people now who operate at, um, more mature companies with larger teams. So like Sean Blanda, who was the first guest we had on, talked about, you know, what it was like to grow a team.
• 5:12
  He, he began as the only content person, now has a team of five or six people, um, and sort of grew his, you know, whatever, sort of went through his own personal journey of like growing as the content lead into a people manager, now into l- uh, leadership role.
• 5:26
  Um, all of which is valuable, right? But it's not... Neither is, is, um, better or worse than, than leaning into the one person thing.
• 5:35
  Interestingly, one of the things Sean talked about in a article that he wrote recently was that at his current role, there is no lone wolf. But you are the lone wolf. I'm kinda like you.
• 5:46
  I sort of gravitate towards that because I think a lone wolf can be, can be really, really effective when given the space to go out and just like, [chuckles] uh, like for...
• 5:55
  You know, this is, this analogy is getting ridiculous. But the space to just like go out and hunt. You know what I mean?
• 5:59
  To like just do your job and to be really aggressive and to execute really quickly, learn from mistakes, keep going.You know, as opposed to being tied to, like, the Q one plan, which was put in place six months ago, which has certain goals tied to it and other teams relying on you and da, da, da.
• 6:13
  Again, neither is better or worse. It's just different.
• 6:16
  I feel like that may be kind of the theme of this conversation is, like, how does Doc, as a, as a relatively early-stage company, and you as the lone wolf, how do you do it and what does it look like? Yeah. So Doc is...
• 6:27
  it's a product-led growth SaaS company. We call it revenue enablement software, which sounds like a bunch of nonsense, but I'll, I'll explain what that means. So Doc was actually founded two years ago.
• 6:40
  Alex and, who's our CEO, and Luke, who's our, uh, another co-founder, one of our designers or our designer, they were doing sales at Lattice and found that the sales process when you're dealing with enterprise-level customers is just really complicated, right?
• 6:56
  There's, there's lots of stakeholders. They have tons of internal conversations that you're not a part of. You have to give them, like, security documentation.
• 7:03
  You have to give them, uh, ROI studies, just, like, all this crap that people need to make a decision.
• 7:08
  And the way most people do that, i-if you've ever been in, like, a sales role, is you just send a bunch of links in an email. You send a bunch of attachments.
• 7:17
  You get these super long email threads, and you just sort of hope that the person you're dealing with sends that stuff to their team.
• 7:24
  And so Doc basically gives you one platform where you can host all of these things i-in one place.
• 7:30
  And so, like, on, on the surface level, it's like building your own little landing page workspace for your customer where you just embed your sales materials, sort of a checklist of what's next, et cetera.
• 7:43
  That's sort of the client-facing side of things.
• 7:45
  The other side, though, is that with the growth of, like, product-led growth, where sales is less about just a one-on-one conversation between a salesperson and a company, customer success is now responsible for sales too, right?
• 7:59
  Getting people activated in the product, getting them to stay a- stay around. Marketing has to sort of give assets at the right time, right?
• 8:05
  Like, here's, here's our blog about how to make the most out of our trial, for example. So these teams suddenly that all used to work separately now need to work together.
• 8:14
  And so normal-- And these teams are normally working in different tools, right? Customer success is in Intercom. Marketing has their, like, CMS. Sales has their, um, CRM, and they're not really talking to each other.
• 8:29
  So with Doc, we're trying to give a platform where these teams can work better together to grow revenue. So marketing can drop in files for sales to use, uh, like assets to use in the sales process.
• 8:41
  Customer success can add sort of implementation checklists, and it gives them sort of one client-facing platform to do this.
• 8:48
  That's-- It's a nicer experience than a project management tool, which is how people often try to handle that now, right?
• 8:54
  They'll give someone like a really big Trello board, and the client looks at it and it's like, "This isn't a nice experience for me. It's helpful for you as the, as the company, but not nice for me." Got it.
• 9:02
  Okay, so when you said Doc is a product-led growth SaaS company, actually, the first thing I thought was that you meant that's how you all approach your go-to-market strategy.
• 9:09
  But what you're actually saying is that's, this is a tool built for PLG-style companies who need that kind of like central place for everyone to... I mean, maybe it's both, actually. Yeah.
• 9:18
  So we are a product-led growth company, so our, our product has a free trial. People can set up five workspaces for free before they have to pay.
• 9:25
  But we also, yeah, we-- product-led growth is one of our main use cases for, for companies that are trying to just sort of show off, do a personalized, nice, like, sales room for people when maybe they have, like, two free users in the product, but you're trying to upsell to, you know, an enterprise deal, for example.
