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

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 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 find it the night 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 welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-wing experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Melton coron Berkowitz Melton is head of growth at deal which is arguably the fastest growing SAS 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 dollars in Revenue in three years while also staying ebitda positive Melton has leather 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 DLC was leading marketing efforts at Branch Accounting in her conversation Milton shares how deal 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 Melton Quran Berkowitz after a short word from our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by Miro an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours the best way to see what mirror is all about and how it can help your team collaborate better is not to listen to me talk about it but to go check it out for yourself go to miro.com Lenny with the help of the mirror team I created a super cool mirror board with two of my own favorite templates my one pager template and my managing up template that you can plug and play and start using immediately with your team I've also embedded a handful of my favorite templates that other people publish in the mirror verse when you get to the board you can also leave suggestions for the podcast answer a question that I have for you and generally just play around to get a sense of how it all works Miro is a killer tool for brainstorming with your team laying out your strategy sharing user research findings capturing ideas giving feedback on wireframes and generally just collaborating with your colleagues I actually used Miro to collaborate with the Miro team on creating my own board and it was super fun and super easy go check it out at miro.com Lenny that's miro.com today's episode is brought to you by element I just recently discovered this stuff actually from another podcast and it is such sweet salty goodness element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with a science-backed electrolyte ratio and unlike most electrolyte drinks there's no sugar coloring artificial ingredients gluten or any other BS getting enough electrolytes helps prevent and eliminate headaches muscle cramps fatigue sleeplessness and other common symptoms of electrolyte deficiency element is the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and many other Olympic athletes also dozens of NBA and NFL teams and players rely on element to stay hydrated along with Navy SEAL Teams FBI sniper teams and the Marines you can try element totally risk-free if you don't like it you can share it with a salty friend and they'll give you your money back no questions asked to give it a shot go to drink lmnt.com Lenny and you'll get a free sample pack with any purchase which includes one packet of every flavor my favorite is watermelon salt you won't find this offer publicly available so you have to head to drink lmt.com Lenny to take advantage of this offer stay salty foreign thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast thank you for having me I'm very excited to be here I'm more excited that you're here so you're head of growth at deal for people that aren't familiar with deal can you just give us a sense of what does deal do briefly and then also can you share some stats around the trajectory of deal it feels like it's been this extraordinary journey and I'm curious just to hear some of the stats of just how how extraordinary yes so dealers payroll HR and compliance platform for Global teams so essentially we help companies expand globally with tools like deal HR immigration employer of record hiring independent contractor hiring payroll both Global and U.S so whether you're trying to hire someone as a full-time employee in Japan or you're trying to make sure your contractor in Germany has everything they need on day one our platform allows you to take care of everything all in one place and when I joined a deal actually that was around the July 2020 we were less than a you know million dollars in ARR and then over time it grew within the first year on January 2021 we were at four million dollars ARR we finished 2021 with 57 Million April 22 22 we were looking at 100 million and then we started off this year with 295 million dollars in ARR and we're what we're particularly proud of is that we've been even a positive so that's something that we are very very proud of on top of the Argo amazing and you said that you were super early a deal can you give us a sense of just how early and what that was like I was a second hire to the marketing team and I was I believe either employee not 19 or 20 on the overall deal team we had uh they had a product from ramp on this podcast and it feels like there's this little bit of which company grew faster early on in the trajectory of the two but we don't have to we don't have to debate it it feels like these are like maybe the two fastest growing SAS businesses in history does that sound that's true yeah so ramp was the first one to be crowned the fastest growing and then we kind of took that Crown from them so I think we're both right um in that at a certain point in time we've been the fastest growing but um they're amazing what I want to start with is something that I heard about you which is that you specialize in cheaper growth channels and that's actually the reason the deal ended up hiring you is they wanted to find ways to grow cheaply and so a couple questions one is just what did you find worked really well from that perspective Ed deal and then two what are today's maybe cheaper growth channels that you think people are under investing in whatever you're willing to share there I don't know if you want to give away all your secrets I'm happy to give away all and everything um so I think you know before we dive into like the list of cheap channels which I will get to it's very important to notice especially in the B2B world like most of the businesses are started because there's an active problem and so when you go out to the market and try to answer people's questions like people don't want to be sold to they want their problems solved so those cheaper channels are often places where people are just trying to get an answer to their questions so whether that be you know search engine optimization through the articles that you write for people looking onto Reddit where people are asking these questions in communities forming Partnerships with other groups that are trying to answer these questions existing communities where you know other Business Leaders are connecting with each other and looking at their peers to kind of find answers to Shared problems that they're having or places like quora that's when you think about cheap channels that's a really good place to start is like just add value to people answer their questions and when you answer their questions and present Your solution