The Exchanges

Q I'm more excited that you're here. So you're head of growth at Deal. For people that aren't familiar with Deal, can you just give us a sense of what does Deal do briefly? And then also, can you share some stats around the trajectory of Deal? It feels like it's been this extraordinary journey, and I'm curious just to hear some of the stats of just how, how extraordinary.

A Yes. So Deal is payroll, HR, and compliance platform for global teams. So essentially we help companies expand globally with tools like DealHR, immigration, employer of record hiring, independent contractor hiring, payroll, both global and US. So whether you're trying to hire someone as a full-time employee in Japan, or you're trying to make sure your contractor in Germany has everything they need on day one, our platform allows you to do, take care of everything all in one place. 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. April, 22, 22, we were looking at a hundred million. And then we started off this year with two hundred and ninety five million dollars in ARR. And we're, what we're particularly proud of is that we've been even a positive. So that's something that we are very, very proud of on top of the ARR growth.

AI assessment note: “So Deal is payroll, HR, and compliance platform for global teams.”

Q To give people a sense of the operation, how many articles are you putting out a month, a day, a week, whatever you can share there?

A 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. So we need to make sure that even if something was published two years ago, it's up to date. So we have a team that is, you know, responsible for kind of continuously fact-checking. So we do about five article updates and five net new articles written. And of course we do it across many different languages. So what started off as English only operations is now in other languages as well. So there's no shortage of work to go around.

AI assessment note: “now we are doing more of five new articles and five article updates”

Q So we've been working kind of through all the ways that Deal has grown. We've talked about SEO, community. You mentioned partnerships. Is there anything interesting there to mention around just like what partnerships have done?

A Yeah, I would say it's very important to know who you should partner with. So there's two groups of partners. Like people oftentimes end up partnering with any company that has a shared audience. Decent place to start, but just because you share an audience doesn't mean your audience goes to your partner for guidance when they have this problem. So, you know, 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 using? What is a platform that you trust that you would recommend? So people go to their VCs for that kind of question, but There might be another tech company out there that is tapping into the exact audience that we are, but people never go to them to ask that question. So our partnership with them will likely not work just as well. So it's important to not only recognize the importance of like an audience overlap, as well as whether or not those people are seen as a trusted resource for the solution you are putting out there.

AI assessment note: “in our case, venture capital partners was a huge one”

Q I want to chat about team building, something that I've heard you're exceptional at. And my first question is early on when you're building the team, the growth team specifically, a deal, what skills did you find were most important to look for? And what skills and experience did you find wasn't as important early on that you could kind of sacrifice and wait till later to get?

A Early on, one of the first questions I would ask people is what are the KPIs that you're willing to commit to? 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 willing to commit to the full funnel. And also oftentimes people tend to hire from, you know, the big companies that they want to become like, because The brand name is appealing. But if you're a team of 35 people and you're trying to hire the director of whatever from a huge company, you need to ask the question of when did this person join that huge company? Did they join when the company was already 5000 people and from day one they had all the resources at their disposal? Or were they actually one of the earlier employees who helped that growth? Because 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 dirty work. And at Deal, we have this concept called little hands. I think it's loosely translated from French. Um, someone can kind of correct me on that, but it basically means that no matter who you are, wher…

AI assessment note: “those people that were willing to commit to the full funnel”

Q What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

A From the non-fiction world, How Will You Measure Your Life by Clay Christensen. That's one I recommend. Kind of takes the business learnings that he's had and applies it to your life. It's a very short and easy to kind of get through a book. Outside of that, I constantly recommend fiction. I think at one point we became like, it became uncool to read fiction that like every moment you have and needs to be productive and you need to learn something. I don't care what fiction it is you read. You can read Judy Blume for all I care, but just read fiction, like Be creative. Do something with your brain other than, you know, reading nonfiction and learning things all the time.

AI assessment note: “How Will You Measure Your Life by Clay Christensen. That's one I recommend.”

Q Awesome. Okay, so let's talk about SEO. First of all, how important has that been to the success and growth of deal? And then also just what have you learned about what is important to get SEO right?

A Yeah. So I would say for SEO, the biggest mistake people make is they will just show keywords. They're like, okay, these are the keywords people are searching for. I need to make sure I mentioned it five times. Like obviously do that. Like make sure that the content that you wrote answers the question. But the main thing to think about it is, you know, is the Google search over? Like if someone reads your content, if they typed in something to Google and then they read the article that you've published, are they going back to Google to continue reading more or is the Google search over? Because ultimately that's what the search engines care about is I want to make sure this person gets their answer quickest way possible. So when you think from that perspective, it's much easier to actually write things that people want to read. And you're not just like meandering and going on and on, shoving a bunch of keywords that people are just like. I'm bored. I'm bouncing. I'm going somewhere else. So asking that question of is the search over is a really good place to start instead of just shoving keywords. And, you know, our content team is amazing. I would say they're more of an operational team than they are a creative team. The way they run things, the way they, you know, publish the articles, you know, there's a very clear framework that is used to decide what gets published when an…

AI assessment note: “the main thing to think about it is, you know, is the Google search over?”