Latest / Content, Briefly / Dock: Eric Doty on automation, learning new skills, and LinkedIn superstardom

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Dock: Eric Doty on automation, learning new skills, and LinkedIn superstardom · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  You can be an individual contributor to a certain extent who's a very good writer or very knowledgeable at SEO, but that kind of has an upper cap on how much you can contribute if you're just a proficient thinker or maker.
• 0:14
  And to scale yourself to the leadership level or just be sort of extra valuable to your company, you need to become a very good project manager.
• 0:22
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today we've got fan favorite Eric Doty back for a second time.
• 0:34
  We talk about all the many things that have happened over the last thirteen, fourteen months since he was first on this podcast, including Doc's evolution from PLG to sales-led or at least hybrid.
• 0:46
  There's a lot of interesting stuff there. We talked about Eric's own journey as a content marketer.
• 0:51
  We talked about some of the freelancing consulting work that he's been up to, and we talk about his role at Superpath, which has sort of evolved from power user to now community manager. Just quick shout out to Eric.
• 1:03
  He's just been so wonderful to work with. I so enjoy being in the community as he runs it. I love getting the newsletters that he writes.
• 1:10
  It's just been wonderful, and Eric's just been a great partner and advocate of Superpath for a very long time. So thanks very much for all of those things, Eric. I think, as always, great episode.
• 1:20
  Eric is really one of the smartest content marketers that I have ever come across. There's a lot of rich detail in this episode. As always, I enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. Take care.
• 1:29
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• 1:38
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• 1:55
  They're also putting on a series of webinars to explain the details of an S corp and show how it can start saving you money today. To learn more, just head to lettuce.co. Hey, everybody.
• 2:05
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with Eric Doty for a round two. He was episode number three, which feels like a very long time ago at this point.
• 2:14
  We talked mostly in that episode, Eric, about your role as a one-man show at Doc. Obviously, we're gonna get caught up on that.
• 2:21
  You've also been running the Superpath community for a while now, so we're gonna talk about that. Doc has launched a podcast.
• 2:26
  There's, like, all these things that I always say, like, "Oh, we should do another episode to, like, see how it went." Well, this is that.
• 2:31
  So before we get into all that, for people who don't know you, Eric, or maybe didn't listen to the first episode, which you should, could you introduce yourself? First of all, how dare you? Yeah.
• 2:39
  [chuckles] Tell us who you are, how did you get here, and then give us the rundown of Doc too. Like, what's the product? Who's it for? Yeah. So I'll give you the half version that I gave last time.
• 2:48
  Just go back and listen to the episode. It was surprisingly good, I, I have to say. But, uh, no. [chuckles] Uh, yeah. So I'm Eric Doty. I'm the content lead at Doc.
• 2:57
  I think most people know me as, like, a one-person content team. I've been a one-person team at three SaaS companies in a row, so I think it's kind of my niche now.
• 3:08
  And Doc is shared customer workspaces that are most often used for sales or onboarding.
• 3:15
  So think of it as, like, a personalized microsite between company and their customer, and you can embed content, you can make checklists, you can sign contracts, you can do all kinds of things that make sales and onboarding really helpful, especially for companies with long sales cycles or very complicated onboarding processes.
• 3:34
  You know, if you have to onboard an entire company into your SaaS product. So that's the super quick rundown. I guess that's about all you need to know. Cool. Yeah. We're a customer. That's it. At Superpath.
• 3:44
  That's the end of the episode. Yeah. [chuckles] Thanks. We'll see you for round three next year. Yeah. [chuckles] Episode 100. Let's just quickly talk about you, actually. I...
• 3:51
  There's a lot of Doc stuff I want to ask you about, but there's been a few interesting professional things in your own world that I would love to catch up on.
• 3:59
  One is you've been running Superpath Community, so I'd love to chat about that. I actually just got the Superpath newsletter this morning, which you wrote, which I love reading now.
• 4:06
  It's a lot more fun to read than to write. Surprise. Yeah. [chuckles] You also, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, you went on a, a LinkedIn personal branding journey. I know. It's awful.
• 4:16
  And I would really like to know what the results of that were. Was it fun? Did you meet people? Did you make money? Like, what happened, you know?
• 4:25
  'Cause you posted a lot of really interesting stuff, and it got a ton of engagement. And then also we'll get to the part where, like, Doc has changed, your content strategy's changed, the team. It... Like, we'll get...
• 4:35
  I want to get into all that, but maybe first, so you helped me when I was out on paternity leave with the community, and now you're still doing it. Like, what, what's it like? Is it a good gig? Yeah.
• 4:46
  It's super interesting.
• 4:47
  I mean, to be completely honest, one of the reasons I was excited about it is you get to interface with, whatever it is, eighteen thousand, twenty thousand content marketers on a regular basis, and I figured it couldn't hurt to, you know, be in front of all these people.
• 5:01
  Sort of selfish reasons- For sure, yeah... of, of, you know, just being, putting my name out there, but also just being connected to folks to be able to ask questions.
• 5:08
  Like, I think earlier on in my career, I super under-indexed on the importance of a strong network. I mean, remote changed all of that too.
• 5:17
  Before, I was just in a small town in Canada and didn't really expect to meet lots of content marketers, and then being, you know, you know, everyone knows the remote world stuff. But I got so much out of the community.
• 5:29
  This isn't meant to be, like, an ad for Superpath, but I got so much out of the community when, for the last few years, I think especially when I was in the solo, you know, role thing, as w- you and I have talked about a bunch of times, where I don't have peers within my company, so it was extremely helpful to have people say, you know, "This is a new scenario I've never encountered.