• 9:40
  This is so interesting. I feel like product-led growth has just become so... I feel like it went from trendy to mainstream so quickly.
• 9:48
  You know, it's like there's like a blog post about PLG and, like, next thing you know, it's...
• 9:52
  I think the thing that it did well was it just sort of like tied together all these things that were already happening, gave it a nice clear name, and now it's just easier for people to understand. But you're right.
• 10:00
  Like, sales for what I guess I'll describe as like lower price SaaS products has gotten to be really complicated.
• 10:06
  You know, it's, it, it's nice that you can, like, do trials and, like, there's a great, greater emphasis on, like, making really nice product experience. But, like, on the buying side, there are more people involved.
• 10:15
  Full disclosure, we are a Doc customer, right? Like, so we use it to create a workspace for Superpath and our marketplace customers. And it's really helpful.
• 10:23
  Like, it just collects all these things that, like, we were using Airtable views for, uh, lots of emails and in some case, uh, shared Slack channels, all of which were a total mess and difficult to keep track of.
• 10:32
  And it's just like this nice little... Like, when Alex explained it to me, I was like, "I don't get it." And then he showed it to me and I was like, "Oh, that's great. That's really helpful, actually."
• 10:39
  It's just like a page where you can embed a bunch of stuff in one place.
• 10:43
  And so if you have a bunch of tools, you put all the tools into one tool, and then suddenly the client only has to deal with one link instead of all these tasks flying around everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool.
• 10:51
  That's great. Can we talk about Alex Krikov for one second? So he's, he's, uh, one of the founders. He's the CEO. He has a pretty extensive marketing background. Did that attract you to this role?
• 11:01
  I mean, like, you know, he brings with it, like, years of experience. I assume a strong vision of what marketing, uh, like, should or could look like at Doc.
• 11:11
  Like, was that-- I'm assuming, I'm assuming that was a factor in you joining. I feel like any marketer who's worked for a CEO who has marketing experience has had one of two experiences, right?
• 11:21
  It's, it's either they're a super helpful contributor of ideas, they know when to jump in, give their two cents. They know, you know, they, they get, they get the game.
• 11:31
  You don't have to constantly explain yourself to them.
• 11:34
  And then you have the other former marketer who's a CEO who did marketing ten years ago and loves to just, like, drop into the conversation and just, like, wreck all your plans. "Hey, should we be using AI?" Yeah, yeah.
• 11:45
  Yeah. "Should we be doing TikTok?" And just, like, scraps your whole marketing plan. So Alex is definitely the former.
• 11:51
  Yeah, and I, I was actually freelancing, uh, through Superpath, actually through the Superpath marketplace for Doc for, for nine months, writing blogs together and, and what, what's really nice about the relationship I have with Alex, so he used to be the VP of marketing at Lattice, which I alluded to a bit earlier.
• 12:08
  So he, he's primarily a, a product marketer, but he's been really focused on, like, go-to-market strategy, things like that. I'm more of a content marketer, so those concepts are still a little new to me.
• 12:17
  But, you know, I can write a mean blog post. I can write a mean landing page.
• 12:20
  So, like, we have this complementary skill set where he understands what I do, I understand what he do-- he does, and therefore we can, you know, make a great team.
• 12:29
  But, so for example-One thing that was working really nicely when I was freelancing for him is to write an article rather than me going out and do the freelancer thing where I just pull up ten competing articles, aggregate those into sort of a, a new post, and, and publish.
• 12:45
  We would sit down, and he would just give me, like, his unfiltered opinions for half an hour on the subject, and what we would make is way more interesting than anything I ever could have come up with on my own.
• 12:55
  Like, I'm a writer, right? But I'm not an expert in sales. I'm not an expert in product-led growth, et cetera. So we just had this nice chemistry that, that I think, like, most marketers dream of.
• 13:06
  And so, yeah, hu-huge factor of me joining Doc and, and loving the job so far. Yeah. That's awesome. I wanna talk more about that.
• 13:12
  This sort of, like, blend of what Doc does at SEO content but infused with genuine subject matter expertise. There's a few other things I wanna get to first before we go deep on content.
• 13:21
  The next question on my list is tell us about the marketing team.
• 13:24
  But you are the marketing team, so maybe tell us about the marketing function, because I'm imagining that the scope of marketing is necessarily narrow because you're only one person.
• 13:33
  Alex can only dedicate so much time to marketing among the other things he-- I'm sure he's working on. Can you give us the scope of it? I mean, there's, there's a content creation arm of it.
• 13:41
  Can you share about that and kinda, like, what else is going on in marketing? It, it's funny sometimes when people say I'm a one-person content team, and then they're like...
