Deal

When Meltem Koran Berkowitz joined Deal in July 2020 as the second hire to the marketing team (around employee #19-20), the company was generating less than $1 million in ARR. Deal had already solved a real, urgent problem—companies wanted to expand globally but had no easy way to navigate payroll, HR, compliance, and hiring across multiple countries. The problem was acute enough that demand existed; the challenge was reaching people who needed the solution.

Meltem immediately recognized that the traditional playbook of awareness campaigns and paid ads would be wasteful. Instead, she focused on a deceptively simple principle: find where potential customers were asking questions and provide genuine answers. Within her first day, she set up keyword tracking across Reddit using a janky IFTTT setup to surface conversations about international hiring, HR compliance, and global employment. Whenever someone posted a question, Meltem or her team would jump in—not with a sales pitch, but with actual value. They'd explain whether something was possible, what the limitations were, and what factors to consider. Only after solving the person's problem did they mention Deal.

This approach scaled because Reddit answers live forever. One helpful response to one person would be found by dozens more people with the same question months later. The team also built a content machine around high-intent search queries. Rather than chasing vanity metrics, they implemented a "traffic light system": researchers would find up to 700 keywords related to Deal's domain, then manually assess each one. Green keywords had high purchase intent from real potential customers. Yellow was ambiguous. Red was irrelevant. They'd only pursue content for greens and yellows with sufficient search volume.

The Reddit and community strategy was brutally effective early on. By January 2021, just six months after Meltem arrived, Deal had grown to $4 million ARR. By year-end 2021, that figure hit $57 million. The mix of channels was roughly 80-90% non-paid: SEO, Reddit, partnerships (especially with VCs who would recommend Deal to their portfolio companies), and Quora. These channels worked because they met people where they were already searching for answers. When the IRS linked to an article from Meltem's previous company about PPP loan qualification as the official resource, it validated the entire approach—when you answer questions better than anyone else, authority and traffic follow.

Meltem's core insight was that B2B growth should prioritize the bottom of the funnel first. She advocated against early-stage awareness campaigns, which consume months of effort with uncertain payoff when people aren't yet convinced your product solves their problem. Instead, she insisted on the fundamentals: Is your website fast? Does Google know it exists? Can people understand what you do from your homepage? Only after those basics should you spend on paid ads.

SEO worked because Deal's content team treated it operationally rather than creatively. They didn't try to rank for every keyword; they researched intent obsessively. They wrote for clarity, not keyword density. They continuously updated articles as regulations changed (critical for payroll/compliance). The team grew to eight people, publishing five new articles weekly plus five updates. By the time Deal reached $295 million ARR in early 2022, roughly 50% of growth still came from non-paid channels, though the absolute volume from paid had grown significantly.

Paid ads worked too, but required discipline. The team treated creative as perishable—refreshing ads monthly to fight fatigue. More importantly, they tracked not just lead volume but conversion rate one year out, measuring actual revenue per customer acquired from each channel. This revealed that some high-volume channels weren't profitable and some small outlets punched above their weight.

From $1M ARR to $295M ARR in roughly 21 months, Deal became one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies ever while remaining EBITDA-positive. The strategy hadn't changed in principle—they still answered questions on Reddit, still published SEO content, still partnered with VCs—but the volume had shifted. The company expanded to multiple languages, built a sophisticated content operations function, and demonstrated that low-cost, high-integrity channels could carry a hypergrowth business if executed with rigor and genuine intent to serve customers.