Aug 10, 2023 · 1h 3m · in-depth
The Zero to One B2B marketing playbook | Alex Kracov (Lattice, Dock)
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In this episode of First Round's 'In Depth' podcast, Dock co-founder and former Lattice VP of Marketing Alex Kracov shares a tactical masterclass on zero-to-one B2B marketing. Drawing from scaling Lattice from employee number three to a 20-person department, Kracov breaks down hands-on hiring, category redefinition, community-led media engines, and the necessity of compounding inbound growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Brett holds 18.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Brett as informed peer 4.5 Guest teaching 6.3 Guest disagreement 1.2 Brett pushing back 1.2
speaking balance: gold is Brett, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 58:55 Dismissing founder obsession with silver bullet channels
Alex forcefully pushes back against founders looking for quick-fix marketing silver bullets, stressing that B2B buying journeys are messy and non-linear.
Hardest push from Brett ▶ 1:01:58 Brett probes marketing as the chronic lagging functionBrett challenges the conventional sequencing of startup functions by arguing that early marketing consistently lags sales and product traction.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 35:30 The button-clicker doer archetypeAlex breaks down why standard marketing resumes fail in early startups, educating founders on screening for candidates who can execute directly inside tools.
Brett holds their own ▶ 46:10 Brett frames the 'because of vs in spite of' startup dilemmaBrett demonstrates deep domain pattern recognition by articulating how founders often misattribute success to specific tactics rather than broader environmental conditions.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Brett as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Brett pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lattice’s Day One: Building Core Marketing Foundations | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Brett sets the stage by asking Alex to reflect on early-stage B2B marketing foundations at Lattice. Alex details his experimental approach to setting up the initial website and positioning without any prior SaaS experience. | |
| Balancing Short-Term Sales Support with Long-Term Brand Building | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Brett probes how Alex balanced short-term pipeline demands against long-term brand equity. Alex explains how he ran direct-response ads to support sales reps while seeding long-term HR media assets. | |
| Time-Boxing Marketing Tasks and Community-Centric Strategy | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Alex explains his time-boxing methodology by dedicating specific days of the week to different growth levers. He outlines how community and content served as Lattice's overarching marketing through-line. | |
| The Overlooked Power of Inbound Marketing and SEO | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Alex argues that early-stage technical founders often underutilize inbound marketing and SEO due to long gestation periods. He emphasizes that early investments in compounding channels are critical for scaling past initial revenue plateaus. | |
| Crafting Resonant Messaging and Redefining Crowded Categories | 5 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Alex discusses redefining crowded categories rather than attempting category creation from scratch. He details how Lattice pivoted messaging from goals to continuous performance management to capture existing budget lines. | |
| Redefining Workspaces with Dock’s External Collaboration Platform | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Brett asks how category positioning applies to Dock's multi-product external workspace. Alex details balancing broad umbrella hero messaging with granular solution landing pages. | |
| Co-Marketing Webinars and Scaling Virtual Events | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Alex outlines how Lattice partnered with complementary ecosystem players like BambooHR for co-branded webinars. He explains how this playbook scaled from kitchen-table webinars to 40,000-person virtual conferences. | |
| The "Resources for Humans" Community and Media Ecosystem | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Alex describes establishing the Resources for Humans community ecosystem across Slack, intimate dinners, and multimedia content. He notes their initial mistake of gating the community exclusively for executives. | |
| Evaluating Marketing Arbitrage: Evergreen Plays vs. Evolving Channels | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Brett asks whether past marketing arbitrage opportunities get exhausted over time. Alex agrees that channels like Slack communities face diminishing returns while evergreen tactics like dinners and content remain potent. | |
| The Million-Dollar Account-Based Marketing (ABM) City Campaign | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Alex details Lattice's million-dollar multi-channel ABM city campaign combining direct mail, billboards, geo-targeted ads, and local events. The coordinated blitz generated substantial pipeline across key tech hubs. | |
| Aligned Incentives and the "Button-Clicker" Mindset | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Brett inquires why Alex was so impactful despite not having standard SaaS credentials. Alex highlights his founder alignment and practical hands-on capability to click buttons and execute directly. | |
