YouSaid · the spoken record

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz

lines on the record: 76
first: 2023-08-27
most recent: 2023-08-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So they can reach out to me on Twitter at Meltm K. I'm the fastest to respond there. Please don't reach out to me on LinkedIn. I never respond there. And the way readers can be useful to me is if they, one, we're always looking for feedback on deal. If you see something out there that you think could be better, let me know and I'll make sure to communicate it to the team, whatever that may be. And also I would benefit from or any good book fiction recommendations, I'm always open to them.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Caesar. They're called Caesars, but the American equivalent would be a bloody marriage. It's so much better than a bloody Mary. It's not vegan. And then the reason I qualified as food is when you ordered in Canada, it comes with like pepperoni strips and pickled asparagus. And they'll shove a whole meal in there. And it's just amazing and something that America should definitely adapt to.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 not the only one. And it's just, you know, I think I do think world is run by a bunch of people that have something to prove for a good reason or not, but it's better to embrace it than to pretend like you're all confident and you're just doing this because you're brilliant.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly And the second one is I recently was gifted a personalized library stamp, which I love because I love to give books away. So I stamp them with my library stamp. And I like to think that one day in a secondhand bookshop I'm going to run into it.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like listerine strips, and you put it on your tongue and then it also doesn't give you the jitters. And it's just 50 milligrams, which is a very mild cup of coffee. Microdossa.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a dangerous one. So, two, one was new strips, their caffeine strips. I find, you know, caffeine pills and everything, or when I drink coffee is like accidentally, I'll have 300 milligrams and then I'm buzzing. But these are 50 milligrams each. So it's very easy to stop yourself. And they don't taste bad. So those I like for when I just like need a little boost.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look for sincerity and self awareness. Like your siblings are never, I mean, I love my sister, but she'll probably should talk me a lot. And being aware of that is very important. Like if someone's like, my siblings will say I'm very organized and that I'm the one that brings our family together”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would your siblings say about you? It's very telling. If they have siblings, if they don't, I will say, what will your parents say about you? But it's very telling what you think other people think of you.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favorite recent movie, I think, along with everybody else was Oppenheimer. I thought it was great. I do wish they explored a little bit more of why he was the person that drove everybody to excellence, but overall love the movie. Kind of did not think I could sit through three hours without peeing, but I did. And favorite reason TV show was The Samurai Turned Pretty. I absolutely love it. I don't care that it's actually designed for TV troopers. I enjoyed every second of it.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the nonfiction world, how will you measure your life by Clay Christensen? That's one I recommend. He 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 needed to learn something. I don't care what fiction you read. You can read Judy Bloom for all I care, but just read fiction. Be creative, do something with your brain other than reading nonfiction and learning things all the time.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a really good conversation. One thing I would kind of tell people is most of growth people assume is very difficult. I'm not necessarily saying it's easy, but it's relatively straightforward when you go back to the first principles of just figuring out where are the people at, how can I add value, and how as long as your product is there to actually bring them value. I would say like people should just recognize that it's much simpler than they think it is. It just takes a lot of discipline to kind of execute on it. It's not rocket science.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, people have met my pets and my partner well before they would have if I was showing up to an office. So there's that kind of sincerity that comes with being in someone's home that we really relied on early on. And as a company, like I never felt the pressure to show up in a certain way or, you know, dressed up for meetings or anything. just being able to show up as yourself and whether you're an introverted person who never likes to turn on their camera or you're someone who's going to be like hear me my dog that just naturally built a team culture and kind of camaraderie well before we could meet together in person”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much. Our revenue was already way past $50 million. And I was seeing these people for the first time. So that was kind of very funny. But if I look at the early days of deal, there's a lot of little stories like that where, you know, 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 New York and like print our logo on something? So a lot of those things kind of, just by the nature of being a pandemic business, kind of came in a little bit later. But the thing that allowed, I think for me and Deal to build the culture early on was because we all work from home, we've been like that from day one, we have the option to go into, you know, WeWorks and co-working spaces if that's something that you choose. But we all get to show up as like our very authentic self.