• 13:48
  Then they discuss handing something over to product marketing. It's like, "No, like, I'm all of the marketing teams, like product marketing, et cetera." Like, whatever it is, it has marketing on it.
• 13:56
  Like, that's gonna eventually fall to me. We, we actually take two approaches with this.
• 14:00
  We, we take the let's be super lean now and put our heads down and just focus on publishing quickly, getting stuff out there, and on the other hand, we also have this vision for one year from now, two years from now.
• 14:14
  Let's say we suddenly have series A funding, series B funding. What do we want that world to look like, right? And so- So you're building a foundation now for- Yeah. So our...
• 14:24
  Basically, our goal now is let's spin up one channel at a time so that I can, you know, narrowly focus on one thing. So for example, SEO was just the first thing we went after.
• 14:35
  Just bringing back the product led thing really quickly, we do have a viral product in the sense that you send your Doc workspace to somebody.
• 14:42
  At the bottom it says, "Powered by Doc," and we've seen chains of, like, four paying customers where we know this customer came from because they worked with this other customer, et cetera. So that kind of buys...
• 14:53
  We see that as buying us marketing time to focus on the long-term strategy rather than needing to get customers in the door tomorrow with marketing.
• 15:02
  So going back to the sort of one channel at a time approach, my goal is let's spin up our SEO strategy. Uh, let's get all the workflows in pl- in place.
• 15:11
  Let's get, you know, Airtable set up with as many automations as I can to make my job easier. Let's get everything in Ahrefs, et cetera. Let's get a bunch of freelancers on board.
• 15:19
  Let's figure out what that whole process looks like, get that flowing relatively smoothly, which is sort of where I'm getting to now-ish, and then getting it to a point where I could just hand it off to somebody, maybe another freelancer, to manage that process.
• 15:33
  And then let's spin up a new channel. Then let's focus on, you know, what's, what's LinkedIn gonna look like now that we have all this blog content sitting there? What's our podcast gonna look like?
• 15:41
  And so it's basically like I can't scale myself.
• 15:44
  I can't keep adding channels and, and be able to manage it, but I can get them going, get them moving so that they align with our sort of growth strategy and then hopefully pass them on to somebody else 'cause we're not planning on hiring another headcount anytime soon.
• 15:59
  Have you read "The Cold Start Problem" by Andrew Chen? Kind of like, uh, network, network products, which is how you would classify a tool like that. Pretty interesting stuff though.
• 16:07
  Um, one thing he does not talk much about is SEO. And so the reason I sort of bring those two things up is I think that Doc has chased SEO earlier than most product-led growth companies.
• 16:18
  I've, I've talked to Alex about this before. I think the approach makes sense because, at least my take of it, is that Doc is trying to kill two birds with one stone here.
• 16:26
  It's like get great subject matter expertise out there, like associate the Doc name with really legitimate expertise in this area, and while we're at it, we might as well optimize for these keywords, right?
• 16:38
  Like, I mean, I'm probably oversimplifying it. Is that generally how you guys think about this? That's a hundred percent right.
• 16:43
  I think also when you're, when you're a small team or when you're a team of one, you have to kill two, three birds with one stone in everything you do.
• 16:51
  So we're doing SEO, but it's also product-led content in that we're showing examples of how to use Doc in, in this SEO blog post, but then we're infusing our thought leadership, right?
• 17:02
  Like, you know, there's the typical... In a, in a post we'll have the, you know, why, you know, what is topic X? Like, what, what is sales enablement? But then why sales enablement?
• 17:12
  But we really try to go hard on making sure we actually say something interesting and new and, and different there. Or if we...
• 17:19
  A really good example actually is, like, software listicles where you say, you know, ten client portal tools, right?
• 17:24
  And n- normally the, the play is sort of go out, just aggregate a bunch of tools, say two sentences about them, and, and there's your SEO post.
• 17:31
  But for something like that, I'll sit down with Alex, and he'll actually give me his opinions on each of the tools, like what they're good for, what they're not.
• 17:39
  Because to make Doc, he had to go out and research all of our competitors, right? And he had to get a sense of the market.
• 17:44
  We can actually just do a big bullet list of here's our actual opinions on these things, or here's categories, ways to think about grouping these tools that you wouldn't normally find, and then we can hand that off to a freelancer, and they can sort of do their best to translate, uh, Alex's thoughts into, into a cohesive piece.
• 18:01
  It is SEO, but it's also we hope that when someone reads it, that they get this experience of, oh, this, these people actually really understand sales, therefore they wanna come along on the Doc journey, right?
• 18:13
  'Cause our, our tool only does, you know, two or three things today. We hope it'll do 20 things in the future.
