Allow us, for a moment, to set the scene at a local track meet. There are your speed specialists, who quickly burst off the starting line in a full-out sprint. Then there are your distance runners, who can maintain a steady pace, patiently waiting to make their move as the finish line looms. Very rarely would you see the same athlete making the podium in both disciplines.
However, early-stage startup marketers are called upon to become this mythic dual-threat athlete — because standing up a startup’s marketing function from scratch requires the speed of a sprinter and the patience of a marathoner. Equally adept at quickly spinning up a new social campaign that can grab eyeballs with scroll-stopping creative, while also investing in initiatives like SEO with a much longer payoff.
Alex Kracov understands exactly how tricky a needle this is to thread. He was 25 with no SaaS experience when he accepted a role as employee #3 at Lattice, tasked with building an entire marketing org from scratch. But what he lacked in SaaS expertise he made up for with builder bonafides. He’d previously built a dog treat delivery service, a group travel planning app, and even digital campaigns for Blue State Digital, a political adtech firm that helped elect President Obama.
In other words, Kracov passed what he calls the “button-clicker test.” “I developed a lot of these little weird skills, like learning Figma or Sketch. Or how to actually build a website or set up a campaign. It wasn’t just that I could talk about marketing, but I figured out how to click buttons and actually do things, or if I didn’t know how to do something I’d watch a YouTube video and figure it out,” he says.
One of the biggest mistakes people make with early marketing hires is they have someone who can talk the talk, but when it comes to actually doing things, they have to go hire people to click the buttons.
As Kracov helped build Lattice into an HR tech juggernaut, he didn’t come in with any playbooks or priors tucked into his back pocket — he learned on the job. And in this exclusive interview, he takes us behind the scenes of that first year as Lattice’s first marketing hire. Which channels did he invest in first? How did he hone Lattice’s brand voice? And how did he measure what was working?
While Kracov’s experiences are focused on B2B companies, any marketing leader (or founder ready to get serious about marketing) can learn from his approach and this step-by-step guide. He goes channel by channel, explaining his techniques for shaping brand identity, content marketing, community, conferences, SEO and more from the ground up. (And if you want more from the product side of Lattice’s origin story, check out our interview with founder Jack Altman.)
Kracov also highlights the 0-1 strategies he’s returning to once again, now in the founder’s seat at Dock, a revenue enablement platform. So let’s roll back the clock to his day one at Lattice, in July 2016.
Start here: Build your company’s website
Like plenty of first marketing hires at scores of startups before him, Kracov’s first order of business was polishing up Lattice’s website. Starting here served as a two-fold opportunity: “Firstly, I think of a website as your brand’s manifestation in the world. So I used the website as a medium to figure out how we wanted to explain ourselves to our audience and our position in the market,” he says.
More practically, the site is a way to snag potential customers, so a backend infrastructure needed to be put into place to capture leads and nurture them. Kracov was tasked with building out that attribution model and the early stages of a marketing funnel.
But too often, fledgling startups do the bare minimum here. “In the early days, I see people put just a single landing page on their website,” says Kracov. It’s understandable why folks are hesitant to add extra flourish here — the product is still in flux, so investing time in building out a robust website feels like work that could quickly be tossed aside when pivots come later.
However, just because your company is small doesn’t mean your website has to be. For a young company just starting out, the website can be a clever way to give your startup some professional sheen and added legitimacy.
“The best thing about a website is you can do a bit of magic trick in the market,” says Kracov. “You can just feel so much bigger than you are if you nail your website and invest a little bit more into the design of the site.”
The faster you can make your website look bigger, the better.
Next up: Drill down on your messaging
But to create a website that looks robust (even if the product might not be yet), you need a clear story to tell. How exactly do you want to position your product? What is your brand’s voice? What are you offering that’s different from the competition?
Here’s how Kracov suggests first marketing hires tackle these questions:
- Download the founder’s brain: “In a lot of ways, the job of the first marketer is to take what’s in the founder’s brain and tease it out into something that looks like a marketing message,” says Kracov. “Ideally the founder is talking to customers all the time and has unique insights about what they want to build. So translate those insights into something that’s a bit snappier, a bit more punchy, and that stands out in the market.”
- Sit in on calls: In the early days, Kracov was on customer calls with Lattice CEO Jack Altman — and he quickly realized there was a culture shift happening in HR. Gone were the days of Toby from “The Office,” the maligned HR pro. Instead, HR was becoming employee-centric and HR leaders were moving up the org chart and getting seats at the executive table. “We wanted this shift to infuse our messaging — and position Lattice as a new-age brand that helped ease that transition for the modern HR person.”
- Read up on competitors: “One of my favorite ways to figure out messaging and positioning is to go on every competitor’s website,” says Kracov. “I just constantly stare at them and figure out ‘Okay, why are they saying things in a certain way?’ This makes it easier to see how we position ourselves in the market against these companies.” The answer for Lattice? More fun messaging, paired with a differentiated brand identity helped the tool stand out in the crowded category of HR tech.
“There are two questions to answer with messaging: What is the thing our customers are buying? And what is the outcome we’re driving?”
Rather than trying to stuff the homepage with every bit of info you can about the product, your job as a marketer is to mine for the gems that shine the brightest. “Your hero on the website — the first thing people see — should have messaging that stands for the broader umbrella of what you’re trying to do,” says Kracov. “And that’s actually the hardest messaging to get, because it needs to be flexible enough to include all the different things. But if you’re too specific, you’re leaving a lot out.”
Here’s how the messaging at Lattice evolved over time: “We started out as an OKR and goals company. Then we started talking with customers and realized that goals are interesting, but performance reviews and performance management was actually where the big shift was happening. So we focused our content and messaging around ‘Performance management that employees love’ to catch their eye or ear with something that was relevant to them at that moment.”
However, that doesn’t mean that your more targeted marketing has no place on your site. “This is why I’m a huge fan of product and solutions pages,” says Kracov. “You can have pages that speak directly to each subcategory. For Dock, we have pages for customer onboarding, digital sales rooms, client portals, mutual action plans. Each page speaks to a specific audience — and oftentimes people find us through those pages rather than the homepage.”
Often, folks treat the homepage as a sacred text — not to be tweaked without undergoing a behemoth rebranding exercise. But Kracov’s constant fiddling with the Dock homepage’s wording has become a bit of a running joke around the office.
“I’m updating it all the time to try and figure out the right combination of words that describes both the what and the why of Dock — as well as the outcome we’re trying to drive for customers.”
Add on: Test different channels to find what sticks
As your brand and messaging start to take shape, it’s time to start trying to reach folks who might be interested in your product. That means experimenting with different marketing channels — the table is set, now you have to start spinning some plates.
A word of advice here from Kracov. Do not be too precious — a dose of spray and pray is required in the early days.
“Every early-stage founder wants to find that channel that’ll just take them to the moon,” says Kracov. “But with B2B, the buying journey is incredibly complex. The modern buyer does so much research before even coming to your product.”
The biggest thing I’ve learned is there are no silver bullets. People are everywhere, so you need to be in a lot of different places at once, constantly providing value at each of those different stages.
Looking back on his first year at Lattice, Kracov was constantly in experimentation mode. “There are so many different directions you can take marketing,” he says. “Cast a wide net at first — then pick a few channels that really work. And bonus points if you enjoy doing them yourself.
If you’re a networker, lean into things like dinner and in-person events. If you’re brimming with big ideas, start a blog or a podcast. “Especially in those early days when you’re a team of one, you want to pick things that you personally enjoy doing that you can actually stick with. If it always feels like a chore, you’re never going to want to do it.”
Here are some of the channels he tested out early on at Lattice, along with his advice for adding these tactics to your own marketing toolkit.
SEO takes time, so start early
Creating SEO content is not often at the top of a new marketing hire’s to-do list. “SEO can take multiple years to compound, which scares people off from investing in it early on,” says Kracov.
But that’s exactly why it’s important to start early — which is what they did at Lattice. Kracov set up a CMS where they could easily add blog content, and started publishing regularly.