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, he hasn't fully wrapped his head around the startup world. So, you know, it was just one of those moments of sharing that, yeah, work can be remote and it can be whatever you want it to be. So that's the kind of the story behind it. In this moment as we're recording this, I am in a proper home office with a desk and a back supported chair. So, you know, it changes all the time. And in terms of kind of going back to a second question of early days not meeting the team members, as I said, I joined DEAL in July 2020. Pandemic was kind of at its peak. Me being based in Canada, Canada had a very strict restrictions of you can't leave the country. We won't let you back in. So I had to stay put and 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 the surreal moment because I've worked with them for a year and a half. We'd accomplished.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do my work regardless of where I am. I had a full day of work and meetings and everything and my work just kind of continued and I was also able to be with my family. So like it was a moment of deals, promise kind of coming true in a very real way in my life. And I thought it was kind of hilarious. My dad thought it was so unprofessional that I shared that with the public.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll explain the ironing board first. So that was because I was actually visiting my family in Istanbul. And in the setup that we have, there's one desk. So my husband and I go rock paper, scissors, and we'll see who gets the desk and who gets to come up with a secondary solution. And he won the desk. So I had to come up with a creative solution. And because the view behind me was stunning of the bosporus, every meeting I joined, people were like, wow, like I love your view. This is amazing. And I was like, I don't know. You guys, I'm sitting on an ironing board right now. And to me, that was both funny. Like I kind of wanted to do a reality check with people to be like, come on, like, this is not as kind of glorious as it looks. But at the same time, it really like in that moment, I was like, this is awesome. You know, I work a deal previously when I wanted to go visit my family in Istanbul and I'm living in Canada. I would have to use my kind of days off to go. And for me, just meant a lot to be able to like.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's incredibly fulfilling. I look back and sometimes things when, for example, when the SVB was going through the issues they were going through, the entire team had to work on a Sunday to kind of communicate with our cust”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Deal speed was something that our CEO would tell at people. He'd be like, okay, I want to do this, but I want you to do a deal speed. And one of the early jokes was like, let's have company swag that's deal speedo and things like that. It was already used so frequently with people that we were just like, okay, we keep saying this. Let's also kind of like define what it actually is for us and set it in stone and share it with people. So we did go through that exercise probably about a year in into the company being kind of existing, but the culture happened well before we established that.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's like, no, it's a business trying to pay a human so they can live their lives and the business can continue growing. So that care is something that we need people to bring to the table. Now in return of those things coming, what we give back as a company is, you know, outside of obviously your pay, your benefits package, et cetera, is, you know, we offer people the flexibility to choose how and when they do their job, they get to decide on where they work from, what hours they work. So we basically give people all the freedom to set up their life how they want to as long as they come to the table giving us what they need. So I would say we do have an intense culture and that's expected. We share that openly with people. But at the end of the day, that's also what sets us apart.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that we remain positive. We have default optimism because we are in a new space. So if someone's going to come into 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 these four reasons. Now let's see what are the risks associated with it and let's seek to kind of solve those risks. That's again something we expect from our team members. And then the last one, kind of, well, not the last one, but one of the kind of third important ones is, you know, fully giving a shit about your customer. Like at the end of the day, the product that we have, we are dealing with humans. We're dealing with their livelihood, the way that get paid. We're dealing with the way companies hire. It's so incredibly personal if someone doesn't get their paycheck on time or if someone gets into a legal trouble because their contract wasn't set up the proper way. So recognizing that it's not a software and a platform that we're trying to make it the”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I would say culture is made up of two components. One is what do you bring to the company as a team member and what does the company give back to you? So what we expect the team members to bring to us is our version of velocity is something that we call deal speed is that we want to make sure that we act with urgency. It doesn't matter how big the team has grown. We want to act with urgency on behalf of our customers. If a customer has a problem, they're not going to wait two weeks to get an answer for that. They're going to get that answer within 24 hours. If we need to build out a product because many customers are asking for it, that product is going to get built in one tenth the time that any of our competitors will likely build it in. So deal speed is very, very important for us. And that's something we expect from our team members who are committing to it to say, what's the quickest way I can solve this problem properly and to repeatedly kind of push themselves to kind of act with urgency. We also care.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it depends on the total addressable market in a region, what are the opportunities we're seeing, what's the competitive landscape like. So chances are if a market is what we consider to be tier one, it's a place that we have seen good growth, we will invest our resources into it. And then along the way, we learn and we decide if we're going to double down or pull back a little bit.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So they would work with our central paid ads team to say, I would like to run paydabs in Turkey. This is the audience I want to go after. And then they work together to execute on that strategy.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know where that money's going and what it's doing for us, which a lot of people would assume that's a very early hire for data is too early to hire as number three, but I still think that we did the right thing there. Now we have a whole data team, but back then we didn't. So those were the kind of three teams that we started with on top. And then the content was content person was already at deal by the time that I joined. So that was the first I mentioned. That was early employee. So that's kind of how we originally said it. Now the teams have changed. So now we have a different structure, slightly different structure, which is we have regional teams and functional teams. The functional teams are basically subject matter experts. They're good at what they do and we don't care where they are based in the world.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so very early on, we always seek to bring in kind of one leader to manage a part of the organization and then let them grow their teams. 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, and then let them grow their team. The first hire we made to the team was actually a product marketing person. To this day, they lead our product team, product marketing team, and they were the ones who sit between the product team and the go-to-market teams and really set the messaging. And quickly, we realized this person needs more help in kind of setting the messaging, the tone. So then the second person we hired was a very talented copywriter. And that person today kind of leads our creative teams. And then 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.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's why we're called growth instead of marketing. We care about the revenue growth. And, you know, of course we track leads and SQOs. Those are leading indicators to know whether or not we're going to hit the ultimate number that we all care about. But at the end of the day, that's not what we consider success.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can only do social media monitoring. We're not going to get much because that's what makes sense. Well, you probably know that they're not going to be comfortable committing to those bottom-up funnel metrics until you give them all the resources that they need.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It happens within the interview process. So, one way to find out is what are the KPIs that they have committed to in the past in their roles. So if they've never committed to a revenue goal or kind of a bottom funnel goal and they're saying they're willing to commit to it, that's probably not correct. And I always say, you know, if they haven't, I say, what are the KPIs that you have today and what are the KPIs that you think you should have? Because sometimes they're just not given those, but they still think they should have been given the more bottom funnel. So that's something that I would look for in the interview process. And 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, and maybe $100,000 to see if they're going to be able to scale with you and to see how are they thinking about with different levels of spend and what are they willing to commit to at different levels of spend. Because if someone's throwing up their hands and saying it's zero.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One 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. 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 into the little things and kind of do the nitty gritty work and not shy away from it. And it's very important too, whoever we hire when any level is like, are you willing to do the tiniest of the jobs? And if the answer is yes, that's great. And some people are like, I would build a team for that. And of course in the future, maybe you should, but that shouldn't be your first answer. Your first answer should be yes, of course I'll do that. And if someone's not excited about that, then they're not a good fit for at least a company at our stage right now.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 lead numbers, that's not good enough. They need to be able to commit to 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 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 5,000 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 some.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it was word of mouth, like maybe very, very early on, it was word of mouth, but within the first few months of our operation, that kind of stopped being short least. The word of mouth stopped being a smaller percentage of the way in which people discover us. But it's always that people needed apparel solution. They needed a way to hire independent contractors overseas. And we just were the answer to that. So we consistently put ourselves in front of them and said, hey, if you're trying to do this or if you're already doing it and you're not doing it legally, we can help you do that legally.