| Scaling the Team: From Player-Coach to Marketing Executive | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Alex walks through the sequencing of his first marketing hires, moving from time-consuming tactical execution to functional domain leads. He details the transition from player-coach to executive leadership. | |
| Executive Growth, CEO Alignment, and Marketing Coaching | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Alex candidly shares a critical inflection point where the CEO questioned his ability to scale as VP. He describes bringing on executive coach Francois Dufour to navigate rapid organizational growth. | |
| The Priorities Exercise: Defending Focus Above the Line | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Alex explains the whiteboard priority exercise he used to establish explicit agreements on what marketing would and wouldn't execute. This framework protected focus and eliminated cross-functional friction. | |
| Tactical Approaches to Third-Party Conference Domination | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Alex explains how to maximize ROI at third-party conferences through brand dominance rather than isolated booths. He also reflects on choosing marketing channels that align with founder personality. | |
| Hiring First Marketers: The "Button Clicker" Test | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Brett asks how founders should evaluate early marketing talent. Alex emphasizes the button-clicker test to screen for scrappy builders who can produce tangible output without relying on external agencies. | |
| The Modern Early-Stage B2B Marketing Tech Stack | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Alex outlines his recommended early-stage B2B marketing tech stack and dispels the myth of silver bullet channels. He highlights the non-linear, multi-touch nature of modern B2B buying journeys. | |
| Why Marketing Lags Sales and the Danger of Delayed Investment | 6 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Brett synthesizes his observation that early-stage marketing is often the lagging function compared to sales. Alex explains that delayed investment in compounding marketing bets causes companies to stall out at scale. |
Statements from this episode (30)
Kracov: Building an HR media brand creates distribution for B2B software
“And if we could build a media brand that was focused on HR people, that's our distribution.”
Kracov: SaaS media properties bridge value before prospects are ready to buy
“Once you build that kind of media property, if you will, the nice thing about SAS is like, there's only one advertiser and that was Lattice. And so we could sort of use that as a bridge between providing value to the folks before they were ready to buy perform…”
Kracov: Content and community marketing compound over time like software
“I generally think like nothing is going to work right away. Things work when you stick with it, right? The beauty with either content or community Is that they compound very much like software.”
Kracov: Early-stage B2B startups underutilize inbound marketing
“I still think inbound marketing is generally under the utilized by early stage. Companies, especially on the engineering side, if you're an engineering leader and becoming a founder, it's very foreign to them.”
Kracov: Delaying SEO until scaling to $2M-$10M ARR hurts growth
“When you're early stage, it's sometimes the best stage to invest in it because you need SEO to be working when you're two, three, five, ten million in ARR. If you just start making those investments later, it's gonna, you know, really hurt your growth in the f…”
Kracov: Early startups look bigger by copying enterprise website architectures
“You can just feel so much bigger than you are if you nail your website. And so if you would just invest a little bit more into the design of your website, but if you even also make your website like bigger, right? Go look, you know, extreme examples, go look a…”
Kracov: Redefining existing categories gains traction faster than creating new ones
“It is really hard to just go out and create a brand new category and Lattice did a tiny bit later, which we get into, but we really redefine categories. And that's, I think a much easier way to get your traction in the market because we could go to companies a…”
Berson: Most people confuse category creation with category redefinition
“I think that a lot of people like the idea of category creation because they think it gives them a chance to kind of be the monopolist or the category king. But I think one, to your point, it's very hard. And two, most people confuse category creation with try…”
Kracov: Granular solutions pages often drive more customer acquisition than homepages
“What you can do with your website, and this is why I'm a huge fan of like product and solutions pages, is you can have pages that speak directly to each of those subcategories.
Keep going with the doc example.
We have a, you know, a page around customer onboar…”
Kracov: Multi-product platform approaches create harder sales but bigger businesses
“It makes the sales process a lot harder too, because you just,
You're, as a sales rep, you have to be trained to be able to speak to a lot of different use cases and you deal with wildly different competitive sets.
So that's like a danger of this approach, but…”
Kracov: Evaluate early-stage homepage copy by ARR growth, not conversion rates
“I generally am not looking though at conversion rates that
Like I am not saying on my homepage, am I trying to increase this from three percent to four percent?
I'm trying to say, what's the best way we're going to explain this in market?