if it's a fit to what they're looking for that ends up being a cheap channel for you you don't necessarily have to advertise you know when you go to Reddit and you set up those keywords to be tracking what people ask certain questions you're not paying any money to do that you're just seeing how someone has this question I have the answer to that here you go and connecting with them it takes time but early on those were a lot of the things that we invested in and I think a lot of people kind of jump that because they think oh it's one person here two people there but when you start helping people that combined with word of mouth and guess what these are digital places you provide one answer and your answer lives out there for other people to repeatedly refine as long as we're not talking about a closed slack Community maybe a conversation happening in DMS so when I think about cheap channels I think about where are people asking the questions that might be Google or that might be Reddit or any other channel and providing them the answers so they know that your solution exists okay this is awesome so this Reddit example is that which you actually did you set alerts for when people have questions about HR or hiring internationally imagine and then had someone go in there and give them some advice yes exactly that's what we did it's important to notice that you know if you're looking at a subreddit of about a thousand people you know recognize the upper size of this audience you know it's not you're not going to win 5 000 businesses through that Reddit Community but you're maybe going to win 10 of the people there that are having this problem so it's very important when investing in these cheap channels to focus on you know what's the upper limit of the audience size and also I see a lot of people sometimes go blindly into SEO they're like we're just going to write content which I'm a huge fan of SEO happy to discuss that later but if people aren't asking this question to Google you cannot write all the content you want it doesn't matter nobody's going to find it I love this so much because it connects with something I find again and again is one of the more effective early growth channels is tapping into an existing community and kind of picky backing off of what they've already built Airbnb is a little bit of an example where they went kind of went to Craigslist actually most people pull people off Craigslist Uber pull people off Craigslist lift so many companies just like piggybacked off Craigslist and built up their own company but what you said is so important which is you can't just go into a community and be like hey everyone check out what I've got you need to add value to people and add value to the community otherwise No One's Gonna Pay attention to you they're going to kick you out and so I think that is a really important Insight is if you're trying to say piggyback off of a community it's the most important thing is you need to add value to the community yeah be so when people actually want to talk to I love that is there a tool that you found for that Reddit uh strategy I've just had to know if someone's talking about hiring say internationally I did a very janky assistant that's set up I'm not proud of it but it works so someone else out there built it and I just plugged in the keywords we were looking for into it I know it wasn't just Reddit and I'm curious what else you found was worth your time but how did you figure out that's where your potential community and potential users are spending time well I think over time you know Reddit became the place that you go to when you want peer answers whether that peers someone right next to you or someone halfway across the world so it was a very obvious place for me to go to understand you know what's top of mind for my audience but also you know there are so many subreddits I whether it's Founders or HR managers that people are just asking their Community because oftentimes they have very specific questions you can't just ask that to Google because they have one thing that means that they might not be able to qualify for the exact solution that is what's most used out there so Reddit just became the place over the years for people to ask their specific questions semi-anonymously and get answers from their community and you know multiple answers to be able to judge which works better versus didn't so it was just it was one of the first places that myself and my team wants to and is this something that worked really well mostly at the beginning to kind of kick-start growth or how early was this and then how much of your growth would you say came from this sort of strategy early on I believe I set up that little kind of keyboard tracking within the first day of me being you know starting my role at deal so it was very very early and it's we still do this by the way we still you know provide answers across Reddit quora communities like we're still out there connecting with people over time of course you know I went from maybe being 15 of our funnel to you know less than five percent of our funnel because the rest of our funnel has grown a lot but the next number of people that we get to kind of share our solution with through those channels have continued to grow over time coming back to something else that I want to touch on is in today's world are there any cheaper growth channels that you are excited about or is it essentially the same idea look for where your potential users are and ideally asking questions that you could help answer is that is that roughly how you think about it still that is still roughly how I think about it I would add you know social channels to that as well I think you know Twitter is a great place people ask questions oftentimes to their communities and you know when someone has answered that question other people kind of piggyback off of that but anywhere where someone is asking a question I would consider to fall into this category of a cheap Channel well it's an example of answering the question in a value-add way versus a maybe less effective way in your experience I would say the least effective way would be hey we've solved that problem check out our website like okay cool like if you have five seconds to do that but the value add way would be explaining what the solution to that problem is because the reality is there are a lot of people out there who can probably solve this and then providing Your solution but like answer their question first and then let them decide if they want to come with you or go with someone else but the whole point of someone asking a question isn't to be sold a solution it's like I just need an answer so like genuinely treat this person like a friend of yours answer their question be like yes it's doable no it's not doable yes you can do it but you need to consider XYZ if you want to learn more about it you can chat with us and these were people on the team or you answering these questions it wasn't like some automated system it was never automated it still isn't today we would never automate our interactions with people so they were early