When Dock co-founder and CEO Alex Kracov was working at Lattice, an HR startup, he was in charge of a marketing team of 20 people, and he noticed that as the company grew and moved up market, the sales team was having trouble organizing collateral like the pitch deck, ROI analysis and feature videos for large potential customers.
As Kracov pointed out, when you start selling into bigger organizations, you aren’t just convincing a single buyer, you are selling to a buying team, usually with one or two people acting as your champion. He wanted a way to organize all the related sales materials in a standardized way.
He ended up building a solution himself that would be a precursor of sorts to what became Dock. “I built this prototype in Webflow, a no code tool, and it basically allowed our sales team to duplicate a private microsite for each customer in the buying process,” he said. After seeing this prototype being used on a regular basis by his sales team at Lattice, Kracov figured he was onto something. He left his job as VP of Marketing to launch Dock last April, and the startup launched its initial beta in August of last year.
“So the way I think about Dock is it’s a collaborative workspace for anyone in your company. There are a lot of different potential use cases, but the main one we are focused on right now is helping companies own the full customer lifecycle, Kracov explained. That comes down to helping a sales team create a reusable, templatable process for sharing sales materials with buying teams with a tool purpose-built for the sales motion. The tool itself comes with a number of templates out of the box to help customers get started.
Dock proposal microsite example Image Credits: Dock
He says this ability to customize these sites for your brand and customers separates it from a tool like Notion or Google Slides or Docs, and other workarounds sales teams often use. You can also link it to your CRM database, and you get analytics about opens, read time and so forth, so you get a sense of whether people are seriously looking at the materials or not.
The startup currently has five people, and that includes the three co-founders, with plans to hire as many as 10 additional employees in the next year. Kracov says the goal, however, is to keep it lean and build the company as conservatively as possible for now.
As he looks to add employees, he says that being a fully remote company certainly helps with building a diverse organization, especially giving him the latitude to hire from anywhere. In fact, his first two employees are based in Nigeria and India.
Today the company announced a $3 million seed led by Altman Capital. It’s not a coincidence that this firm is run John Altman and his brother Max. John is the co-founder and CEO at Kracov’s former company, Lattice, and he has been supportive of the fledgling startup.
The round also includes additional investors Operator Collective, Flexport funds and a slew of industry angels.