And then I'm looking …”
Kracov: B2B influencer marketing is just audience borrowing
“I think something that's more in vogue now is a lot of this like influencer marketing that's like happening, especially on LinkedIn, where a lot of companies are spending money on different podcast brands or different people with big like LinkedIn influencers.…”
Kracov: Lattice grew its virtual event to 40,000 attendees
“And just to give you a sense of like how much that's scaled, flash forward five,
Years.
We had a virtual event where 40,000 people, and we called it resources for humans virtual.
That was after years and years of doing these webinars monthly.”
Kracov: VIP-only communities fail because early-career members drive conversation
“We first started the Slack community trying to go after VPs of HR and we were like, let's make it a VIP community. And it fell flat, like no conversation, nothing happened. But once we sort of broadened it up to sort of more all HR people, what we found is peo…”
Kracov: Lattice's HR Slack community grew to about 20,000 members
“That went from, you know, zero to like 20,000 People in the Slack community, I think it is today.”
Kracov: Dock avoids Slack communities because the marketing arbitrage has decayed
“A lot of these things go out of style and like a doc, I'm not starting a Slack community. There are way too many of them. They get noisy. It's hard to scale. There's still value and I'm sure some people can still make it successful, but for me, I just don't th…”
Kracov: In-person dinners will always remain an evergreen B2B marketing play
“Like dinners will always be good. Meeting up in person, hanging out with your target audience, you know, spending an hour with them, drinking, drinking a little bit, you know, that builds really good relationships with people.”
Kracov: Promoting personal profiles with LinkedIn ads offers marketing arbitrage
“You basically have to start paying for content now, but you can start running ads as a person now on LinkedIn. And so that's a really interesting arbitrage potentially where you can spend a lot of money and promote Content as a person on LinkedIn, not just as …”
Kracov: Lattice ABM City campaign generated millions in pipeline and revenue
“And this campaign generated millions and millions of pipeline and revenue.”
Kracov: Effective SaaS GTM builds concentrated density city by city
“SaaS is funny because you can just like take customers from everywhere, but I thought a lot of great go to market strategy is how do you make sure like everyone in New York is using Lattice and then everyone in Austin is using Lattice.”
Kracov: VPs must work exclusively through managers, not individual execution
“When you're a VP, you're really working through managers. And you can't actually do any of the work yourself. You have to be a leader and kind of inspire.”
Kracov: Lattice CEO Jack Altman questioned his ability to scale to VP
“So like, I think the, probably the toughest moment for me at Lattice was, I think it was like series B ish. Like right before I really started hiring some of these more strategic leaders, Jack sort of went to me and was like, Hey, are you the guy? Like, are yo…”
Kracov: 'Above-the-line' whiteboard prioritization protected marketing focus at Lattice
“There was a priorities exercise where I wrote out on a whiteboard every single thing that we were doing, every single thing that we could be doing. And then we kind of went down the line and said, okay, what are the five things we're going to put above this li…”
Kracov: Dock skips expensive conferences to focus on owned media
“Events and conferences, like there's so many conferences you can go to and they work and you can stand at the booth and you can talk to people, but it's like kind of expensive and it's kind of time consuming and it can work. And those were things that I did in…”
Kracov: Winning third-party conferences requires integrated brand domination, not just booths
“I think what's most important around conferences and the way to do it right. And I would say we only kind of did this at Lattice was you want to try and like dominate a conference, you know, from a brand presence perspective. So you have the booth, but then yo…”
Kracov: Early founders should pick marketing channels they personally enjoy
“In the early days, you have to pick a few channels. You have to pick a few programs and things that you're going to really invest in and build a marketing muscle and get good at. You don't have enough budget to do it well. You don't have enough people. And I t…”
Kracov: Hiring creative writers for B2B SEO content failed at Lattice
“One hire, you know, I sort of made a mistake on was somebody who was maybe a little bit more of like a creative writer. And I thought, oh, they could apply this like really creative writing. And they had done a lot of other, you know, like really interesting f…”
Kracov: Early startup marketing hires must pass the 'button clicker' test
“You want to separate the talkers from the doers. And so the way I think about it is like the button clicker test. You want to make sure that they can actually sit behind a laptop and do marketing.”
Kracov recommends pairing Ahrefs and Clearscope for early-stage B2B content
“When it comes to like the SEO and content side of things, generally what I would recommend is you get a tool like a refs where you can look for keywords, use a tool like clear scope to make sure that you're actually writing really, really good content.”