days it was myself the other people people on my team are co-founders which to this day they still do by the way um so it's a lot of people on the team you know every single person on the team kind of has access to these and whoever is the first person to jump in will kind of flag it and you know sometimes you'll see on a Twitter someone will write a question there's like three people from deal team doesn't answer and we're like okay I think enough of us have provided uh you know value here that's amazing and I'm spending a lot of time on this but this is such an interesting and important tactic that clearly worked to help you all start and it's cheap and most at least B2B companies could probably leverage this so when people are thinking about where to go maybe do this you mentioned Twitter maybe Reddit maybe Cora is there anything else just like the sphere of potential places Founders can go think about whether maybe people are asking questions they could answer there yeah there are a lot of close communities so they're still you know they could be select communities Discord places that you know Founders choose to connect with other Founders or we have Partnerships with places like the Y combinator where you know once you go through a certain program or you qualify to be in the club whatever that club may be you get to kind of get access to this community where you can talk to other people so those are considered close communities it's not as easy to gain access to but if you can find a way to gain access to those communities they're also great places to be and then step number one is add value right yes just get in the community hey check out deal everyone otherwise we'll just get kicked out like you can try not adding value you're not going to last very long yeah if you think about the pie chart of how growth happened at deal early on and then today what would that roughly look like like what percentage of early growth came through this versus SEO or whatever else worked and then today whatever you can share of where growth comes from yeah today roughly about I would say 50 of growth continues to come from what we would consider you know non-paid channels through you know whether it be Partnerships SEO these kinds of moderations so early on that was more close to you know 80 to 90 percent but that number has grown like again the net number has grown but the percentage of the overall value has shrunk because other channels have also grown significantly awesome okay so let's talk about SEO first of all how important has that been to the success and growth of deal and then also just what have you learned about what is important to get SEO right yeah so I would say for SEO the biggest mistake people make is they will just shove keywords they're like okay these are the keywords people are searching for I need to make sure I mention it five times like obviously do that like make sure that the content that you wrote answers the question but the main thing to think about it is you know is the Google search over like if someone reads your content if they typed in something to Google and then they read the article that you've published are they going back to Google to continue reading more or is the Google search over because ultimately that's what the search engines care about is I want to make sure this person gets their answer quickest way possible so when you think from that perspective it's much easier to actually write things that people want to read and you're not just like Meandering and going on and on shoving a bunch of keywords that people are just like I bored I'm bouncing I'm going somewhere else so asking that question of is this search over is a really good place to start instead of just shoving keywords and you know our content team is amazing I would say they're more of an operational team than they are a creative team the way they run things the way they you know publish the Articles you know there's a very clear framework that is used to decide what gets published when and what doesn't get published by the same token so all of those things are very important to consider instead of just being like ah this keyword has you know 10 000 monthly visitors I'm just going to write a bunch of things about that with an example of a page that you wrote that ends people search and gives them what they need a lot of people wonder what what an eor is because that's an employer of record they tend to be confused about exactly what that is so we do very well in explaining to people what eor is and isn't and what its limitations are because the first question you know that you will have after the eor questions answered is okay what's the downside when do I need to not use it so that for us that does that's one of the content pieces that does very well I'd love to spend more time on this operational element of the SEO team maybe one question is just what is that bar that tells you that it's ready to publish and worth going out versus it's not ready yes so I can take credit to this this is all of our team's work but we have this framework that we call the traffic like light system essentially we go well whenever the team is going to do you know a Content um series they will go and find up to 700 keywords these are keywords that are related to what we do so they might be closely related they might be distant related and then those set of keywords get ranked by highest volume to the lowest volume so then you have an Excel sheet keywords on the left volume on the right and then you go one by one this does take time and then say what is the intent of someone searching this keyword is this a university student looking to write an article and they're never going to become our customer or is this someone that is actually looking to solve their existing solution and they are going to become our customer so with that you know you get the green light ones which is the intended very high this person wants our solution the yellow light is intent could be there 50 50 you know maybe they're looking to buy our solution maybe it's not soon enough and then the red is this person is not looking to buy our solution they're just doing this search for any other reason so when you do that then you go from the greens highest volume to the lowest volume yellows highest volume to the lowest volume and oftentimes you never get to the Reds I love that and then once you have say a keyword say green I guess it's a green keyword where it's high intent and high volume what is the process to actually put together an article that works for SEO so step one is understanding the search intent why is someone typing that like what are they trying to understand you know and a part of that is going to Google and figuring yeah what is Google service servicing today so one of you know the examples that I always give people of when you type eor to Google it doesn't give you employer of record it gives you enhanced oil recovery because most of the people typing ER to Google is looking for that solution now if my team blindly went in and said we're going to rank for eor we're never going to rank for that