• 18:19
  And when, you know, we're still at the sort of early adopter stage where people who are interested in Doc are the types who just like to try new tools, um, a-and those people also wanna know not just what you do today but what, what you're planning, what your vision is for your product and what you do in the future, right?
• 18:35
  Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. I feel like I know the answer to this question, but I-I also feel that I have to ask it anyways. How do you measure stuff?
• 18:42
  Like, the true SEO benefit is gonna take a while to kick in. What signals are you looking for? And then related to that, is there a sales function? Is that just the founders?
• 18:51
  Like, are you getting any feedback directly from, like, conversations people are having with prospective customers that influences the stuff you write about, or kind of how you might measure the success of stuff you've already published?
• 19:02
  Yeah. So the problem when you're at such an early stage company is that when you try to measure things, most numbers are going to be close to zero, right? [chuckles] Like, we, we post a blog, we have no domain authority.
• 19:15
  I, I don't expect it to get any numbers overnight. I don't expect the numbers to be meaningful in any way, right? I, I... That's gonna take time. So we actually measure by inputs more than outputs.
• 19:29
  Meaning, how much am I actually, how much am I actually doing? Uh, how much am I publishing? Because if we take-- If we're really slow at publishing lots of blogs, it, the results are gonna take longer.
• 19:39
  The faster we can get things up, the, the more efficient I am in my function, then the faster we should see results, right? Then okay, great, a blog gets traffic, then I'll go back and make it perfect.
• 19:50
  That [chuckles] was like a big mental hurdle for me to overcome 'cause I'm... I think most writers, we end up perfectionists, right? We love the craft.
• 19:56
  But when you're at this stage where we need numbers moving quickly rather than slowly, just speed to publishing becomes a big priority.
• 20:04
  So, so yeah, so we, we sort of set our goals more so in let's publish eight blogs a month, uh, or whatever the number is. Let's post on social every day.
• 20:14
  Let's get these things down and then see, sort of see what my capacity is and what I have time left for, for example. I, I think there was another part to your question that I- Uh, sales. Yeah.
• 20:25
  Is there, is there- Yeah, sales. Like, do you have some access- Yeah... to hearing what prospective customers are talking about? Yeah.
• 20:31
  So we have Alex, our CEO, participating in sort of sales conversations with his network, but we also have an account executive, his name is Andy, and he- Okay... does all the inbound lead requests.
• 20:43
  So he does, he does some cold outreach, but mostly now we have a pretty steady amount of leads coming in, demo requests, and so he's doing the one-on-one customer demos.
• 20:53
  And, uh, what's really nice is he's sharing videos from those calls w-with me and on team internally, like the ones that he think either went well or the ones that actually went terribly.
• 21:03
  Um, which is, you know, people always talk about in content marketing, like talk to your customers.
• 21:09
  I guess I have, could have time for that, but it's way easier for me to see how our salesperson, like how, how Andy's talking to our customers, what the sort of feedback they give.
• 21:17
  And that gives me insights for what I should be talking about with content, right? Or like what sales assets we're missing.
• 21:23
  So right now, like in terms of feedback on the content, my normal, my primary source is actually just Alex, our CEO, and Andy telling me like, "It would be really nice if we had this thing.
• 21:32
  Like, we really need a case study now. We're at the point where customers are asking for like ROI or something like that." So then I went out and did two case studies.
• 21:40
  Or, you know, "We really need a pricing comparison with other tools now," so that I can go out and do those sort of sales enablement type assets.
• 21:48
  You know, SEO, like as you know, the early days, it's a bit of a crap shoot, right? Like we have one blog popping off and who knows why.
• 21:54
  But, you know, we try not to micromanage or micro-analyze the, the performance of that stuff so far. Got it. Okay, a couple follow-ups on that.
• 22:01
  One is that on a small team, I think it's easier for everyone to be on the same page about who the customer is, what are their problems, and how are we solving or, or not solving those problems right now.
• 22:12
  Whereas like on a much larger team, it's like you might not even know anyone's name on the sales team, like let alone like how to get access to a recorded sales call. So it's just like one thought.
• 22:21
  I mean, I feel like there's this trend of like Gong and Chorus and tools like that, just making those conversations really accessible. It's like one of the most wonderful things that's ever happened in content marketing.
• 22:31
  Another follow-up thought is that I'm very intrigued by this idea of measuring based on inputs rather than outputs at this early stage.
• 22:36
  And I can see how it works for you all because there's, like, you bring a certain level of confidence to it. Like, you believe the content is good. You kinda like understand what the longer term vision.
• 22:44
  You've both done this before also, right?
