Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (00:00:00): ... 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 knows 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 can 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 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 (00:00:47): 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 $0 in revenue to a mind-boggling $300 million in revenue in three years, while also staying EBITDA positive. Lenny (00:01:15): 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 Bench Accounting. In our conversation, Meltem shares how Deel kick started 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 ...