because that's not what Google gives people because that's not what people have been looking for so first is understanding what are people looking for and creating a Content piece that answers those questions oftentimes the bottom part of Google you know where it says yes like the next question is that you should be asking is a really good place to go to understand okay after someone's done with this search what's the next question that they ask and the next one and the next one so figuring out what do people want to get out of this and then their Myriad of you know SEO Solutions tools that you can use out there to ensure that the content you've written is in a simple enough language that someone you know with a fifth grade reading level can understand that you actually did the right things you know you put the right keywords in the right places I almost think of keywords as like that's your address like that's how you give people give Google like please send people my way so you you know you can use many tools we use clearscope we love it so those are the tools that you use and then it gets published and oftentimes those tools will give you a score to say you're an A plus or your C minus you need to make your language less sophisticated currently it's at University level and we need it to be at fourth grade reading level what is the structure of the content team at this point like how many people is it and what are their focuses fun fact about our content team the person that leads it was one of the earliest employees at deal I want to say number two or three so the person there is just so special to our entire company and so the structure of the content team for us is it is led by our director of content we have one person that is in charge of all of the operations so that is working with our Freelancers making sure that the briefs are sent out making sure that the fact checking is done on time that the articles are published on the website and tracking in everything that they kind of run the Machinery on the back end and then we have you know different people focused on different areas of content because you need to have expertise that you build over time to write properly so we have one person you know looking after certain product lines another person would be focusing on but behind different product lines and very recently we've set out a team for different types of content because content isn't just written article it's also a video it's also education there's a lot of different types of content that we want to tap into so now there's a team that is focused on those new mediums for us awesome so how many people total uh full-time that run this operation right now the team is about eight people total and it's like I don't know if it's exactly fifty percent of it something like half of your growth essentially is coming from this team yes is there anything else you found that it's really important or effective for thinking about making us see it work the biggest mistake people make is SEO is one of those things that you can try and automate it like you can do a lot of things that save you time but it never stops being time consuming and to do it well it is going to be time consuming so oftentimes people just get over it or they think it's below them to you know be going over and doing keyword research and doing all those things one by one and that's oftentimes where people lose out is they try to cut corners and when you cut Corners you just don't create a good quality resource like that's what it comes down to it's like is there a resource good quality yes or no so when you try to just be like I want to rank and cut all those Corners you know content is not going to be great nobody's going to want to read it and your program is not going to go anywhere so I think it's one of those things that people as they become more senior think it's below them and I think that's the biggest mistake it's interesting that's exactly the same advice for writing a newsletter like the thing I do where if a newsletter isn't working it usually means the content isn't valuable enough to people it's such a clear meritocracy of if it's useful people will read it subscribe share and if they're not they will unsubscribe and then Google basically figures that out based on people's behavior yes exactly to give people a sense of the operation how many articles are you putting out a month a day or week whatever you can share there we used to put out about 10 articles a week that's net new whereas now we have doing more of five new articles and five article updates because the type of content we write regulations change things change all the time so we need to make sure that even if something was published two years ago it's up to date so we have a team that is you know responsible for kind of continuously fact checking so we do about five article updates and five net new articles written and of course we do it across many different languages so what started off as English only operations is now in other languages as well so there's no shortage of work to go around something that I go back and forth on a bit is if SEO is something every company should be doing and will work for them and in my experience there's certain products that are really good for SEO especially if there's user generated content or there's just like a bunch of data like you say Yelp or Glassdoor where they can generate tons of pages in all these different ways do you have an opinion on what sort of business and companies best suited for SEO or is you're feeling like everyone should probably be doing SEO in some form and even if it's not a huge part of your growth strategy it'll help I don't think everybody should be doing SEO I think if you are in a space where people are looking for a solution you should be doing SEO but if you are a direct consumer company selling people lipstick which I'm a huge buyer of you probably shouldn't invest in SEO all that much because people don't go to Google for that they go to Instagram they go to influencers and even if someone types in the best lipstick of 2023 chances of your website ranking because you're not a third-party objective comparing to other people is very low so really depends on the solution but if you are in a space which most B2B products tend to be that you're solving an active problem very specifically then I would say SEO is a good idea if you're a consumer good maybe a little bit lesser you know effort should be put towards it makes a lot of sense going back to the early days your heart has had a growth a deal there's a lot of things you could do I'm curious how you decided where to prioritize your resources and what to do in the early days versus what you started doing down the road and what you could almost like not worry about early on what have you learned about that early prioritization exercise yes so I would say early days it's very important to just go back to the basics just 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 it 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 the net 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 