• 22:46
  I could see how that may or may not work for other companies because the thing they're looking for on the other side, the number, that's the thing that's telling them whether or not it's good.
• 22:53
  Whereas like you believe intrinsically that the stuff is good, and you just know that it will take a certain amount of time for other people to realize that. That's pretty much it.
• 23:01
  We have strong gut feel on, on what should work. We know that half of it is gonna fall flat, but we understand the game.
• 23:08
  And yeah, it's, it's kinda just gut feel on, on what's working and what's not, which is really difficult. I think there's a...
• 23:14
  You have to kinda throw your a-anxious marketer, "I need numbers to tell me I'm doing a good job" thing out the window and, and sort of trust your nose.
• 23:23
  I think the, the other thing at a startup is that things change so quickly.
• 23:27
  Like go-going back to what you said about knowing our, knowing our target audience, we might add two, three features to the product that suddenly change, that suddenly add more groups or, or we change the, the segment we're, we're aiming for.
• 23:40
  For example, we realized pretty early that enterprise was not really a great customer segment for us because they're too entrenched in their tools, right?
• 23:49
  They're, they're not willing to just suddenly give up their sales tool or their customer success tool for something that's more in the middle.
• 23:55
  Versus startups, medium-sized businesses are way more willing to experiment with tools.
• 24:01
  So, like having those insights just sort of constantly fed in from the team is, is just incredibly use- helpful at making stuff, right, understanding who you're talking to.
• 24:10
  Do, do you find any tension between the speed of startup life and the slowness of content creation? Like particularly to make stuff that's good, it, it, you can't get around the fact that it takes a while.
• 24:23
  I mean, the writing alone can be quite time-consuming. Getting time on Alex's calendar to pick his brain about, you know, his opinions or experience on a... Like, do you find...
• 24:33
  I mean, I feel like what I'm asking is almost like a, a personal struggle of mine. Like, right? Like we're always trying to move quickly at Superpath, and then we're like, "Okay, we gotta write more content."
• 24:41
  And then you get into it and you're like, "Oh my God, this takes forever," right? Like, do you feel that? Do you guys talk about that at all? Yeah. I think I feel that every day. And I think [chuckles] I, I...
• 24:51
  The, the hardest person to manage is-Myself, like I, I, I joked or I said before, I don't have to manage any people, but I think managing my own sort of expectations for what we can deliver and what my expectations would be are super important.
• 25:04
  And I think the other thing...
• 25:06
  I'll, I'll get back to the slowness part, but that triggered my thought too, is when you, when you're a content marketer, you're, you're always seeing content from the most successful companies with giant marketing teams and giant marketing budgets, and someone drops in Slack like, "Hey, look at this.
• 25:20
  This is cool." You're like, "Great. Well, probably 15 people made that, and we can't, we can't make that."
• 25:26
  So I think in terms of the slowness, I've had to accept that like 80% to my personal threshold of what's good enough, maybe even 50% is probably good enough, right?
• 25:35
  If a, a freelancer gives me an article that's like most of the way there, I'll just go through, do some edits myself, and publish it.
• 25:42
  And doesn't have to win a Pulitzer, it, it just needs to like communicate our message, right? I think I- I've actually heard you say this before too, that like good content happens quickly.
• 25:51
  And so the, the way we get speed normally is, is working with Alex, for example, on just tell me your thoughts on this. Let's just get it out. Let's hit publish.
• 25:59
  Let's not worry about it having like 20 beautiful graphics. Uh, let's just put it out into the world, and then once it sees a little more traction, let's come back to it.
• 26:07
  I like that because no one's listening in the early days anyways. I feel like it's good to remember that. You know, like if you had 100,000 readers anxiously awaiting your next blog post, it's different.
• 26:17
  But if you're like just trying to get that initial traction, you're right, like 80% is, is great. Is, is really great.
• 26:24
  And honestly, for most companies that take content as seriously as Doc does, 80% is, is better than what the readers are seeing elsewhere anyways. Like, just taking it pretty seriously actually does set you apart still.
• 26:35
  Yeah. And then, and in terms of speed, like there's places where we'll just cut corners. Like on social, I'll just copy-paste a good section from our blog and just make it the LinkedIn post, and like, you know what?
• 26:46
  That's fine for early days. We have 800 followers, it doesn't matter if the post is pretty good or incredible. We just need to get our message out there, right?
• 26:54
  We just need to show people what it is that we talk about, what it is that we're thinking about, and, and that's good enough for now. That's cool.
• 27:00
  I wanna ask you about, um, one thing we're kind of asking everybody about is team communication. You know, how much of it is synchronous versus asynchronous? Do you have a cadence to the, to your meetings?
• 27:09
  Additionally, are there tools that you rely heavily on to communicate about content? So I'm talking about things like content calendar. I mean, I guess everybody uses Google Docs.
• 27:16
  Like, is there anything else in there where you are kind of communicating in a, in a longer form way? How do you and anyone else on the team that you need to talk to about content, how do you do it?
• 27:24
  Most of my collaboration happens with Alex, as we've talked about a lot here. So we, we have a biweekly meeting.
• 27:32
  We have a meeting at the beginning of the week where we spend an hour just sort of talking about what this week is gonna look like. Like, do we have any product launches coming out soon?
• 27:40
  He just sort of puts things on the plate if they need to be, and then I then normally word vomit a bunch of stuff I'm thinking about working on, and then he'll just give me sort of prioritization, right?
• 27:49
  Like this, this thing is more important than the other, focus on that. So that's just Zoom meetings. I also need design support though. I'm not a designer.
• 27:56
  We have a pretty nice brand overall, and I don't wanna kill that [chuckles] with creating crappy thumbnails or whatever. So we have our head of design, co-founder Luke, is just super great at this stuff.
• 28:07
  And so to, to work with designers, I find you normally have to work in their tools. So for that, I'll, I'll use Linear, which is what we use for our... like our development team uses for task management, right?
• 28:17
  So I create a ticket, and I say, "I have this graphic I need, probably within two weeks would be nice, but, you know, product takes priority."
• 28:25
  And then I'll, I'll create a ticket, and that means it like enters his workflow.
• 28:29
  Rather than have a meeting where we like, "Here's all the design stuff I need," and he thinks about it and comes back weeks later, I just like put it into where he's already working, right?
• 28:37
  And, and just to add onto that, if I need a graphic, like I'll make something rough in Figma because Figma is the tool he's gonna use to make it.
• 28:43
  So I'll just like sketch something out and be like, "Here's more or less what I have in mind," and then that just sort of puts him in his frame of working rather than like my world, right?
• 28:52
  I just wanna like kinda like highlight, just capture what you just described. So many content marketers, myself included, have a... they struggle with resourcing.
• 29:00
  It can be very difficult to get developer and designer support, especially when like you, you and your team are not technical enough to do those things. A lot of people cry about it.
• 29:09
  So I just really appreciate that like you've gotten yourself into their own workflows where you can just drop stuff on there. [chuckles] I just think that's such a smart productivity hack, you know?
• 29:18
  Because it's kinda the same thing, like if they need something from you and they are create-- like if they're creating a ticket for you in Linear saying, "Oh, we need copy for this thing," you're gonna be like, "I don't know how to use this tool."
• 29:27
  Like, is this really important? But if they put it on, you know, whatever, if you use Asana or Todoist or some tool like that, if it's on... if they're working, kind of sort of being more gracious of your time, right?
• 29:36
  Saying like, "Okay, I'm gonna get up to speed on your workflow so I can understand how you work, so that we can get this one tiny little thing done." Uh, yeah. I- I'd like to go back to the, the tools to communicate.
• 29:45
  One example is like, I think when you're a team of one or you're a content marketing team, you really have to create visibility for yourself.
• 29:52
  So one thing I do just to create sort of awareness of what I'm working on or what I'm thinking about is I also... I connect Airtable to Slack through Zapier or Zapier. I don't know how you say it.
• 30:03
  But so what I do is I have it going both ways. So if I publish a blog, for example, I push that through to Slack. New blog published, everyone can see it.
• 30:11
  'Cause the worst thing is to create a ton of content and never share it with your own team even.
• 30:15
  The other thing I do is when I have an idea, I made myself a little hashtag called like content idea, and I put it in Slack, and then that goes into a list in Airtable, which is where I manage all my content.
• 30:26
  So there's this two-way, so they can sort of see ideas I have. So that thing might not happen for months, but it just sort of triggers, like it creates a, a level of awareness, right? But then they can also put ideas.
• 30:38
  They just need to use the hashtag, and, uh, like our CEO or, or someone in sales like, "You know, content idea, it'd be really nice to have a case study from this client."
• 30:46
  And then it goes into Airtable where I'm working, and I don't forget about it. Versus, you know, just a Slack conversation, it could die. So that's another way I like help them enter my workflow. I love that. I love it.
• 30:56
  How many people work at Doc right now? Eight. This is cool because- Right...
• 30:59
  yeah, that's interesting because usually the first marketing hire is probably not someone with a content marketing background, and additionally, it's, it's probably not this early.
• 31:08
  So it speaks a lot to the kind of the culture that the founding team is building, right?