“You don’t have to publish a hundred blog posts right away, just get the marketing muscle going. The reality is early stage is sometimes the best time to invest in it because you need SEO to be working when you’re generating $2, $3, $5, $10 million in ARR,” he says. “Start early so you can thank yourself later.”
And it’s a lesson he’s taken to heart at Dock. “The first big marketing bet we’ve been making has been SEO. How can we put a bunch of content in the world and have that compound over time?”
Find opportunities to partner on webinars
The HR software scene was pretty crowded when Lattice emerged, with plenty of big players. Kracov describes a lot of these companies as HR “frenemies.” The products might integrate in certain ways, while in other respects they’re in direct competition.
The Lattice marketing team decided to use this crowded landscape to their advantage.
“We would go to Bamboo, for example, and offer to do a webinar together,” says Kracov. “We’d make all of the content and do most of the work. Then we would leverage their much larger email list to drive a bunch of leads to this webinar. Then we’d split the leads afterwards and follow up with them.”
Lattice was able to expand their audience through this strategic “piggybacking” onto other brands. They made sure to choose brands with a clear audience overlap. For instance, Bamboo made sense because they worked with upper-SMB and lower mid-market. “That was exactly where we wanted to be,” says Kracov.
“We started really small with these webinars,” says Kracov. “I was literally sitting in Jack’s house doing the first webinar. Then over time you’re able to professionalize it and make it a lot better. Flash forward five years and we had a virtual event with 40,000 people. We called it Resources for Humans Virtual. That was after years and years of doing these webinars monthly. These things scale all the way up.”
Build content and community through a media brand
It might sound ambitious for an early-stage marketing team to launch an entire media brand — but Kracov insists teams can start small and reap big rewards down the line.
“There were not a lot of websites out there in the world that are dedicated to HR people,” says Kracov. “And the ones that existed were really old school. We wanted to build a media brand around this more modern and strategic HR culture,” says Kracov. So Lattice turned ho-hum human resources on its head with the launch of their media brand, Resources for Humans. It included a few related “franchises,” as Kracov puts it:
- Slack community: ”We were one of the first Slack communities of this type. And it was a great way for people to jump into a shared Slack channel and network. HR can be a pretty lonely function, so it was a place for people to ask questions. It went from zero to 20,000 members today.” (Kracov notes that this isn’t a strategy he’s repeating now at Dock, as Slack communities have become much more prolific and it’s hard to stand out. But back when Lattice was starting out, it was a more novel approach.)
- Dinner series: “We also wanted to promote in-person connection. So we would rent out a room at a fancy restaurant like Foreign Cinema in SF and invite a bunch of HR people to talk and have different discussion topics.”
- Newsletter: Fascinating conversations were happening on Slack and at these dinner series — so Lattice turned these discussions into a newsletter. “We created a little online magazine around it then sent it out.”
- Podcast and video series: “We did a video series where Jack would go into people’s offices and interview folks like the head HR at Reddit, and other leaders who were good examples of the modern people leader we wanted to celebrate.”
None of these are disjointed — each initiative compounds. A Slack community soon gives way to a newsletter, whose readers become the audience for a podcast. Folks who attend a dinner might become guests on the video series. As you’re testing out different channels, consider how each experiment might feed into another.
Be choosy with your conference strategy
Conferences can be a hit-or-miss opportunity for startups. “They work and can be a great way to meet people, but they’re also expensive and time-consuming,” says Kracov.
But he found them valuable when growing Lattice’s brand, so he shares his lessons for other marketers who might want to try their hand at it. His number one tip? Go big or go home.
“What’s most important around conferences is trying to dominate from a brand presence perspective,” says Kracov. “So you have the booth, but then you should also have your founder on stage speaking, you should have a happy hour afterwards, and your sales team should be setting up a bunch of meetings ahead of time.”
A conference doesn’t have to be a dull exercise in handshaking, running demos and collecting Linkedin connections. “Don’t be afraid to turn the conference into an integrated marketing campaign for your brand,” says Kracov.
For instance, on the way to one of their conferences, Kracov and the Lattice team packed up the usual: swag, flyers, posters, personal belongings, and…50 Lattice-branded pedicabs.
“Unfortunately, the conference ended up being canceled due to the pandemic — but originally we were really excited to drive people around the conference in these little pedicabs,” says Kracov. “It’s just an example of a way you can try to stand out at a conference and turn it into something bigger.”
Take a big swing: “You get a mug! And you get a mug!”
“At Lattice, there were moments when Jack Altman would burst in and give us a challenge prompt: ‘Say we want to have a $1 million month. How are we going to get there?’” recalls Kracov.
It’s an early marketing hire’s dream: a big goal and total creative freedom. And it bred an ambitious multi-channel campaign called the ABM City Campaign (which Kracov admits isn’t the most compelling name — but don’t let that detract from the rest of the story).
“We started by identifying the HR people at around 15,000 companies — a total of 18,000 HR folks – that we wanted to target. We mapped them out across major tech cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin.”
Next, Kracov spent a large chunk of the budget on 18,000 coffee mugs, all emblazoned with the phrase, “I love humans,” which were mailed to the desks of all those 18,000 HR pros.
The mugs were complemented by an all-out marketing blitz. “We combined that direct mail push with actual billboards in their cities, plus commercials that we geo-targeted on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter,” says Kracov. “It was all time-boxed within a six-week period in the fall. Lattice was everywhere these HR folks looked. They’d get a mug on their desk, see our commercial on YouTube, or spot an ad on the subway.”
And no, they weren’t finished.
“We paired this blitz with invitations to events in their cities,” says Kracov. “Our SDR and outbound team reached out with invites to dinners, meetups, and more.”
SaaS is funny in the sense that your customers can come from anywhere, but usually the best go-to-market strategy is figuring out how you make sure everyone in New York is using your product, then Austin, then LA and so on.
The campaign ended up generating millions in pipeline and revenue, and it was the kind of startup kismet early hires dream of. “It was probably one of the most successful things we ever did at Lattice,” says Kracov. “It was chaotic, exciting, and it worked!”
Keep it simple: Measure your sales team’s at-bats
“Nothing is going to work right away,” warns Kracov. And this is perhaps where early-stage marketing becomes trickiest — and when the marathoner’s patience comes into play. Your first SEO article probably will not bring in dozens of leads. A new podcast won’t climb the charts right away.
“Something works when you stick with it — and the beauty of content and community is that they compound very much like software,” says Kracov.
While you wait for that compounding to happen, Kracov urges teams to first track qualitative feedback. “You might see a really cool experienced leader sign up for the Slack,” he says. “Or maybe someone said something really nice about the blog. Those signals, while qualitative, can give you a sense of whether or not something is working. And you can be confident that all these little things, incrementally, help the go-to-market function.”
Kracov believes teams can get by with simple, bespoke measurement as they’re starting out. At Lattice, the metric was simple: Are we getting quality leads or not?
“It wasn’t like ‘I need to drive 50 MQLs per month’ or anything,” says Kracov. “As we started running a couple of Google ads, I was tracking the quality of those signups, asking, ‘Who’s coming in?’”
What was most important to track in the early days, rather than monitoring how many folks read a blog or followed Lattice on Twitter, was giving their first sales rep at-bats with customers.
“It was important to see how the product resonated with people who were outside of the founder’s network,” says Kracov. “Because the first group of customers usually come from people around the founder. And then when I was brought in, we were moving towards a bunch of cold leads. How was the product and our messaging resonating with these customers?”
Admittedly, it’s a bit more art than science in the early days. But that doesn’t mean hard numbers were thrown out the window entirely. Here’s an example of how Kracov would track the value of the Slack community: “We would take lists of the people who are in our Slack community, upload it into Salesforce about once a week, then see how that population moved through the funnel. Did they go on to create pipeline? Then you could look back and attribute how much revenue was coming from the community itself.”
And along the way, while you wait for these bets to mature, Kracov strongly advises to over-communicate — don’t just hole up and wait for the numbers to roll in before sharing with the rest of the team.
“I tried to be talking all the time with the CEO,” says Kracov. “I prioritized super direct, honest transparency not just about what I was building but why I was building it. I wanted to be on the same wavelength as Jack around the moves I was making and the programs I was building.”
Double down: Nail your early marketing hires
Kracov was starting to see that his investments in community and content were paying off. These little seeds of an idea were generating pipeline — but there was just one problem: he didn’t have enough time in the day to manage these initiatives himself.
“Certain things were breaking down in our process,” says Kracov. “Product launches were getting delayed because the marketing team was strapped for resources and we weren’t able to keep up with the product velocity of the company. We were starting to feel the pain.”
On the heels of a successful fundraise, Kracov was given the go-ahead to build a “big boy marketing team,” as he puts it. And along the way he learned the following lessons about scaling up your marketing org beyond a team of one.
Hold a mirror up to yourself
As you prioritize your early marketing hires, Kracov encourages leaders to do some much-needed introspection. “You need to hold the mirror up to yourself and see what you’re honestly really good at,” he says. “Where do you spike? What are your personal strengths?”
If your background is on the product marketing and content side of the marketing engine, you want to look for someone with more of a demand-gen bent, for example.
And taking stock of the programs that are quietly humming along, and which are floundering, can also point you in the right direction. “You’re eventually holding up a mirror to the overall program and seriously evaluating it,” says Kracov. “And you’re asking ‘Where are we not fulfilling our goals with the current personnel or programs we have in place?’ Then fill in those gaps.”
Here’s how Kracov prioritized two early marketing hires: “I started by targeting areas that were personally really time-consuming for me,” says Kracov. “So writing a blog post is something I can’t just get done in a half a morning, it takes me a couple days to work through it. So I brought in a content writer as one of the first hires.”
Next up: community and events. “Traveling around the country and doing events and managing all the different things that were happening in the community were pretty time consuming for me personally, so that was another gap to fill.”
Build a team of do-ers
Plenty of first hires of any function — whether it’s marketing, engineering, or sales — eventually don’t work out. So what made Kracov an outlier? He would point to his founder mentality. In fact, during the interview process, he made it pretty clear to the team that he wanted to start his own company one day.
“I had this entrepreneurial mindset. I was going to do everything I could to learn and get better and figure this out. I felt like it was my chance,” says Kracov.
I acted like a founder of the company where I set out to try a lot of different things, bounce around, and bear-hug as much of the marketing as possible.
Now he looks for similarly entrepreneurial “do-ers” when he hires for marketing roles — whether they’re content writers or product marketers. “You don’t want someone who will come in and say, ‘I need to go hire a bunch of contractors or other full-time employees or an agency to help with this function.’ Instead, look for people who can actually do things on their laptop that produce marketing.” Yes, the button-clicker test doesn’t just stop with the first marketer — it should crop up every time you open up a new role.
Wrapping Up: Get out the whiteboard
“Marketing has a million different things you could do: inbound marketing, outbound marketing, videos, content,” says Kracov. “That’s the fun and hard part about being a marketer. You’re just constantly looking for where you can just get a little bit of a competitive edge. It’s never just one thing. It’s the sum of all these different things that goes into building a great company.”
But the reality is, resources at a startup are limited and time is precious. Suddenly, an email comes in from the CEO: Why aren’t we on TikTok (or insert the latest platform-du-jour)? This is when Kracov advises pulling out your handy whiteboard.
“One of the most memorable exercises we did was when I sat down with the CEO and COO and I wrote out on a whiteboard every single thing the marketing team was doing, then every single thing we could be doing,” says Kracov. “And then we went down the line and said, okay, what are the five things we are going to put above this line? What are the five things we’re gonna put below the line? And anything below the line we’re not going to do. It helped me get alignment with the exec team and really clearly say, ‘Okay, this is what marketing’s focused on at this moment in time.’”
It was a clear set of marching orders — if Kracov did the five things above the line, that would be considered success.
“Of course, we can rearrange and redo things, but being able to have that priority conversation was so important,” he says. “Then, when sales or customer success was asking us to do different things, I was able to clearly say that this is what marketing’s focused on at this moment in time. Not to be defensive about it, but to be really strategic about what we’re doing to impact our company goals.”