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 is how I would suggest everybody starts and that's what I would do if I was to get hired all over again I love that so what are some of those steps so Step One is do you have a website step two is make sure the website performs and people can actually have a good time and they're experiencing it imagine part of it is also that people understand what you do like tweaking maybe the pitch and the yes exactly and speaking of the pitch our copy team does an amazing you know 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 know you and your team feel really good about it but then if you're a one-liner can also work for another business please don't let that be our one-liner like make it so that people actually understand what you do because right now there's a lot of you know 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 is there anything that you remember you changed in those early days in terms of the website or the positioning or anything along those lines that was a big Improvement our website was hard-coded so the first thing we did with the help of the you know 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 testings and outside of that we worked really hard on testing a lot of you know value propositions to explain to people exactly what we do explain you know problem first solution first and Time Savings cost savings you know putting a lot of those against each other and rapidly a b testing once you got past that phase where maybe you started doing some paid ads and other things where did you find you could invest more resources once we covered the basics of you know your big 4 405 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 you know or it's 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 you it starts adding up so really long tail is where we focused on and we started going very Niche with websites that have you know maybe fifty thousand hundred thousand visitors a month which isn't all that much when you're thinking about your paid ad strategy but all of those places add up and they're oftentimes overlooked because they're not as easy you have to take the time to set up from scratch to run it on everything you know our paid ads team they spend just as much time running Facebook and Google ads as they do running those third-party much smaller platform ads it takes the same effort but you need to have a diversified um you know source of your leads huge fan of podcast ads over here and maybe that's a good time to cue the mid-roll ad maybe I don't know if it happens sounds perfect here we go today's episode is brought to you by assembly AI if you're looking to build AI powered features in your audio and video products then you need to know about assembly AI which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale what I love about assembly AI is you can use their simple API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from Top tier research Labs product team that startups and Enterprises are using assembly AI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings detect topics in podcasts pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken and lots more all of assembly ai's models which are accessed through their API are production ready so many PMS I know are considering or already building with AI and assembly AI is the fastest way to build with AI for audio use cases now is the time to check out assembly AI which makes it easy to bring the highest accuracy transcription plus valuable insights to your customers just like Spotify call rail and writer do for theirs visit assemblyai.com Lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no code playground that's assemblyai.com Lenny and welcome back speaking of podcast ads something that I find is with that sort of advertising there's a direct response component of like we will drive leads as running an ad like this and there's also a awareness brand building component I know you're not a big fan of awareness campaigns and marketing campaigns especially early on and so I'd love to get your perspective on why that is and when how you think about that sort of investment I'm not a huge fan of early awareness campaigns for B2B businesses specifically so if you are a consumer goods founder you can you know Skip fit spocket 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 you know teams that are during 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 businesses 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 out there now 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 gonna go ahead and continue looking for a solution for my problem is there an example of a marketing campaign or an awareness campaign that comes to mind that you thought was like okay this is if you do it this way maybe maybe it's worth doing I've seen notion do a great job with their out of home ass 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 so what is it about notion that you think was great it was timing and then also the actual ad itself you thought was great 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 wasn't 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 so 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 so we've been working kind of through all the ways that deal has grown we've talked about SEO Community you mentioned Partnerships is there anything interesting there to mention around just like what Partnerships have done 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 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 for 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 solution you are putting out there I really loved this idea you keep coming back to which is where are people asking this question that you can help them answer and to make that even more concrete for people what are some other examples maybe of questions people ask that deal can help them with so that it could help people think about okay maybe our product can help them answer these are the sorts of questions since the early days when it continues to happen compliance is a huge question that gets asked so when you are an HR leader or Finance leader or a 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 know you need to know where you need to what pay what taxes when you need to not pay them and what types of work 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 you know if you 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 um so you those are the kinds of specifics that we get into with people got it so it's like how do I pay taxes for an engineer I'm hiring in Turkey and then you give them here's the answer and then it's like if you just want to take care of it for you go check out deal exactly like rarely 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 speaking of answering questions and content something that you told me is that you wrote a blog post at the IRS ended up linking to as the definitive answer to a question and I don't think this was a deal but can you share that story Yes actually it wasn't my previous role and the person who wrote that article is today a deal um so he came over to join us there too but yes it was right around when covet happened and the U.S 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 so 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 well 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 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 resource that's the ultimate sign of the question is answered uh and you're done with it the IRS decides the link to it so you're saying that was actually a Big Driver of growth or as traffic I'm curious how many people actually go read that so that was huge for that short duration of a few week time when people were trying to apply for PPP um and then it died out as did PVP makes sense one last question uh around paid and then I want to move on to a different topic is there anything you've learned about what it takes to be successful okay growth from your experience to deal yeah so a few things our paid team spent a lot of time on both the messaging aspect of things as well as the optimization so optimization is you know 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 the ads we put out there on a monthly basis with the exception of a few Google ads which need to be straight to the point so get 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 you know as your product has evolved so has the messaging alongside that and also recognizing you know not just looking at the amount of leaks that you 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 you know 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 you know 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 at what rate do they convert 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 to invest there or are we kind of reaching that Peak and we can't continue to invest there something that I should mention as we talk through this we're talking about all these ways to grow the product but at the core is a great product that people actually find valuable and want to keep using and maybe a question there is just how how that plays into this whole growth strategy like actually making the product something people want versus all these acquisition channels 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 deal the project was top-notch you know I as I was joining an early stage company I joined right after series 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 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 where people aren't going to put up with crappy products they're gonna leave that's going to get out and people are going to know it's not a worthy product so like 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 ability product and they have six sales people and two Engineers the product probably isn't going to be great for that much longer especially if it's like an outsourced you know Dev shop during the product they're like oh they'll take care of the product we'll just sell it something else that I think is important to talk about is covet was an important element of your growth and so I guess one is is that true and then two just what did you lean into and lean out of in terms of growth during covet to kind of help people discover deal when they needed it most which is basically people going remote in a lot of ways in a lot of companies yeah so kovid 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 whether that means you're working remotely from someone who lives a block away from you or 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 on as the code was coming to an end was are you worried covet is coming to an end that people aren't going to use deal anymore and our response to that has always been we are not a remote work platform we're a global work platform so a lot of these businesses have gone back into offices we have a lot of customers that ask people to go back to their offices but now they have offices in Germany and in Canada and in U.S and in France so we were never a remote work company we were just a global work company and remote work kind of because there was a lot of news coverage happening around it we just became synonymous with that so I do think early on we did benefit from you know being able to provide that solution and a lot of people saw the reality of like hey I work just as well with this person as I did when I was in an office with them well the best person that I'm looking for the job may not be within my you know region so let me go ahead and hire them regardless of where they are people got comfortable with that and more and more companies kind of started moving in that direction and is there anything that ended up being really important in terms of helping deal grow through that like a channel that's just like let's go big on this channel because it seems to be working really well or is it just Word of Mouth basically and people just like oh [ __ ] I really need to solve this problem my hair's on fire what's out there let me go find find an answer I would say it was Word of Mouth like maybe very very early on it was a word of mouth but within the first few months of our operation that kind of stopped being sure at least the word of mouth stopped being a smaller percentage of the way in which people discover us but it's always that you know people needed a payroll 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 I want to chat about team building something that I've heard you're exceptional at and my first question is early on when you're building the team the growth team specifically a deal what skills did you find were most important to look for and what skills and experiences did you find wasn't as important early on that you could kind of sacrifice and wait till later to get 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 you know lead numbers that's not good enough they need to be able to commit to you know 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 you know 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 they joined 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 someone from an amazing company that have accomplished amazing things but they're not used to operating with ten percent of the resources that they had so they're not willing to kind of get down and do the Dirty Work and a deal we have this concept called little hands I think it's Loosely translated from French um 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 to 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 yes of course I'll do that then if someone's not excited about that then they're not a good fit for at least a company at our stage right now that is an amazing expression little hands you talked about how you check that people are willing to commit to revenue goals is that like in the interview or is that like how do you because one everyone just say like yeah yeah I can commit to anything you need me to commit to I'm going to go make this off work great how do you kind of get a sense if they're the kind of person that would do that it happens within the interview process so one ways 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'll 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 