👋 dock.us/library/meet-dock

First Lil' @dock_us feature update that I designed 'coded' is now in production 🥹 I really love this feeling, which I missed compared to the brand/Webflow world Big merci to @VictorKmita and eng. team for helping and letting me contribute ✨ You can see what we used to have in 🧵

@dock_us Big fan of your UI guys - well played 👏 Just signed up to the paid version.

Your product is super easy to get into and use and there’s a minimum of friction points. It’s got an innovative architecture that allows you to see multiple views in one place. The value use cases goes so far beyond what you advertise that it’s insane. I use dock for sales. I use dock for investors. I use dock to transmit information to potential technical cofounders. I use dock for everything.

Le ✨ @julienfsqt next to the “dock” wordmark he designed for us 🙏 ⚪️🔵 (I know, I’m good at taking pictures 😅)

One reason I love making this show is hearing about the things that didn't go right before companies found success. Gong's sales process went through a few major pivots before they found the right fit. Chris learned early on that selling and positioning Gong directly to Sales Enablement as a coaching tool was a tough entry point. When they repositioned as a pipeline management and execution platform, they got in front of CROs with buying power — which had a major sales impact (we're finding similar success being more top-down at Dock).

One of the mistakes I made early on at @dock_us was trying to build for too many uses cases. I wanted to create a horizontal product for any type of business to business interaction from sales to recruiting to finance. But this proved to be an enormous challenge on many levels. 1) Customer feedback was all over the place - when went to talk to customers we heard such a drastic range of things to build. For example, recruiters wanted Dock to integrate with ATS systems, while sales teams wanted us to integrate with CRM systems. We couldn’t build both with our limited resources. 2) Product experience was too open ended - since we wanted to build a horizontal product, we tried to build a super flexible product experience. But this decision led to an activation issue for our customers. The product wan't tailored enough to actual solve for any one persona’s challenge 3) Hard to define our positioning - since we needed to speak to many different people, we had to create generic messaging that spoke to no one. 4) Difficult to gain GTM momentum - when running ads or sending emails or reaching out to folks on LinkedIn, we tried to go after too many personas. We weren’t able to create content that resonated, since we had too many goals. We spread ourselves thin across personas which limited the amount of organic word of mouth growth. Everything changed in our business when we decided to focus. Today, Dock focuses on helping revenue teams collaborate with customers. We have three core uses: sales deal room, customer onboarding, and client portals. This niche works for Dock since all these use cases are interconnected. The sales deal room leads into the customer onboarding plan which ends up as a client portal. Our product matches the natural progression of the customer journey. Everything is focused around a company’s most most important relationship - the customer. Once we made this shift our growth started to take off and everything became easier. We’ve been able to build a more valuable product and our sales/marketing efforts have become way more straightforward. Focus is the key to growth.

Loved hearing @ToddBusler's journey from getting laughed out of the room for pitching a $600k deal for the first time at @heap:

It's nice to finally showcase how those Lil' simple things instantly make it feel on brand for each of our @dock_us customers 🎨 I also wonder what kind of transition I could play with to make it more delightful and clear, or if this might just be enough 🤔

This not a plug for @dock_us, but this is just a simple but effective tool for customer onboarding. I give credit where credit is due.

Experimenting with a Lil' animation to showcase @dock_us shortcuts! 👀

It's hard to add a self-serve motion later in your company's lifecycle. @mariegassee, who led @Box's initiative to add self-serve, shared her toughest lessons from implementing a new system at an established company: