Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…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 Deel, the product was top-notch. As I was joining an early stage company, I joined right after series A, I was expecting certain things to be duct taped in the back, it happens. And I was like, "Oh no, 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 Deel 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 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 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 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 Deel, most of the team was product and engineers. So that told me that the core of this business was 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 are talking to an early stage company that's a B2B product and they have six salespeople and two engineers, their product probably isn't going to be great for that much longer. Especially if it's an outsourced dev shop doing 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 Covid was an important element of your growth. And so I guess, one, is that true? And then two, just what did you lean into and lean out of in terms of growth during Covid to help people discover Deel when they needed it most, which is basically people going remote in a lot of ways in a lot of companies? So Covid, actually a lot of people think Deel was started as a response to the pandemic, we actually got started before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened. So as sad as it was, it did force people into 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 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 Deel 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 asked people to go back to their offices, but now they have offices in Germany and in Canada and in the US and in France. So we were never a remote work company, we were just a global work company. And remote work, 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 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 region, so let me go ahead and hire them regardless of where they are." People got comfortable with that and more and more companies started moving in that direction.…

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