ten thousand dollars and maybe a hundred thousand dollars 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 dollars 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 of funnel metrics until you give them all the resources that they need and it sounds like the way you goal teams within deal is also is is revenue growth teams basically have Revenue goals it's not like you said leads or traffic or anything like that 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 in terms of Team structure how you thought about structuring the early growth team what did that look like and what was kind of the reporting lines and buckets of investment 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 put out a theory and then let them grow their teams so 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 on to the girls team was a data analyst because the sentiment was we're not willing to spend a dollar if we don't know where that money is going and what it's doing for us which you know a lot of people would assume that's a very early hire for you know data is too early to hire is 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 person I mentioned that was early employee so that's kind of 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 so those are teams like product marketing content community events paid advertisements brand you know if we are looking for the best graphic designer in the world I don't care where they are they can sit wherever they in the world they are basically functional teams and then we have Regional teams because we are selling into a lot of different regions we need to make sure that we have local expertise as well so we have marketing managers for different key Visions for us that then work with our functional teams to bring the strategy to life so that's kind of how we've said it I've seen businesses who you know set build out a regional team that has their own paid ads team and their own content team but what we have found is when you take people away from their kind of group of expertise so if you take a paid ads person and if you have a team of paid ads people and you separate those five people and give them to different regions instead of letting them sit together and be a tight team the best practice is learning and the skill like the leveling up of the skills doesn't happen as fast as they would if all of the technical roles are sitting together so we are kind of continuing down the road of functional and Regional setup so say someone in Turkey wants to run paid ads they convince the paid growth team to investment resources in growing turkey exactly so they would work with our Central paid ads team to say I would like to run paid ads in Turkey this is the audience I want to go after and then they work together to execute on that strategy how does that team decide who who's going to get their time is there a rough approach to that 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 chess is Art if a market is you know what we consider to be tier one um it's a place that we have seen good growth we will invest our resources into it and then we along the way we learn and we decide if we're going to double down or pull back a little bit awesome I want to chat a bit about culture culture deal so we had Jeff from ramp on and their culture is described by one word velocity also being one of you being the fastest growing business of all time I'm curious how you contrast your culture and broadly how you think about culture at a startup and how you help create the culture a deal 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 you know 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 you know that we remain positive you know 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 XYZ reasons they're going to just slow things down we need people to ask the question up 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 [ __ ] 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 illegal 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 best but it's like no it's 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 to be able 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 Etc is you know we offered 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 I love this deal speed are these core values basically within deal these are values that you come back to yes exactly and these are values that we publicly share as well how early in the life cycle of the company did you all come come up with these values that's something that a lot of startups think about is like when should we actually crystallize these values so we came up with them I believe it was about a year in we didn't sit around the table and say what should we call our values like deal speed was something that you know our CEO would tell it people he'd be like okay I want you 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's like it was already used so frequently with people that we were just like okay we keep seeing 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 and into the company being you know kind of existing but the culture happened well before we established that reminds me of Airbnb there was a team that came up with the core values I think I think it was like four years in probably and there were six of them and then a few years later they realized two of them aren't actually true they're like aspirational and there's this kind of recognition that value should be who you are not who you hope to be because it just doesn't click and so they actually cut those values and they ended up having just four values and maybe one day they'll bring him back and so I think that's a really good lesson is you wanna kind of see who you already are and then just represent them in a really interesting creative way yes exactly there's a version of what did you call it default Optimum yeah default optimism airbnb's version of that was embrace the adventure which is just like this is gonna be crazy just go for it embrace it this is what it's going to be like exactly and you know try and see how can I solve this like how can this be done instead of why it won't work yeah I love that and this urgency piece comes up again and again in these interviews I'm doing what I think of is Frank slootman I think is his name the founder of snowflake has this book called amp it up yes all about yeah all about just like how they made snowflake work and something he comes back to is just you need to constantly have a sense of urgency because when you don't people people get bored and they actually end up liking their job less because it's just like I don't really know what I'm doing things are like sort of moving along and there's actually a lot of value in moving fast Jeff talked about this is just like you have less burnout when people feel like things are getting done and out the door yeah it's incredibly fulfilling you know I look back and sometimes things when for example when the svb was going through the issues that we're going through the entire team had to work on a Sunday to kind of communicate with our customers of like no we're good don't