• 5:49
  Can you guys help me out?" And that made Superpath incredibly invaluable to me. And I think my salary is probably double what it was five years ago and found all these great freelancing opportunities, like, through you.
• 6:00
  I actually got connected to Doc through Superpath. So giving back is, like, a cheesy thing to say because, like, you are also paying me for it, but I think, like, there's so much value in the community and that's...
• 6:09
  it's kind of a role I like to take of, like, instigator of conversations online, and so that's been really fun.It's funny because you were kind of almost doing this anyways.
• 6:21
  You know, like, when I look at the analytics, you're the number two most active person in the group's history behind me, which makes sense 'cause I've, like, been doing it for almost five years now.
• 6:32
  But it's so interesting to observe the group from a different perspective. Like, sometimes I get to just be a participant, not the person in charge, and it's great.
• 6:42
  I'm having so much fun, like, just talking about content and not stressing as much about, like, is this thing in the wrong channel? Yeah. You know? Hey, there's no link swaps here- And that's kind of annoying...
• 6:51
  and stuff like that. Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. Like, it does suck sometimes to have to play policeman. It does ultimately. I've been in communities, and I'm in other Slack communities that are totally unregulated- What?
• 7:01
  What?... and it's, it's... Oh, sorry. [laughs] Not content marketing communities, I promise. I promise. Sorry.
• 7:06
  Yeah, it's, they get completely unruly once you don't, you know, be a mean moderator and, and so- Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, Super- This is not kinda...
• 7:15
  We're going off in a different direction, but I feel that the reason the Superpath community is still relevant, because there are a million Slack communities, and pick one, you know, there's a new one every day, basically, if you wanna join it.
• 7:25
  The reason that it still exists, and that I think and hope it's still relevant, is that we've just taken it really seriously for a long time. Mm-hmm. You know?
• 7:31
  And, like, that stuff tends to peter out, and then the communities slowly die off. So anyways, you've been an amazing contributor to the community, and now you're an amazing manager of it, so thank you for all of that.
• 7:41
  And I know nothing about running a community, so you hired a horrible person. [laughs] There's whole, there's whole communities about running communities. I'm like, "Nah, I've got, I've got this.
• 7:49
  I'm sure I'll make my way through it." [laughs] But I guess another, like, just going back to your LinkedIn question too, uh, we might as well segue there. Yeah.
• 7:56
  I think I used to have, we talked about this last time, I had a super active Twitter account where I did, like, sports humor and, like, hockey humor, and
• 8:05
  th- the downfall of Twitter also sort of coincided with me deciding that I should get off that website, and I, I sort of had this realization of I can take all the, like, silly humor posting, being kind of self-deprecating and port that over to LinkedIn, and in some ways Superpath, but I think LinkedIn is so...
• 8:27
  I mean, everyone knows what LinkedIn is like and the, you know, cringe posts and things like that. And I see discussions all the time like, "Oh, why is LinkedIn content so boring?"
• 8:35
  And the only reason it's so boring is because people make it boring. You know, you can, you're allowed to post interesting stuff on LinkedIn- [laughs] Right...
• 8:42
  and nobody will get mad at you, and in fact, people will like it. And I think people are sort of turning the corner now on that.
• 8:47
  But around a year ago or so, I did the whole, you know, I'm gonna post every day challenge thing, and I was kinda shocked at how transformative that was, um, you know- Yeah, yeah.
• 8:59
  Tell me about that because the posts were really good. Yeah. Like, you were sharing really good stuff, and I think, I don't know if necessarily intentional, I feel like you became, like, the automation guy.
• 9:08
  Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, you were sharing a lot about Airtable and automation and efficiency and things like that, among other things too, but- Yeah, that was kind of an accident...
• 9:16
  how could- I think my strategy from the beginning was that I felt that most LinkedIn posts are too advicey, and I don't...
• 9:25
  I mean, I, I guess I answer people's questions as Superpath, but I, I don't feel like I'm great at giving advice, but I feel like I'm doing so many jobs as a one-person team that I can show what I'm working on.
• 9:36
  And I think- Yeah... just openly showing what you're working on and, like, building in public in a way is super valuable because it was like, "Oh, here's a thing I figured out today that saved me time."
• 9:47
  And over the course of trying to think of what do I post every single day, that's where I got into the automation stuff because I realized sort of engagement levels were higher when I showed, when I showed things I was doing.
• 10:00
  And so, you know, I dabbled in talking about freelance writers and things like that, but then you just get 1,000 freelance writers DM-ing you, which is fine, but it wasn't necessarily, like, my target audience.
• 10:10
  So then I got more into talking about automation because I think I sort of, like, fumbled my way forward into finding a niche through posting every day. And I actually hate posting every day, and I don't do it anymore.
• 10:22
  But it was really useful to, like, quickly build an audience, figure out what I have to say that's unique, and then just sort of lean into that. So now it's more so when I have something interesting to post, I do it.
• 10:32
  But it created a ton of inbound opportunities for me all year long. People just messaging me saying...
• 10:39
  You know, sometimes it was job offers that I wasn't interested in, but sometimes it was like, "Hey, can you coach me on how to be more efficient?"
• 10:45
  I got, you know, "We're creating a content product that has to do with automation. Can we pay you to give us product feedback? We're doing our website messaging.
• 10:53
  We're writing cold outreach that has to do with automation." So suddenly everyone who's trying to target marketers with my interests started coming to me inbound with all kinds of, like, ad hoc requests.
• 11:04
  And so I filled my limited free time that I had for freelancing all year with just odd jobs. That was pretty... I don't know. It was, it was crazy.