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so COVID actually 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. So as kind of sad as it was, it did force people into like a pilot program of the vision that we had for the world. It forced people to work remotely. What do that means you're working remotely from someone who lives a block away from you? you are working remotely from someone in Germany. So we did benefit from the fact that everybody was at least forced to test out this hypothesis of does it work to not be in the same room as the people that you're working with? And one of the questions that we were getting early on as the COVID was coming to an end was are you worried? COVID is coming to an end that people aren't going to use DLA anymore. And our response to that has always been we are not a”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where people aren't going to put up with crappy products, they're going to leave. That's going to get out, and people are going to know it's not a worthy product. So that really sits at the core of everything that we do. I think it's very easy to take it for granted when you're at a company that has an awesome product. You're like, it is like this all the time. But, you know, one of the things I would encourage anybody looking to join a young company is ask them what their team breakdown looks like. When I joined deal, most of the team was product and engineers. So that told me that the core of this business is going to be solid. And then we built out those supporting things like marketing, like sales, like data to surround the product. But if you're talking to an early stage company that's a VDB product and they have six salespeople and two engineers, the product probably isn't going to be great for that much longer.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acquisition channels just straight up don't work if you have a product that doesn't live up to the expectation. I think I personally have been very spoiled and lucky because from the day I joined DL, the product was top notch. You know, as I was joining an early stage company, I joined right after series A, I was kind of expecting certain things to be duct taped in the back. It happens. And I was like, oh no, like the engineers and the product team are, if they say a product can do something, it can do that and more. So early days of my team pitching deal was people were like, I don't think you guys can do all of that. I don't believe you. And it was almost like we had to tamper down our messaging so that people would believe us. But, you know, you can be the best marketer in the world. If when people come to your product, even if your sales team does a good job at convincing them to become a customer because you can do that, if the product doesn't live up to the expectations, especially in the B2B world,”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generated from a campaign, but how many of them actually became a client and how much money did you actually make from those clients to understand things around payback? Because oftentimes marketers just tend to think about, oh, this is a great lead channel. And I get so many leads from it, but then you ask that question to sales teams and they're like, yeah, I'm busy, but none of these are converting. So it's really important to look at not just the volume that you bring in, but what is the journey of that volume with your business one year out? How much money do you actually make from them to be able to properly decide how much can I spend to win this customer? 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, what rate do they converge from a lead to a qualified opportunity to a closed one? And then on average, how much money do we make from that customer one year out so that we can decide, is this a worthy channel for us? Do we not want?”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a few things. Our paid team spends a lot of time on both the messaging aspect of things as well as the optimization. So optimization is the technical way in which you set your bids. Make sure that you don't go over budgets, whether or not you can afford that, and then messaging is making sure that if someone sees your ad, whether it's on Instagram, Twitter, Google, that it makes sense for them. So 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. So our paid team is actually updating as we put out there on a monthly basis, with the exception of a vehicle, the ads which need to be straight to the point. So staying ahead of creative fatigue, making sure that your messaging also keeps up with your product, even if the ad is working really well, you need to make sure that as your product has evolved, so has the messaging alongside that, and also recognizing, not just looking at the amount of leads that you just”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big moment of growth. There was a very unfortunate instance, you know, we wish we never had to write that, that it never happened. But yeah, that was kind of the story around IRS linking to the company's resources.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, actually it was at my previous role, and the person who wrote that article is today at Deal. So he came over to join us there too. But yes, it was right around when COVID happened and the US government rolled out the PPP program. And there was a lot of questions about do I qualify? If I qualify, how do I apply for this? And at the time, company that I was working for had a lot of customers that were like, what do I do? Like I need to gain access to this, but I don't know what to do. The team there took the time to truly understand how the system works, whether you qualify what to do, and kind of created this resource for our own customers because we just wanted to help them. And then 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 and it just kind of went to show that when you do your best answer questions and other people don't have the time to do it, no matter who it is, they're going to kind of send people back your way. And it was at the time, you know, it happened to be.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Like, really, the question is what's the best payroll solution? It's like, okay, that's good to make sure what you're leaning towards isn't shipped and that other people agree with you. But ultimately, it's like you need the best payroll solution because you need to make sure that things aren't going to go wrong.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do. So those are some of the kind of types of questions that get asked. So for us, they're very nitty gritty and use case specific. The taxes you need to pay for someone who is an engineer, that's a full-time employee might be very different than who is a designer who is a contractor. So those are the kinds of specifics that we get into with people.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since the early days, and it continues to happen, compliance is a huge question that gets asked. So when you are an HR leader or finance leader or legal leader in a company that works, let's say, in America, but you want to hire someone in another country, you don't know what you don't know. So it's very important to have people that know what they're talking about in context of your country of origin, as well as the country that you're trying to hire from. So compliance is always a huge part of kind of has been a huge part of what we did and what we've always answered for people. That's why we have in-house experts that answer those questions that constantly provide updates if the answer to that question has changed over time, which regulations constantly change. You know, an answer we provided a week ago may change and you need to be very proactive in communicating that. Taxes is another one, especially in the space that we're in, you know, payroll, hiring, taxes change from country to country. You need to know where you need to pay what taxes, when you need to not pay them and what types of work.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 with 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”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the ads that I'm recalling right now were showcasing their product interface. So they needed enough time. And this is my obviously hypothesis if someone from Notion wants to jump in and say, that's part of the reason why we did this. Go ahead. But I think they needed enough time for people to get familiar with the interface because Notion has a very specific interface that when you see it, you recognize it. It's not like any other product. Unless people built that awareness and recognition, doing an out-of-home ad with that layout wouldn't have made much sense because just with that layout, they were able to communicate what product they're talking about. If they did that day one, people would be like, what is this thing that I'm looking at?”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen Notion do a great job with their out of home ads. They didn't do it early on. They started doing it much later in their journey by the time when everybody that was working in tech kind of knew what it was. And it was really to kind of drive home the message continuously rather than to introduce themselves to the world. So by then, when you saw that layout on a billboard, it made sense. You're like, oh, I know what they're talking about.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There. That's not to say never do awareness as, but it's oftentimes the shiny, cool thing that you want to do. And it just ends up being a waste of time early on because people don't really even understand what you're doing. You haven't really even figured out what's the messaging that resonates, but you've done this creative campaign and people are like, this looks cool, but I'm just going to go ahead and continue looking for a solution for my problem.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a huge fan of early awareness campaigns for B2B businesses specifically. So if you are a consumer goods founder, you can skip this part. But the reason I don't like awareness early on is because to do a proper awareness campaign, it takes time. You need to have teams that are doing the strategy, doing the creative work. And they don't always hit. You don't know if they're always going to resonate or not. And then you look back and you've worked on this thing for a whole month and it hasn't resonated and you've wasted a full month. So because B2B business is 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 probably take you six to eight months minimum to tap into that bottom of the funnel of people that are ready to convert today before you have to start doing awareness ads.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once we covered the basics of your big four or five ad platforms, we started looking into the long tail places. So those are the platforms that individually never contribute a significant enough chunk for you to individually care about it. But 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. So those could be things like review sites, or much smaller outlets that could also run ads, newsletter ads, podcast ads, all of those things, you know, when you run an individual podcast ad, yeah, you're probably not going to get 2,000 customers from one podcast, but you run 10 of those and then it starts adding up. So really long tail is where we focused on. And we started going very niche with websites that have maybe 50,000, 100,000 visitors a month.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our website was hard coded, so the first thing we did with the help of the dev team was to move it to a platform that it was easy for me to access and edit so that we could continuously A-B test things. And outside of that, we worked really hard on testing a lot of value propositions to explain to people exactly what we do, explain problem first, solution first and time savings, cost savings, putting a lot of those against each other and rapidly A-B testing.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. And speaking of the pitch, our copy team does an amazing job at this. In the B2B world, it's very easy to come up with statements that could so easily be applied to another business and it would work just as well on their website. And it sounds good. And you and your team feel really good about it. But then if your one liner can also work for another business, please don't let that be your one liner. Make it so that people actually understand what you do. Because right now there's a lot of statements out there like we do the complex things so you can focus on what you do best. Like what does that mean? And you can give that to 90% of the B2B businesses out there and it would apply to them, which means it's not good enough.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I would say early days, it's very important to just go back to the basics, you know, 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? So like going step by step, but 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 is how I would suggest everybody starts. And that's what I would do if I was to get hired all over again.”
2023-08-27 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source