• 31:12
  Like, I think my sort of like, you know, from afar takeaway is that, uh, that Doc really cares about content, and which, which means that they care about educating people, communicating with people, you know- Mm-hmm...
• 31:22
  building the brand.
• 31:23
  All of which are like very long-term investments, not gonna pay off right away, but it gives you, the content person, a seat at the table with the people actually building the product, which often doesn't happen till much later when it's kinda too late to bridge some of these gaps.
• 31:35
  And I think like partially that's because three of our founders, they were early founders at Lattice, and they've seen a company go from, they were the first 10 hires in there somewhere, to a billion-dollar company.
• 31:46
  So like we're looking forward to being a billion-dollar company rather than-Like, let's try to get some little bit of profitability. It's like, how do we get, like, way up here, right?
• 31:55
  How do we, how do we become a billion-dollar company? And that-that's going to need content. Let's just do it now. I forget the other half of where I was going with that.
• 32:02
  Oh, also, like, kind of core to our product messaging is the importance of content in sales, right? So you have to be able to create the assets that you can drop into a doc that makes life easier for your prospect.
• 32:14
  And so where our buy-in to content is also in our product.
• 32:17
  Like, we're just releasing a content management library system now where people can drop in content, share it with somebody, and get analytics on, like, who's looking at it, how many pages into your PDF did they get, et cetera.
• 32:29
  So, like, it's just sort of in the blood of our product, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. What's next on your list, right?
• 32:34
  Like, you sort of mentioned that you would, you know, pick a channel, operationalize it, and start to delegate that, assuming that frees you up to do whatever the next thing is. Are you able to- Mm-hmm...
• 32:44
  tease what some of those next things are? Like, what are you thinking about? We're thinking about it in two ways. One is we wanna make more sort of media-style bets.
• 32:53
  So we wanna launch podcasts, not unlike this one, probably focusing on revenue teams specifically, sort of revenue playbooks, and especially companies who are-- have sales and marketing and success working together nicely.
• 33:06
  You know, I, I'm a marketer. I listen to a million podcasts. I haven't really listened to much about how should marketing work with success or how should we work with sales.
• 33:13
  So that, that's kind of a topic we wanna get to. We also have this... Like I said, we wanna be a billion-dollar company. We wanna have millions of visits to our website.
• 33:22
  We wanna experiment with some, like, big bet SEO projects. So what tools can we make on our website for free? Or like, what can we take from Doc and just sort of make for free and put it on the website?
• 33:32
  Like, we, we use the HubSpot website grader as an example of, like, a tool that's just... It's a great gateway into the product, right? So we wanna do more of that.
• 33:40
  And we have, you know, the CEO dictates our product development team's workload, so it's, it's not hard for us to just, like, plunk something like that into the product roadmap.
• 33:49
  Um, or like a browser extension or something like that, that just, like, is better at generating links and attention than just writing two hundred blog posts. That's cool.
• 33:57
  I feel like en-engineering as marketing, like, uh, kinda, I guess that's what I would lump that into that category, was really hot for a while, and I feel like you don't see quite as much of it anymore.
• 34:06
  Like, Ahrefs has some stuff like this, like H-HubSpot you mentioned. Like, Clearbit did a really good job with this with their, uh, free browser extension.
• 34:13
  But again, that sort of comes back to this whole thought of like, you know, small team, uh, working closely together. Content marketing is not out on some island just writing SEO blog posts. It's like- Mm-hmm...
• 34:22
  you know, sort of bringing the, uh, like bringing marketing front and center, getting it on the dev and design calendars to make it happen. Yeah. It's not- Yeah.
• 34:28
  Like, it sounds simple when you describe it, but, like, I'm just calling it out as like, it's kind of a big deal. You know? It doesn't, it just doesn't always happen that way. Yeah. For sure.
• 34:35
  And you, you kind of have to be in startup mode to do that, where you could just shelf...
• 34:40
  Like, the, the developers have, you know, they don't have, like, easy work they're trying to do to, like, fix all these bugs in the product all the time, that it's kind of a fresh slate.
• 34:49
  So you can, you can just drop something, like a, a new project onto the plate. Another thing that's, like, sort of on the horizon is we, we keep making, like, in-product templates.
• 34:58
  I talked about trying to kill two birds with one stone. We make templates that act as they're useful in the product.
• 35:03
  So like, here's a, a enterprise sales template, or here's an implementation plan that's just, you can access it from within Doc. Uh, but it also doubles as an SEO access point into our product.
• 35:13
  So people searching, like, really middle bottom funnel, actionable things, uh, that to, they might want to do in Doc.
• 35:19
  So we-we're kind of betting big on that template strategy, which is, I think, pretty common now in, in PLG.
• 35:25
  And then I guess the other thing that w- I feel like is missing in the market is, like, really good examples of sales assets or, like, content, right?
• 35:34
  Like, people, there's lots of advice about what you should make in terms of sales enablement content or something. But let's do, like, the, the best sales asset that Gong has and let's, let's talk about that.
• 35:44
  Or like, let's build, let's build a resource of these things like, you know, something like an Airtable database, but let's give real examples from what other companies are doing, and then let's talk about them.
• 35:55
  So I think that that would be, like, a fun project that would get a little more attention than just, like, an SEO post. For sure.
• 36:00
  Also, it helps you kind of like chip away at that SEO work without kind of the intensely time-consuming long form blog posts. Like, there's a company called Tetra that did a similar thing.
• 36:10
  They called it Culture Codes, and they would collect culture decks from companies and, you know, created this cool library with, like, description of kinda like what they like and what they didn't like about whatever.
• 36:17
  It was really interesting, and it like, it's informative, it's helpful, it's not incredibly time-consuming to create. And like, sometimes, like, it's exactly the inspiration that the, the reader or the user needs.
• 36:26
  For sure. And I guess this last, last thought on what's next is, like, we do eventually wanna have more of a, like, big media presence. So this is really big in sales for, for some reason.
• 36:37
  Like, it's, there's, rather than building a content brand attached to the brand, right now what's happening a lot is a company will, will make a secondary sort of media channel. Like, Sales Feed is a really good example.
• 36:49
  It's just like a, it's sort of like a Marketer Milk or, you know, one of these, like... It's just a content resource for people in sales, and it's not a, it's not promoting a brand, it's just building an audience.
• 37:00
  Interesting. And then you- But it's, it's, it's branded separately. It's like a micro brand or micro site style. Yeah. You know, there's like a by, you know, I think it's, I think, I think it's Outreach.
• 37:07
  I could be wrong. But I think it's, like, by Outreach in, in small letters. But so they're basically, like, building just a really great content resource, have like TikTok videos, YouTube, podcast, everything.
• 37:17
  And then using that audience to then, like, as a, as a way to, like, lightly promote their product. We'd like to be there eventually, but that's not gonna happen until we have, like, serious A-A and beyond funding. Yeah.
• 37:28
  Yeah. Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. I feel like if we had this same conversation, we're kinda like revisited this conversation about a year from now, it would be entirely different.
• 37:37
  And maybe we should do that because I'd be very curious to follow up on like, okay, you know, you're a couple months into this role, this early stage startup team of eight, like, you know, what...
• 37:47
  I'm just sort of, like, sending my reminders to myself for the next time we talk about this. Like [chuckles] what happened, you know? Like, has the SEO traffic started to kick in?
• 37:54
  Have you sort of started, you know, tackling the next channel, you know? Did you raise? You know, and what has that enabled you to do?
• 38:00
  So anyways, just mental notes for myself to ask you next time we have this, this chat. Perfect. Yeah. People have to subscribe and set a reminder, whatever it is you say on, on podcasts. Yeah. Give us, give us ratings.
• 38:11
  Smash that, smash that- Smash that rating buttons. [laughs] Awesome. Eric, it's been so cool to chat with you.
• 38:17
  I mean, like I said, we've actually had the chance to chat quite a few times over the last year, but not in this level of detail.
• 38:22
  So I appreciate you opening the book, showing us what it's like to be a one-person, not just one-person content team, but one-person marketing team with this focus on content.
• 38:30
  And, uh, oh, it's been helpful to, for people to kinda hear, like, what is going on inside a, an early stage startup like this. Where can we send people?
• 38:37
  Like, can people wanna go check out the content that you're publishing? Um, and then also for you personally, where can they follow you? Yeah. So our website is doc.us.
• 38:46
  I'm not sure if people say US or us, but let's say.us. And then you can follow me on LinkedIn, Eric Doty, or, uh, Twitter. Tend to post smarter stuff on LinkedIn, dumber stuff on Twitter.
• 38:58
  So you, you choose what, what, [chuckles] what you'd like to read. But yeah, I am, I am sharing quite a bit on my LinkedIn these days about what it's like to be a one-person team at a startup.
• 39:06
  So if that's interesting to you, sauce me that follow. [laughs] Your, actually, your LinkedIn stuff has been really good. So we'll make sure we link to all that so people can go check it out- Perfect...
• 39:14
  without having to go search for it themselves. Eric, thanks again. Really appreciate it, and we'll talk to you soon. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Jimmy.
• 39:21
  [outro music]