• 11:12
  It was really interesting for me, but it was, it wasn't, like, the right way to scale a freelance business, but it was really fun. Maybe it is the r- I mean, it, it sounds- Maybe, yeah... like it worked really well.
• 11:21
  But, uh, you also, you posted, I think, I think it was the end of 2023, about how you had basically moved on from freelance writing.
• 11:28
  You wanted to make some extra cash on the side, and you had kinda posted a list of all the various things you had done to trade your knowledge for money, and it was, it wasn't that it was random, but it was just, like, so many different things as opposed to just, you know, I wrote one freelance article per week for 52 weeks.
• 11:48
  It sounded more interesting also. Yeah, and part of it was by design.
• 11:51
  I mean, I've talked a lot about this with my boss or CEO at Dock, Alex, is that I don't, I don't wanna use the same sort of brain energy on freelancing as I would for my full-time job. Yeah.
• 12:05
  Because, you know, I do have to sit down and write blogs and edit blogs, and on the side I wanna flex a different muscle.
• 12:11
  So, you know, managing a community or justGiving someone one-on-one coaching or, you know, I do SEO for my friend's mortgage company. Like, why not? Like, it's, it's just different muscles to flex.
• 12:23
  You know, some people do their own side projects, and this is like, I might as well get paid for all these side projects.
• 12:28
  And it's just sort of a continuing education a-as long as I don't get sort of, like, pigeonholed into one thing. Yeah.
• 12:34
  I feel like you really nailed the topics because there's a world where you did, like, the too advicey stuff, like, you know, "It's my 35th birthday, so here's 35 things I learned."
• 12:44
  And it's like, you know, enjoy the journey- It's actually my 35th-... stuff like that... birthday next week, so that's a great idea. Is it really? Are you gonna do a post like that?
• 12:50
  [laughs] Yeah, that's a great idea, inspired by Jimmy. Yeah. Please j-just you promise me you won't say, like, the journey is the destination or something like that.
• 12:58
  But then you also didn't do the thing where you just, like, talk kind of in broad strokes about some professional thing.
• 13:04
  Like, I do see this a lot on LinkedIn where people are like, "The thing that's wrong with content marketing," or, like, some kind of, like, extremely generalized trend- Yeah... they've noticed.
• 13:14
  It's like you just said, "Hey, here's some stuff I'm doing. If you wanna see it, it's here. If you don't want to, it's okay also." Yeah.
• 13:21
  And it, it also helps you when you go out to try to teach somebody something, it helps you sort of refine your own knowledge of it.
• 13:29
  So when I'm hosting an automation or something like that, I kinda have to tidy it up and make it look nice and- Sure... work properly. Yeah. And that actually is- Smooth out those rough edges...
• 13:38
  super, super b- super beneficial to me in the- Yeah... long term to, to have kind of like an inventory of stuff I know and, and have it tied in a nice little bow. Yeah. That's cool.
• 13:49
  Actually, I, [sighs] I'm feeling like a little, just like a little burst of inspiration. I should post some stuff on LinkedIn- [laughs]... 'cause I always have this guilt- Don't. That's terrible...
• 13:57
  that I don't, and I feel like I should. Well, you know, I see people like Dave Gerhardt.
• 14:01
  He posts on LinkedIn constantly about how, like, LinkedIn is basically his top of funnel for driving people to Exit Five, his community.
• 14:10
  I literally just saw this morning Cassie Naji, who's now the CEO of Campfire, saying that they've doubled their pipeline for the agency, and they can- Mm-hmm... attribute it directly to her LinkedIn post. Yeah. Dang.
• 14:21
  Should I... I probably shouldn't be ignoring... Like, if people are saying, like, "This is working and it's free," I should probably... It's like [chuckles] I should probably do that. Okay. You probably should.
• 14:30
  I think you can really stand out by not doing what other people are doing on LinkedIn. Yeah. And there's so much of the same.
• 14:36
  There's so much talk to your customers, you know, high-quality content always wins, like, all these kinds of platitudes that if you...
• 14:44
  It's much easier than you think to sort of like open your toolbox, open your desktop, and like what are you working on today and what are three tips you can share from that thing. Yeah.
• 14:52
  And, and just get super practical and hands-on, and that's how I've gone about it. Cool. I love it. Well, we'll look forward to your 35 tips for your 35th birthday post next week. Yeah. I'll dedicate it to you.
• 15:02
  [laughs] But let's, let's talk some Dock stuff because- Yeah...
• 15:06
  you've done a v- lot of really cool work at Dock, and so just to kind of set the context for people when we spoke last, go listen to that episode, one-man show, you were investing in this kind of kill two birds with one stone style of content, meaning, like, you're sharing genuine subject matter expertise.
• 15:25
  You're optimizing it for a keyword 'cause why not? You're going really hard at that, and you had said, like, "We're gonna tackle more channels, but I gotta get this one up and running first so that I can do that."
• 15:34
  Well, now you've done that at, at least with the podcast, maybe other things. You also, I think, have done quite a bit of product marketing work. So anyways, there's a lot here.
• 15:42
  Where do you think is the best place to start? Like, how... Can you just, like, get us, maybe give us an overview of what's happened in the last year-ish since we've done this? Yeah, for sure.
• 15:51
  Maybe let's start with the blog because that's where we kinda left off last time. And so my... I'm one of those people that I could just live in, like, blog SEO world forever until I die and, and- [laughs]...
• 16:02
  get, like, pigeonholed as one of those people, and so it was a real...
• 16:06
  I was sort of challenged from the outset by Alex, CEO, saying, "I need you to, like, be able to do this many blogs a month, but then I also need you to add a bunch of other channels.