worry about it but I remember that Sunday you know I had to miss out on a theater I was so excited to see but it was it just felt like oh my God like we're in this it was like a war room we're doing it and that felt good I didn't necessarily show up on Monday feeling already burned out but it was more like yes like I felt alive and I think the right people will feel that way yeah and as long as it's not like constantly for years just endless yes late nights and weekends it can't always be wartime right I find that those are end up being the most memorable meaningful moments is when you're working really really hard on something that you're excited about and it has to be something you're excited about and are proud of yes last question I saw on Twitter you share this photo of your home office and it was this incredible view out the window and then you took a photo facing your desk and it was an ironing board and two questions there one is just how did that all happen and then two I think you mentioned somewhere that you didn't even meet a lot of your co-workers for a year and a half after joining deal it was very remote forward so I'm curious also just how you made remote work work for you in that environment 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 I he he won the desk so I had to come up with a creative solution and because the view behind me was stunning of the Bosphorus 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 I live in Canada I would have to use my kind of days off to go and for me it just meant a lot to be able to like do my work regardless of where I am you know I had a full day of work and meetings and everything and my work just kind of continued and I was also be 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 then 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 story behind it uh 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 to 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 this surreal moment because I worked with them for a year and a half we'd accomplished so much you know our Revenue was already you know way past 50 million dollars 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 we works and co-working spaces if if that's something that you choose but we all get to show up as like our very authentic selves so you know people have met my pets and my partner well before they would have if I was showing up to analysis so there's that kind of sincerity that comes with in being with beings 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 dress up for meetings or anything so just being able to show up as yourself and you know whether you're an introverted person who never likes to turn on their camera or you're someone who's going to like hear me my dog that just naturally built a team culture and kind of camaraderie well before we could be together in person clearly it has worked out melt them is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round we had a really good conversation that 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 so 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 quite an empowering statement I love it with that we've reached our very exciting lightning ground are you ready I am ready let's do this what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people from the non-fiction 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 you need to learn something I don't care what fixtures you read you can read Judy Bloom for all I care but just read fiction like be creative do something with your brain other than you know reading non-fiction and learning things all the time I've had to make that shift myself and it's been great but I still get drawn to non-fiction but uh get a reminder yes what are some favorite recent movie or TV shows you've loved 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 like 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 recent TV show was the Summer I Turned Pretty I absolutely love it I don't care that it's actually designed for teenagers I enjoyed every second of it what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them 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 what do you look for in their answer that gives you a sign that they're a good candidate or not 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 like that's probably a [ __ ] answer but if they're like oh yeah like they'll say these weird things about me that shows a little bit of like self-awareness and humbleness that I want to see in a person what is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like oh this is a dangerous one so two one was new strips they're 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 um 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 so they're just like strips that you put in your mouth 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 micro dosing caffeine exactly and the second one is I recently was gifted uh 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 second handbook shop I'm going to run into it that's amazing there's a camp at Burning Man that's a library and you can borrow books and you have to return it the year the next year which is amazing and then they'd have there's a guy that has a megaphone or he's just like a book has been returned mix the whole scene about it what is a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with other people either at work or in life 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 I'm 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 oh my God it's so good final question what is your favorite Canadian food you live in Canada and thus the question I mean okay it's not particularly food but Caesars they're basically Bloody Marys with clam juice oh Bloody Caesar is that what they're called they're called Caesar they're clove Caesars um but the American equivalent would be a Bloody Mary it's so much better than a Bloody Mary it's not vegan and then the reason I qualified as food is when you order it in Canada it comes with like pepperoni sticks and pickled asparagus and they can they'll shove a whole meal in there and it's just amazing and something that America should definitely adapt to I think I've had one I think I prefer Bloody Mary's but uh good a good pitch for the Caesars maltham thank you so much for being here we talked about growth strategy team building deals default optimism so many things really appreciate you making the time two final questions where can folks finding online if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you so they can reach out to me on Twitter at Melton K I'm the fastest to respond there please don't reach out to me on LinkedIn I never respond there um and the way readers can be useful to me is if they won we're always looking for feedback on deals 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 if anybody has tips that they think I would benefit from or any book good book fiction book recommendations I'm always open to them amazing welcome thank you again so much for being here thank you so much for having me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode