Product Led Growth Needs Champions
Alex Kracov, CEO of Dock, on rethinking the primitives of external collaboration
This is why product led growth usually turns into a hybrid motion, not a pure self serve machine. One person can discover a tool alone, but an enterprise purchase usually needs a champion to brief coworkers, answer security and process questions, and line up budget. Dock is built for that handoff layer, where sales packages the trial, the case studies, the plan, and the next steps into one shared workspace that helps one user persuade a whole buying group.
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At Lattice, Dock’s starting insight was that winning bigger accounts depended on equipping one HR champion with the exact material needed to convince managers, executives, and other stakeholders. The bottleneck was not initial interest, it was internal coordination after interest.
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Airtable followed the same pattern. Bottom up adoption got it into large companies, but closing and expanding those accounts required customer success, training, documentation, and help with IT signoff. Even highly viral products add people and process once many teams are involved.
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DocSend shows the boundary clearly. Self serve worked best for one person or a small team paying by card. Larger sales led deployments were harder because the economic buyer cared about admin controls and standardization, not just the end user experience.
The next wave of B2B software will keep starting with try before buy, but the winners in enterprise will be the products that make group buying easier after the trial. That means more software built around champions, shared workspaces, usage signals, approvals, and cross functional handoffs, which is exactly where Dock is expanding with quotes, onboarding, and other customer lifecycle apps.