• 16:17
  And therefore, like, we have to compress the amount of time it takes to do the blogs." Mm-hmm. "And we have to get used to, like, hitting publish and, you know, when it's not perfect and things like that."
• 16:26
  So I really spent the first three to six months at Dock just super optimizing that process. So I went really... You and I have talked before. I went really deep on writing an onboarding guide for freelancers.
• 16:38
  I made sure I optimized, I automated all the emails for our assignments that go out. "Here's the blog you've been assigned," or, "It's been published. Please look at it for me. Please share it on LinkedIn if you can."
• 16:48
  And just try to automate as many of those touch points as possible. I automate sharing it internally with our team. "Here's the new blog. Check it out." And so that was kinda step one.
• 16:58
  And then really, like you alluded to, the next big project was the podcast, which has been a labor of love. I mean, you have a podcast. You know how much work it is. We were surprised how much work it is. And- Yeah...
• 17:11
  and the other, the painful part of a podcast is you kinda have to do it for years [chuckles] for it, for it to become a thing and catch on. And so that's been a huge, like...
• 17:24
  There's, there's the launch process, which is a whole thing, and then there's the ongoing sort of weekly tasks associated with that. So I'm happy to get into that if you want or- Yeah...
• 17:35
  whatever you think i-is interesting there. Yeah. Well, regarding the podcast, there's kinda two main things I wanna know. One is how does it, if and how does it interact with the rest of the content?
• 17:45
  Are they two totally separate things? Like, are, are they kind of topics for each and the guests kind of planned deliberately? Like, what's the interplay there? And then two, like, what's your role in the podcast?
• 17:55
  Because I think podcasting is a skill that isn't o- it's not one of those things, it's not like writing. Like, if you're a content marketer, it may...
• 18:03
  the skills needed to do a good podcast may not already be in your, uh, your toolbox, so to speak. That was definitely my experience.
• 18:11
  Part of the reason I found the podcast to be harder than I thought is because I thought it'd be more like content marketingAnd there's a lot of things that are really different about it. So I'm just...
• 18:19
  I know those are two sort of big questions, but- Yeah... yeah, podcast and content, and then, like, your role in it. Yeah. Let's start about how we think about the podcast. So when we conceptualized the show,
• 18:30
  we really wanted it to be, like, a how I built this for revenue teams, and we wanted to tell the stories of successful revenue leaders, like, their, a past company of theirs, which I think is a little different.
• 18:43
  Most people come on, they promote their... Like I'm doing now. Yeah. I talk about Doc. I talk about what I'm doing at Doc. We wanted to have, like, the head of revenue at Loom talk about, like, how Loom went viral.
• 18:53
  We wanna have the former head of sales at Facebook talk about how Facebook launched its sort of sales arm, and that's been our concept for the show. It sometimes deviates a little bit from that.
• 19:05
  Sometimes it's just an interesting person that Alex knows who can speak really deep on, like, sales enablement or something like that, that's a topic that relates to Doc.
• 19:14
  So, you know, we've, we've had a mix of those stories with topics just relating to our audience, which is revenue leaders, so sales, marketing, customer success, growth, et cetera.
• 19:26
  And I think, like, Alex has really taken... He's the host, and so he's, he's really taken, like, the research journalism jobs on. So he, he invites the guests, he does all the research.
• 19:38
  And we talked about whether that's the best use of his time.
• 19:41
  I don't know if you found this, but, uh, preparing for the interview yourself versus me, like, building a list of questions for Alex, it really makes the show that much better.
• 19:51
  You know, like, he watches four podcast appearances that the guest has been on and, you know, researches the company and really goes deep, and then once the conversation's happening, it's quite natural to have a good interview.
• 20:02
  Absolutely. It would be very easy to just ask someone the same questions they've been asked by a couple other- Yeah... podcast hosts. Yeah, and then the, the content doesn't up, end up that interesting.
• 20:11
  And then, so how does the pod- Like, why are we doing a podcast, and how does it relate to our content strategy?
• 20:16
  So one, going back to that two birds with one stone mentality, is that we're trying to do thought leadership-y things in our blogs that are kind of SEO first, but we try to inject them with, you know, real opinions, interesting fact, you know, quotes from smart people, like a lot of people are doing these days.
• 20:35
  And the podcast, because the people are all in our ICP and they're just naturally touching on all the topics that we wanna talk about.
• 20:42
  And so now as we've had 30-ish guests so far, we have 30 hours of interviews with really smart people that pretty much any topic we write, I can go into our podcast transcript and find 10 interesting things to pull from.
• 20:58
  So on, like, just the really basic, for pure content's sake, that is a super great play for us to get sort of subject matter expertise without freelance writers having to go and do that themselves.
• 21:10
  Can you tell me, like, very specifically how this works? Like, you know, you're writing a content brief. Mm-hmm.
• 21:16
  You know that a podcast guest touched on something related to this, so you go into Rev or wherever you get your podcast transcripts from.
• 21:24
  Do you pull that out for the writer, or do you just kind of make the library of transcripts available to writers and say, like, "Hey, you know, don't go Googling for random quotes on this. Like, just go get them here"?
• 21:35
  Yeah. So this has evolved over time. At first, I would just, light bulb would go off as a guest was speaking and say, you know, "This is related to this post."
• 21:44
  You know, write a note to myself, "When you write the brief, remember to link that."
• 21:49
  And so for the first 10, 15 episodes, I kind of just had a personal encyclopedic knowledge of everything that was said and would just drop it in the brief as we were writing it.
• 22:00
  But over time, now that we're getting into the 30-plus guests, and it's, that's getting un- unwieldy. One kind of crazy thing we've done now is...
• 22:10
  I'm jumping ahead, but after we publish the episode, we publish a bunch of clips on...
• 22:15
  We do shorts on YouTube, we do TikToks, we do sort of more just horizontal five-minute YouTube videos, and then what we've started to do is upload them all back to our website.
• 22:26
  So we have, like, a full video library of all these clips.
• 22:29
  And so now I can actually just, when we're writing a blog, I could sort of Control+F our site or, or go to Google and do a site search for the keyword or whatever, like, you know, sales leadership, and then it'll bring up all the transcripts on Google from our own website of all the times someone's talked about sales leadership.
• 22:47
  And then we'll also pull up video clips, 'cause they're all indexed on Google now. Most of them are indexed. So- That's good... we have this... Yeah. It's like- That's really good.
• 22:55
  So there's a transcr- So if you post, like, a five-minute clip on the website, that has a transcript? Yeah. Actually- Okay... we just have the transcript on the original episode. We don't have the transcript on the clip.
• 23:03
  Okay. But also we've, you know, we've sort of SEO optimized- Sure... the titles of all the clips, so it can be, you know, the, any kind of interesting thing can be found there, and that works super well.
• 23:13
  And so we thought that might be an interesting SEO play as well, just super long tail, like Notion community strategy or Notions content strategy, things like that, and the jury's still out on whether that is doing anything.
• 23:28
  But it's incredibly useful just to be able to feed our content strategy. And I'll say one more thing about that. Also, if you go to our blog, we'll, we'll give you the link,
• 23:39
  we've intermingled all those video clips with our blog posts. Cool. And so- Love it... when you land there, you see not just, like, you know, SEO optimized blog titles in a long list and it's lame.
• 23:52
  You're kind of hit with this... It's like a New York Times style, like, bunch of thumbnails down the side, bunch of articles, bunch of video clips, and it feels more...
• 24:01
  It makes us feel bigger than we are in terms of our marketing versus our company size, but it just gives this experience of, wow, these people are... Like, they understand me.
• 24:12
  They're talking about the things I care about. And so that's just kind of a pure, like, brand impression strategy that I think is, is powerful and something more people should do.I completely agree.
• 24:24
  I don't think there's anything better than people's names and faces on your website.
• 24:28
  You know, like, it stands in such contrast to, like, a SaaS website with a bunch of text and stock photos and copy that says stuff like, "Collaborate- Yeah... save time and money," or whatever- Totally...
• 24:39
  you know, value proposition people are throwing out there. So I love that. Yeah.
• 24:44
  When you think of when you're an early stage company, the actual customer logos you can get on your site sort of pale in comparison to the customer logos you can interview. Like, we have Loom as a customer, so that's...
• 24:56
  We can have their logo in both places. That's really... Yeah.
• 24:58
  But to get someone from Notion and Loom and Facebook and all these very well-known companies on our podcast, then you can use that, I think, was it Rand Fishkin called it, like, permissionless co-marketing?
• 25:12
  I think [chuckles] it was- Ooh, that's a [chuckles] that is a great term [chuckles]... it's a great term, right? That you just, like, put yourself next to another brand and be like, "Look, we're friends." Yeah.
• 25:19
  [chuckles] And that's, that's what we're doing, right? That's great. That's a lot of work, too, though, right? I mean- Well-... especially, like, I'm putting it, like, you know, in your seat...
• 25:24
  not when you're an automation wizard. [chuckles] Okay. Yes. That's the thing, though. Yeah. Like, to- Yeah... do the podcast. Th- th- I find that pulling the podcast clips takes forever. Like- Yeah...
• 25:34
  to go find, like, the 30 to 60 second thing that I wanna share, like, that is... That takes a...
• 25:38
  If you wanna do that five times, it's even harder, and then, like, get them on the right platforms, write the copy for those. But then also to bring it back to your website, I'm sure you have to do some, like, custom
• 25:49
  stuff on your CMS to, like, make it all look like you want it to look. And I mean, is it... Have you automated most of that away? Most of it, yes.
• 25:58
  So while, while the episode's happening, I, um, have the liberty of not being the host. So I sit there and I sort of mentally flag.
• 26:06
  I take furious notes while the conversation's happening and can normally pick the quotes with sort of 90% accuracy- Got it. Got it... while the- So you- While the interview's happening. Got it.
• 26:15
  So I'm sitting in on all the episodes. So you're, you're on the... Oh, Got it. So you're like the producer- Yeah... sort of. But I'm in... Yeah.
• 26:19
  I'm in the background, and I'm just yelling at people when, you know, their- [chuckles]... camera isn't pointed at the right direction or whatever. And so I'm able to flag those.
• 26:26
  But then I have a freelancer helping with a lot of the sort of menial tasks around an episode. But we're using that Opus Clip AI tool, which basically identify...
• 26:35
  We can upload our whole episode, and it identifies, like, what it thinks are interesting moments from the show. So we're able to pull a bunch of clips that way.
• 26:42
  But then we also manually, through our podcast agency, make a couple clips. And that's sort of, like, the high value.
• 26:49
  We're gonna post those on our founders page, and then we go and blast YouTube Shorts with, like, 10 clips from every episode. And some of them pop off, which is great. I mean, pop off is, like, a few hundred views.
• 26:59
  We don't really have any followers. But they just get picked up by the algorithm and go. And so we've been able to grow our subscribers on YouTube primarily through the Reels, which is...
• 27:08
  Or the Shorts, sorry, which is interesting. This is, like, a world I just don't know anything about. I know. This is very interesting. Me, me neither- How much are you-... to be honest. Yeah. Well, how...
