Aug 27, 2023 · 1h 11m · lennys-podcast
An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this in-depth interview, Deel Head of Growth Meltem Kuran Berkowitz breaks down how the company scaled from zero to nearly $300 million in ARR through disciplined SEO, authentic community engagement, and data-driven paid acquisition. She shares operational playbooks on growth team structuring, high-velocity execution culture, and first-principles demand generation.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 27.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.4 Guest teaching 3.5 Guest disagreement 0.9 Lenny pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 44:50 Reframing remote work narrative
Meltem forcefully corrects the assumption that Deel was a temporary pandemic beneficiary, insisting Deel is an enduring global employment platform rather than a remote work company.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 49:18 Drilling into candidate revenue claimsLenny pushes back on Meltem's hiring criteria, questioning how she detects candidates who falsely say they will commit to revenue goals in interviews.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 20:16 Google search intent vs literal keywordsMeltem educates on SEO search intent, explaining that blindly targeting 'EOR' yields oil recovery instead of employer of record unless intent and related queries are systematically analyzed.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 58:49 Connecting Deel speed to Amp It Up and AirbnbLenny demonstrates deep company-building expertise by contextualizing Meltem's points on urgency with Airbnb's value pruning and Frank Slootman's management philosophy.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Foundations Before Paid Advertising | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory segment comprising show teaser, host introduction of Deel and the guest, and sponsor ad reads. | |
| Deel's Origin and Unprecedented Growth Trajectory | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Lenny invites Meltem to share Deel's ARR trajectory and compares their rapid growth to Ramp; Meltem humorously confirms Deel overtook Ramp for fastest-growing SaaS. | |
| Tapping Low-Cost Channels by Solving User Problems | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Meltem explains the philosophy behind low-cost growth channels: solving user problems where they ask questions rather than running hard-sell ads. | |
| Executing the Reddit Strategy and Piggybacking Communities | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Lenny connects Meltem's Reddit keyword alert tactic to Airbnb and Uber piggybacking on Craigslist, while Meltem stresses audience caps and adding real value. | |
| Authentic Value Delivery vs. Aggressive Selling | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Meltem explains the difference between spamming links and genuinely answering user questions across Twitter and closed communities without automation. | |
| SEO Strategy: Ending the Search vs. Keyword Stuffing | 3 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Meltem breaks down modern SEO, emphasizing 'ending the user search' rather than keyword stuffing, using the definition of EOR as a case study. | |
| The Traffic Light Framework for Keyword Prioritization | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Meltem details Deel's traffic light prioritization framework for 700+ keywords and points out pitfalls like Google treating EOR as enhanced oil recovery. | |
| Content Team Organization and Multiformat Expansion | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 | Meltem describes how their 8-person content team runs operationally, cautioning that attempting to automate or consider SEO 'below you' leads to failure. | |
| Deciding Which Businesses Should Invest in SEO | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Lenny asks whether every company should invest in SEO; Meltem clearly disagrees, arguing D2C consumer brands like lipstick companies should avoid it in favor of social channels. | |
| Expanding into Long-Tail Paid Acquisition Channels | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Meltem outlines diversifying paid acquisition into long-tail platforms and niche sites, followed by a mid-roll sponsor break. | |
| Evaluating Brand Awareness Campaigns vs. Direct Response | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Meltem pushes back against early brand awareness campaigns in B2B, explaining that Notion's out-of-home ads only worked because of years of pre-existing UI familiarity. | |
| Strategic Partnerships and Answering High-Stakes Questions | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Meltem explains how VC partnerships and answering deep compliance/tax questions serve as high-converting growth drivers. | |
| The IRS PPP Story and High-Impact Content Creation | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Meltem recounts the story of writing a definitive COVID PPP loan guide that was linked to directly by the IRS website. | |
| Paid Growth Optimization, Creative Fatigue, and Payback Dashboards | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Meltem explains tracking true payback periods and downstream conversions to prevent vanity metrics and creative ad fatigue. | |
| Product Quality as the Foundation of Growth | 4 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Meltem highlights that growth tactics fail without a stellar underlying product, warning candidates against early-stage startups with heavy sales and tiny engineering teams. | |
| The Remote Work Catalyst vs. Global Employment Reality | 3 | 5 | 3 | 1 | Meltem firmly corrects the common misconception that Deel is merely a pandemic-driven remote work tool, defining it as a permanent global work infrastructure. | |
| Hiring for Growth: Revenue KPIs and the 'Little Hands' Mentality | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Lenny pushes back on candidate interview answers, asking how Meltem filters out people who just claim they will commit to revenue goals. Meltem shares concrete case study tests and the 'little hands' mentality. | |
| Growth Team Structure: Functional vs. Regional Teams | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Meltem details growth team structure, arguing for functional specialist pods over siloing technical marketers inside regional units. | |
| Building Company Culture: Deel Speed, Optimism, and Customer Care | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Meltem describes Deel's core culture pillars: 'Deel Speed', default optimism, and genuine customer care. | |
| Evolution of Core Values and Managing Urgency | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Lenny demonstrates strong expertise by comparing Deel's emergent values to Airbnb's cultural evolution and Frank Slootman's 'Amp It Up' urgency thesis. | |
| Authentic Remote Culture and the Ironing Board Office | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Meltem shares the viral story of working on an ironing board in Istanbul and how remote work enabled authentic, vulnerable team culture. | |
| First-Principles Philosophy: The Simplicity of Growth | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Meltem distills growth into first principles before moving into a fast-paced, collaborative lightning round and outro. |
Statements from this episode (37)
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 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: 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 set up Deel's Reddit keyword tracking on her first day
“I believe I set up that little kind of keyword tracking within the first day of me being, you know, starting my role at deal.”
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'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: 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…”
Berkowitz: Why Deel avoids targeting the acronym 'EOR' for SEO
“When you type EOR to Google, it doesn't give you employer of record. It gives you enhanced oil recovery because most of the people typing EOR to Google Is looking for that solution. Now, if my team blindly went in and said, we're going to rank for EOR, we're n…”
Berkowitz: Deel's content operation runs with about eight full-time people
“Right now the team is about eight people total.”
Berkowitz: Deel's content team outputs five new articles and five updates weekly
“We used to put out about 10 articles a week. That's net new. Whereas now we are doing more of five new articles and five article updates because the type of content we write, regulations change, things change all the time.”
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: 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: VC partnerships succeeded because funded startups ask investors for tooling recommendations
“In our case, venture capital partners was a huge one because when you get money from a new VC, they ask, they're like, okay, thank you for giving us this money. Now we want to expand our team with the money you gave us. What are your other portfolio companies …”
Berkowitz: IRS linked directly to previous company's PPP guide
“And it ended up being such a good resource that it was linked from the IRS's website being like, if you have questions, check out this article, which was a great moment of pride.”
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 refreshes ad creatives on a monthly basis
“Our paid team is actually updating the ads we put out there on a monthly basis, with the exception of a few global ads, which need to be straight to the point.”
Berkowitz: Deel tracks Facebook ad conversions to closed-won revenue in real time
“And the way that we've done it is we've worked with our data team to set up a dashboard that tracks that in real time. We know an average customer that comes from a Facebook ad. At what rate do they convert from a lead to a qualified opportunity to a closed on…”
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: Deel was founded before the COVID-19 pandemic
“A lot of people think Deal was started as a response to the pandemic. We actually got started before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened.”
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: Deel requires all employees to do 'little hands' manual work
“And at Deal, we have this concept called little hands. I think it's loosely translated from French. Someone can kind of correct me on that, but it basically means that no matter who you are, where you sit within the organization, you need to be willing to get …”
Berkowitz: Test growth hires by asking for $0, $10k, and $100k budget strategies
“A really good way to also test for that is This is more on the case study process, but asking someone, you know, to come up with a strategy with zero dollars with 10,000 dollars and maybe a 100,000 dollars to see if they're going to be able to scale with you a…”
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: 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: 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…”
Deel codified values one year in from organic behavior
“So we came up with them, I believe it was about a year in, but we didn't sit around the table and say, what should we call our values? Like deal speed was something that, you know, our CEO would tell it people. He'd be like, okay, I want to do this, but I want…”
Berkowitz: Deel revenue surpassed $50M before she met coworkers in person
“I worked for a year and a half at Deal before, for the first time where I met our team members was at a conference in Lisbon and I showed up and it was this surreal moment because I worked with them for a year and a half. We'd accomplished so much, you know, o…”
Berkowitz: Deel created no company swag until reaching a $1B valuation
“We forgot to create swag until we reached a billion dollars, and it was actually when we were, our photo was going to be on the Nasdaq, and we wanted to take a team picture that we're like, guys, we need to have t-shirts. Can someone please run to a store in N…”
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…”