An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)

**Meltem Kuran Berkowitz** (0:00)
In the early days, it's very important to just go back to the basics, build the skeleton before you put on the makeup. So the first question I would ask is, do you have a website? Is it fast?
Do the search engine know that it exists? Okay, great. The next step would be, can people find it? If they can't find it, do you need to write content to make sure that people find it?
Only after all of those questions are answered should you then consider, do I have money? Can I put it behind some paid ads to make sure people come to my website? You know, you can't run a successful paid ads program if you have a website that's loading in four plus seconds. So really going back to the basics and starting from a good experience at the core and then expanding step by step from there.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:47)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Meltem Kuran Berkowitz. Meltem is head of growth at Deel, which is arguably the fastest growing SaaS business of all time, possibly even faster than Ramp, which we delved into in a previous episode. They went from zero dollars in revenue to a mind-boggling $300 million in revenue in three years while also staying a bit of positive. Meltem has led their growth team from the early days and today leads all their growth efforts, including paid ads, product marketing, content community, brand, and more. Before joining Deel, she was leading marketing efforts at branch accounting. In her conversation, Meltem shares how Deel kickstarted growth through low-cost growth channels, like tapping into communities like Reddit and also content and SEO. She also talks about how she evolved her thinking on growth investments as the company grew. She shares a bunch of tactical advice for how to do SEO well, how to do paid ads well, and how to structure your early growth team and prioritize your early investments. She also shares her experience building a culture of speed and optimism and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Meltem Kuran Berkowitz after a short word from our sponsors.
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Meltem, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.