• 27:17
  Do you feel that it's worth it, and how are you measuring it, if at all? Yeah. Is it worth it? I think so. I, I think YouTube SEO is an untapped thing for B2B especially.
• 27:29
  I think people are just starting to think about it, and so we're trying to... We always say, "Let's try to zig when other people zag," and that's what we're trying to do is let's figure out YouTube. Is it worth it?
• 27:39
  I think all the reasons that we already talked about of how it also feeds into our other content. Like, now I can...
• 27:44
  I have those videos uploaded, and I can put them in a blog post, and that just gives a different impression than whatever, a quote from a writer or from a- Yeah... SME.
• 27:53
  And then the other thing we didn't really talk about, too, is we use... It's wrong to say, like, sneaky sales play, but, like, you talk to the people on your podcast who would be ideal customers of- Yeah...
• 28:04
  Doc someday, or they match the ICP, so their network are icel- ideal Doc customers. And so that has just been super valuable.
• 28:13
  You know, you multiply number of guests times their audience, and they like and share your post. That has to be worth it, right? For, for an hour, maybe two hours of work per episode, especially when there's so many...
• 28:24
  There's limited ways to get your name out there. Yeah. And so- Definitely. But yeah, that huge long tail of work, I've automated a lot of it with Airtable. So we kinda just have a grid. Surprise.
• 28:35
  So we have a, a grid where, you know, here's the episode, here's all the clips associated with it, upload the video in there, and it goes through some series of Zaps that ends up on YouTube.
• 28:44
  And so, uh, and we try to automate as much of those little uploading steps. There is, like, a publish to YouTube Zap, and so- That is pretty slick... you can go from, you can go from database to YouTube fairly easily.
• 28:58
  And then, yeah, haven't done anything that fancy with AI yet though, but Airtable does have AI fields now where you could like, for example, upload the transcript of the clip and then get it to write something about it is something I've been thinking about.
• 29:11
  Right. You know, just kind of a side note to this conversation is I feel that the skill set of the content marketer is really changing, and I feel like you're very representative of that.
• 29:24
  Automation is huge, but automation is not just kind of dreaming up, you know, efficiencies. It's, like, learning how to use these tools and, like, really making it happen, which there's a few different levels of.
• 29:37
  There's, like, oh, we can send our email subscribers to this thing, but then there's, like, building out complete workflows like you described.
• 29:44
  Sometimes really hard, but it, it's like some of the, what you described is, like, probably not possible or maybe not worth it unless you are going to automate it. And then another that I would cite is multimedia.
• 29:55
  You know, content marketers are now... Like, you just can't rely solely on text any longer. You just can't do it. So, like, you gotta learn the tools. You gotta learn the mediums.
• 30:05
  You gotta learn how to appeal to people on these platforms and, like, frankly feel a little intimidated by all of that stuff myself. But, like, to kinda hack it- So am I-... as a content marketer... to be honest. Yeah.
• 30:16
  Yeah, but you're doing it. You know? Like, you've... You're, you're, I would imagine, learning a ton as you do all these things. Yeah.
• 30:22
  And I think if there's a lesson for people to take away is that I wasn't doing- This is a LinkedIn post right here. Yeah, exactly. Here we go. I need a catchy tagline.
• 30:30
  But no, uh, the, the lesson to take away is that I wasn't doing any of this stuff, like, maybe a year and a half ago. I- Right...
• 30:37
  I s- I sort of sawI was at a company called Butter, and I saw one of our product managers doing all this like Slack to Notion automations and things like that, and, and that's when it kinda clicked for me that
• 30:50
  you can be an individual contributor to a certain extent who's a very good writer or very knowledgeable at SEO, but that kinda has an upper cap on how much you can contribute, right? If you're just a proficient like
• 31:04
  thinker or m- or maker. And to scale yourself to like the leadership level or just be sort of extra valuable to your company, you need to become a very good project manager. You need to be...
• 31:17
  You, you talk about this all the time.
• 31:19
  You need to be really good at vendor management and work with freelancers and contractors and agencies and then the thing that I've really leaned into as a one-person team is this automation stuff because it's a necessity.
• 31:29
  Like, if I were just sitting down and writing eight blog posts a month,
• 31:32
  you know, Doc would grow, but it would grow at a much slower speed, and you're sort of like at a startup that's in the seed stage where we're just trying to get heard out there.
• 31:41
  You kinda have to be in a constant like where can we find efficiencies? Where can we be bigger than we are? And, and for me, automation was something that I leaned super heavy into.
• 31:51
  And yeah, I mean, like I took computer science in university. That helped, but just a little bit. And so it was just, you know, you have to lean into your personal strengths, too. Yeah. Super cool.
• 32:01
  You know, just s- little teaser.
• 32:03
  We're gonna re-release the Superpath marketplace soon, and for years it's been, you know, Airtable and Zapier and kinda me behind the scenes trying to make it look kind of more legit than it actually is.
• 32:19
  But I've built an app which is not quite ready to be released, but it's using no-code tools that you can log in. It's fully branded. You would never know a real developer didn't make it.
• 32:29
  Like, my point basically has been like these tools are insane. Like, the fact that I can't code but can make an app and sell access to it is wild.
• 32:41
  Anyways, if that's inspiration for people who maybe need a little kick in the butt to- I'm inspired. Yes, [chuckles] just to like, you know- You inspired me...
• 32:47
  get going on some of this automation stuff 'cause it's super cool. I wanted to ask you, too, about are you still a one-person marketing team? Y- yes. Like in-house, yes. Yeah. So- But you have contractors and- Yeah.
