Meltem Kuran Berkowitz
Head of Growth, Deel. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Meltem Kuran Berkowitz is the Head of Growth at Deel. She was an early employee who led growth and marketing teams to scale the company from zero to $300 million in annual recurring revenue.
1shows
2appearances
38statements
2resolved
1supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Meltem Kuran Berkowitz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Berkowitz: Deel overtook Ramp as fastest-growing SaaS company in history
“So Ramp was the first one to be crowned the fastest growing, and then we kind of took that crown from them. So I think we're both right. In that at a certain point in time, we've been the fastest growing”
Berkowitz: B2B startups should exhaust bottom-of-funnel demand before awareness ads
“Because B to B businesses uniquely are started because there's a very real need and there's a lot of people that are ready to convert, like first tap into the bottom of the funnel and then go out and start speaking to the masses. But I promise you, it'll proba…”
Berkowitz: Startups with more salespeople than engineers cannot maintain product quality
“If you're talking to an early stage company that's a big product and they have six salespeople and two engineers, their product probably isn't going to be great for that much longer.”
Berkowitz: Decentralizing growth specialists across regions slows skill development
“If you take a paid ads person and if you have a team of paid ads people and you separate those five people and give them to different regions, instead of letting them sit together and be a tight team, the best practices learning and the skill, like the levelin…”
Berkowitz: The world is run by insecure overachievers with something to prove
“The world is run by insecure overachievers. I used to think my insecurity was a downfall and I would just kind of hide it and try to pretend it's not there. And then someone that I really look up to told that to me, I'm like, okay, so I'm not the only one. And…”
Berkowitz: Asking what siblings think reveals insincerity if answers are polished.
“Like if someone was like, my siblings will say I'm very organized and that I'm the one that brings our family together. Like that's probably a bullshit answer. But if they're like, oh yeah, like they'll say these weird things about me that shows a little bit o…”
Berkowitz: Deel grew ARR from <$1M in 2020 to $295M in 2023
“And when I joined the deal, actually that was around July, 2020, we were less than a million dollars in ARR. And then over time, it grew within the first year on January, 20, 21, we were at four million dollars ARR. We finished 20, 21 with fifty seven million.…”
Berkowitz: Deel's content team functions operationally rather than creatively
“Our content team is amazing. I would say they're more of an operational team than they are a creative team.”
Berkowitz: Paid ad programs cannot succeed with four-second page load times
“You can't run a successful paid ads program if you have a website that's loading in four plus seconds.”
Berkowitz: Long-tail paid channels account for roughly 30% of Deel's lead flow
“If you add them up, it diversifies your lead flow such that it kind of ends up being about 30% of your overall kind of lead flow that's coming in.”
Berkowitz: Deel spends equal time on niche ad channels as Google and Meta
“Our paid ads team, they spend just as much time running Facebook and Google ads as they do running those third party, much smaller platform ads.”
Berkowitz: Ad creative suffers from fatigue after roughly three weeks
“Creative fatigue is a real thing. You know, when you put an ad out there that works for three weeks, people get tired of seeing that. You need to constantly update that.”
Berkowitz: Deel is a global work platform, not a remote work platform
“We are not a remote work platform. We're a global work platform. So A lot of these businesses have gone back into offices. We have a lot of customers that ask people to go back to their offices, but now they have offices in Germany and in Canada and in US and …”
Berkowitz: Growth hires must commit to closed-won revenue, not just leads
“So if someone's only willing to commit to, you know, lead numbers, that's not good enough. They need to be able to commit to, you know, closed one revenue KPRs to really show that they care about the business's bottom line. So it was those people that were wil…”
Berkowitz: Startups err hiring big-company talent unaccustomed to scarce resources
“Oftentimes the mistake I see people make is They'll hire someone from an amazing company that have accomplished amazing things, but they're not used to operating with 10% of the resources that they had. So they're not willing to kind of get down and do the dir…”
Berkowitz: Hire one person to validate hypotheses before scaling headcount
“We don't love the idea of hiring people based off of a hypothesis that something is going to work. That's a really good way to have to do layoffs because the plans you thought were going to work didn't work. So we always hired one person, prove out a theory an…”
Berkowitz: Deel's third growth hire was a data analyst
“The third person we actually hired onto the growth team was a data analyst, because the sentiment was, we're not willing to spend a dollar if we don't know where that money's going and what it's Doing for us”
Berkowitz: Teams must identify why initiatives will succeed before solving risks
“So if someone's going to come in to deal and they're going to be pessimistic and they're like, I don't think that's going to work for X, Y, Z reasons. They're going to just slow things down. We need people to ask the question of, I think it's going to work for…”
Berkowitz: Deel drove early growth answering questions on Reddit and forums
“When you go to Reddit and you set up those keywords to be tracking when people ask certain questions, you're not paying any money to do that. You're just seeing, oh, someone has this question. I have the answer to that. Here you go and connecting with them. It…”
Berkowitz: Factor in community audience ceilings when pursuing organic growth
“It's important to notice that, you know, if you're looking at a subreddit of about a thousand people, you know, recognize the upper size of this audience. You know, it's not, you're not going to win 5000 businesses through that Reddit community, but you're may…”
Berkowitz: Community outreach dropped from ~15% to under 5% of Deel's funnel
“Over time, of course, you know, I went from maybe being, 15% of our funnel to, you know, less than five percent of our funnel because the rest of our funnel has grown a lot.”
Berkowitz: Deel has never automated online community interactions
“It was never automated. It still isn't today. We would never automate our interactions with people. So it was early days. It was myself. The other people on my team are co-founders, which to this day, they still do, by the way.”
Berkowitz: Roughly 50% of Deel's growth comes from non-paid channels
“Today, roughly about, I would say, 50% of growth continues to come from what we would consider, you know, non-paid channels through, you know, whether it be partnerships, SEO, these kinds of moderations. So early on, that was more close to, you know, 80 to 90%…”
Berkowitz: Deel uses 'traffic light system' across up to 700 keywords per campaign
“We have this framework that we call the traffic light system. Essentially we go on whenever the team is going to do, you know, a content series, they will go and find up to 700 keywords. These are keywords that are related to what we do. So they might be close…”
The other half of the tape: Meltem Kuran Berkowitz's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Head of Growth, Deel | 2 | 38 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |