An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz, head of growth at Deel (a global payroll, HR, and compliance platform that scaled from under $1M to roughly $295M ARR in about three years while staying EBITDA positive), discusses how Deel grew with cheap channels. The conversation covers community answering, SEO operations, paid and partnership channels, prioritization for early-stage growth, team structure, and the culture of 'Deel speed'.

01Key learnings

• Start growth with cheap channels: monitor communities like Reddit, Quora, and Twitter for people asking questions you can answer, and add real value before mentioning your product.
• Before spending on paid ads, make sure the fundamentals work: a fast website, discoverability in search engines, and clear positioning that differs from competitors.
• For SEO, aim for content that fully answers the search so users don't need to return to Google; avoid keyword stuffing and cutting corners on research.
• Prioritize keywords with a traffic-light system, focusing first on high-volume keywords where searchers have clear buying intent.
• Diversify paid lead sources by running many small long-tail placements (niche sites, newsletters, podcasts), since they can add up to a meaningful share of leads.
• Delay broad awareness campaigns for B2B until you have bottom-of-funnel demand and validated messaging, which usually takes six to eight months.
• Measure paid channels by downstream revenue, not just lead volume, using a dashboard tracking lead-to-opportunity-to-close rates and one-year customer value.
• Hire growth people who commit to full-funnel revenue KPIs and who are willing to do scrappy work, and hire one leader at a time to prove a hypothesis before expanding a team.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.