• 33:00
  Yeah. Yeah, so like we th- this person that I mentioned who's helped me with the podcast, she spends, I think, 10 hours a week working on that, so that's pretty- Yeah... significant.
• 33:10
  I have a sort of an old buddy who I just send all kinds of random odd jobs to, like, "Can you upload this blog to Webflow?" Or can you, you know, he's sort of a generalist.
• 33:19
  H- "Can you write the FAQ for all these product pages?" Like, he's just sort of a generalist hours bucket, and so in-house, yes, I'm a team of one.
• 33:28
  I mean, Alex, our CEO, is a marketer as well, so he takes a significant chunk on his plate of, you know, writing some LinkedIn posts or, or you know, he does all the product launch videos. He'll record- Yeah...
• 33:41
  himself going through the product, which takes a lot off my plate. But, uh, yeah, still, still a team of one. Okay, cool. And the rest of the team has changed.
• 33:50
  You were telling me a little bit before we started recording that there's a sales team, customer support or customer success, and I'm curious how, like how does that change what you do on a day-to-day basis?
• 34:02
  Because if I remember correctly, there weren't sales and customer success last time we talked, so I'd imagine at the very least you're, you know, you guys are communicating about, "Here's what I'm doing.
• 34:12
  Here's what you're doing." Like, uh, is there some synergy here, or is it, you know, has it developed into something more kinda deliberate than that? Yeah.
• 34:20
  So when I joined Doc, we hired an AE on the same day, so we had one sales rep- Okay... sort of taking away the founder-led sale thing away from Alex and, you know, building out a sales motion.
• 34:30
  And one thing we learned in the past year is that Doc ended up a lot more of a top-down sell, more sales led than product led. And so in the last few months, we hired a head of sales and then another AE.
• 34:44
  They always say you should have two sales reps because it was like a Jason Lemkin thing. You should have two sales reps 'cause they have to compete with each other. Um- [laughs] That's such a sales thing.
• 34:52
  And, and like... Yeah. Yeah, and you have to lear- you have to learn like what's like an individual's, you know, failings versus a product fail.
• 34:59
  Anyway, so but it's been, and it's been transformative for us to have a head of sales and two reps. But what's really changed for us on the marketing side is that we used to only answer to ourselves. Uh, we- Right...
• 35:10
  Alex and I could put our heads together and say, "This seems like a smart thing to do. I love SEO. Do you love SEO?"
• 35:15
  [laughs] "Yes, let's make blogs, and then two years from now, let's look and see if any of this worked," right?
• 35:21
  But when you have a, a sales team, that's completely unsatisfying to, you know, to go to a sales leader, and they're like, you know, like, "What are you working on all day?"
• 35:29
  And they're like, "I did outbound to 1,000 people. What did you do?" Like, "Oh, I wrote a blog." Right? So you really have to- Yeah. Yeah...
• 35:36
  change how you report on content, how you sort of communicate internally about it. And one thing that's been new to me, just to be totally transparent, is sitting in like pipeline meetings.
• 35:46
  I've worked with sales teams report before, but it was more of the sort of service, you know, they tell me I need this asset or like, you know, make a sales deck for me, and I would go and do that.
• 35:56
  This is, is way more we're sitting in a go-to-market team meeting and saying, "Here's the pipeline that, that's been created this month. You know, marketing inbound has created this much.
• 36:05
  Sales outbound has created this much," and we're looking at those numbers, and, you know, when you see your number and it's not, you know, they're growing the outbound faster than we're growing the inbound, suddenly i- it lights a fire under you a little more on, you know, I, I can't just be patient and do this the usual SEO thing I've been doing.
• 36:22
  I ha- I have to go like more outside the box or, or do the more- Yeah... like growth hack-y urgent things on top of that. And so there's new internal accountability there.
• 36:32
  So, like we have to be accountable for our numbers, and that's, and that's like even the CEO has to like, you know, go to our head of sales and say, "Our marketing initiatives are doing this for our pipeline," which is interesting.
• 36:43
  And so that's caused us to look at our content strategy, too, and say-You know, should we keep making eight blog posts a month, or now is it the time to, like, focus on backlinks and sponsoring communities- Right...
• 36:58
  and partnerships and influencers, and what other things can we add on top of this mix to move the needle quicker? Normally, all that doesn't fall under a content person, but I'm the only marketer, so I guess my,
• 37:09
  the other side of that is my role is sort of broadening more into a generalist marketer. Yeah, that's interesting. You know, if you ever wanna start a business, you're building all the right skills to do it.
• 37:20
  That's just another- Right... side note. But, like, the more generalist you are, actually, the better suited you are to be an entrepreneur one day, if that ends up being what you wanna do.
• 37:28
  I am curious, though, like, you look at the sales pipeline generated, you look at the marketing pipeline generated. Have you made any significant changes to content strategy based on working with sales?
• 37:41
  Yeah, one thing that we sort of shifted gears on was we were like, "Okay, it's great that we have 200 blogs and, you know, a certain percentage of them are getting traffic, but we really want these 10 blogs to get traffic or these five product pages to do better in the rankings."
• 37:59
  And I think having that internal accountability made me...
• 38:02
  Like, now I just have a list of those five pages and those 10 blogs, and I look specifically at their traffic and their rankings and, like, building backlinks to those pages, for example, which it was easier before to just say, "Oh, look, uh, this blog that's not that relevant is pulling up our site traffic and the line's going up-" Yeah.
• 38:20
  [laughs] "... and therefore, great."
• 38:21
  You can live a little more in, you know, fantasy land, whereas being accountable to the sales team for, you know, great, that blog has traffic, but is it, you know, the classic, like, is it resulting in sales?
• 38:31
  It's true, and it, it has. Having to look at that number every week and sit, look people in the face, and report on it has really made a difference there. Yeah. Super interesting. How about the PLG sales thing?
• 38:44
  You know, like, I certainly think of Dock as, like, product-led growth. Has your and the company's view changed on that as you've built up a sales team? Yeah.
• 38:55
  So I think one side of that is we kind of made a conscious decision to move up market once the product got better, so we were able to support larger sales teams.
• 39:04
  The, the teams also that were really having the trouble that Dock sort of solved were bigger teams.
• 39:10
  So either they have 10 sales reps, they have a long sales cycle, and the leader really wants to help their reps all follow the same process, do the same follow-up, cons- make things easier for their buyer, and they had to kind of be bigger teams for that to happen.
• 39:26
  And therefore, it's harder to do, like, pure product-led growth into, like, a sales leader with a 15, 20-person team.
• 39:32
  Our contracts got bigger, which is great, but from a content perspective, it didn't change that much, 'cause we can still, you know, you can still get a lead by getting someone into the product, and you can still post on LinkedIn and try to get the attention of sales leaders.
• 39:47
  One thing that it shifted our content a little bit to, like, case studies, for example. We, we're in lots of s- sales conversations and really needed strong case studies.
• 39:56
  And so, you know, you and I have talked about our case study process before and the Superpath community thing, but that's something I'm constantly doing.
• 40:04
  Like, we have six or seven or eight, which is kind of a lot for a company of our size, but we keep building more. So that's been, that's been a big thing.
• 40:12
  And, and things like messaging, putting messaging documentation together for our sales team, putting together, like, sort of the ROI case for Dock. We wrote a blog on that.
• 40:22
  How Dock consolidates a bunch of other tool stacks. Like, we've kind of had to do the bottom funnel sort of sales objections that our team typically faces and write content for that and give that to them.
• 40:34
  And it's sometimes they don't even use the blog we wrote, they just, like, we go through the exercise of that argument and then put it in their hands, and then, then they're better equipped for those conversations- Yeah...
• 40:44
  once they come up. That's a great point. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to plug Superpath Pro, where you've done a couple of- [laughs]... workshops for us. People can get access to those.
• 40:53
  The one thing you had mentioned on our, the last time we talked on this podcast was Dock was, like, PLG, and you were primarily selling to smaller companies because they're more open to trying new tools.
• 41:05
  So I think that's actually a very interesting development, that Dock's product has become more mature. You have a better understanding of who needs it and a better understanding of how you're gonna get it to them too.
• 41:16
  It's just, like, an interesting, like- Yeah... companies evolve, like, you gotta evolve with it. Yeah.
• 41:20
  And part of that, part of our strategy has been intentional, in that we really focus on SEO because you can write the blogs and you can get the traffic and the product can change, versus if we were super heavily promoting the product or something or going out into the world and really putting it in front of pe- uh, spending our budget on getting, like, ads, getting in front of people right now.
• 41:40
  We sort of took the slow, deliberate approach, because once we'd have the traffic, the product would be ready for it. And now we feel much more comfortable with product fit.
• 41:48
  Like, we have reporting built in and we have a whole content management system in it. It's just better suited for larger teams. And so that really enabled us to, like, now we can go...
• 41:58
  We sort of have been talking about this as, like, our coming out tour. This year, like- Nice... we're gonna splash Dock everywhere because now it can handle it. And, um, yeah. That's great.
• 42:09
  Well, we will genuinely have to circle back in a year or so and- Yeah... hear w- how it went. Did you roll out new channels? You know, how's it going with sales? Are there, like, 15 salespeople now?
• 42:21
  Are you still a team of one, or do you have, like, you know, a massive team working under you? I'll be so curious to know, like, w- how all of this stuff develops. And in the meantime, where can we point people?
• 42:32
  I mean, obviously, your LinkedIn, the Dock Podcast. Grow and Tell might be another good place to point people. Anywhere else? Yeah. Follow me on LinkedIn.
• 42:39
  I keep teasing that I'm gonna put a course together on automation, kind of Automation 101 for content marketers, and maybe by the time this podcast is out, who knows, I will still be teasing it. But maybe it'll exist.
• 42:51
  [laughs] And so yeah, definitely follow me on LinkedIn. Yeah, listen to Grow and Tell.
• 42:55
  It's a really cool podcast because it's talking to all the revenue leaders, not just marketers, and so you get a sense of, you know, how does a sales team run? How does a customer success team run?
• 43:05
  And I think it's a great way to sort of scale your skill set and, and knowledge as a marketer who tends to interface with those teams. Yeah. It's really good. The branding for the podcast also is very good.
• 43:15
  It's, like, retro, Saved by the Bell kinda thing. It's really good. I mean, if nothing else, go check out that. And then obviously, if you're in Superpath, you'll see Eric there in the newsletter- I'm not hard to find...
• 43:27
  all that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time, Eric. Seriously appreciate it. It's always good to catch up. We actually catch up surprisingly not as often as people might think.
• 43:35
  We talk in Slack a lot, but we don't often have the chance to do this, so it's good to catch up. I think most of our conversations are on camera. It's like a weird reality show. Yeah.
• 43:42
  [laughs] Where people can watch our, the entire, like The Bachelor. [laughs] People can see the entirety of our relationship from beginning to end. That's so funny.
• 43:50
  Hopefully, it ends better than most of The Bachelor relationships do. All right, this is going off in a direction I didn't intend. [laughs] We will see you next time. Eric, thanks as always. Thanks so much, Jimmy.
• 44:00
  Take care. [outro music]