Skeleton Before the Makeup
Sequence early growth investment from site fundamentals up to awareness — never the reverse.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Meltem Kuran Berkowitz's ordering rule for a brand-new growth function: fix the foundational layer (site exists, loads fast, is indexable, explains what you do) before any spend, then discoverability, then paid, and only much later brand awareness. Each layer is a gate — investing in a higher layer while a lower one is broken wastes the spend. She frames it as building the skeleton before applying the makeup.
Origin
Berkowitz's own approach as Deel's first growth hire (employee ~19-20, joined July 2020 at <$1M ARR). She says it is exactly what she would do again 'if I was to get hired all over again'. The awareness-last argument draws on Notion's out-of-home campaigns as her counter-example of correct timing.
Core principles
- 01Basics first: a fast, findable, comprehensible website is the substrate every other channel sits on.
- 02A paid ads program cannot rescue a four-second page load — it just buys bounces.
- 03B2B businesses exist because someone has an active, urgent problem; harvest that bottom-of-funnel demand before speaking to the masses.
- 04Awareness campaigns are the shiny thing that feels like marketing and produces nothing for 6-8 months of runway.
- 05Positioning copy that could belong to any other company is a failed foundation, not a finished one.
How to run it
- 1
Confirm the foundation exists and performs
Ask, in order: Do you have a website? Is it fast? Do the search engines know it exists? Treat each as a hard gate. Move the site off hard-coded HTML onto a platform the growth team can edit and A/B test without a developer in the loop.
Pro tip Deel's first infrastructure act was migrating a hard-coded site to an editable platform precisely so continuous A/B testing became possible.
Watch out Do not skip to spend while the site loads in four-plus seconds. The paid program will fail for reasons that have nothing to do with paid.
- 2
Make the pitch unmistakably yours
Test value propositions against each other — problem-first vs solution-first, time-savings vs cost-savings — and rapidly A/B them. Apply the one-liner test: if your headline would work verbatim on a competitor's or any other B2B site, it is not good enough.
Pro tip Rewrite anything resembling 'we do the complex things so you can focus on what you do best' — it applies to 90% of B2B and therefore says nothing.
- 3
Make yourself findable
Ask whether people can find you. If not, determine whether you need to write content so they can. This is where SEO and cheap question-answering channels enter — before any budget is committed.
- 4
Only now ask whether to buy traffic
With foundation and discoverability in place, ask: do I have money, and can I put it behind paid ads to bring people to a site that now converts?
- 5
Exhaust bottom-of-funnel demand before awareness
Spend the first six to eight months minimum converting the people who are ready to buy today. Only after that demand is tapped should you run brand/awareness campaigns — and only once the market already recognizes your product enough for the creative to land.
Pro tip Notion's out-of-home ads worked because they came late — the ads showed the product interface, which only reads as a message once people already recognize that interface.
Watch out An awareness campaign burns a month of team time on strategy and creative with no guarantee it resonates. Early on, that is a month you cannot get back.
In the wild
Berkowitz joined Deel in July 2020 when it was under $1M ARR. Rather than launch campaigns, she moved the hard-coded website onto an editable platform, ran rapid A/B tests on value propositions, and pushed into free question-answering channels and SEO. Paid came after; brand awareness came much later.
→ Deel went from under $1M ARR to $4M by January 2021, $57M by end of 2021, $100M by April 2022, and $295M ARR entering 2023 — while staying EBITDA positive.
Notion ran billboard-style ads that simply showed their product interface. They did not do this early — they waited until essentially everyone in tech recognized the interface on sight, so the layout alone communicated the product.
→ The ads reinforced an already-understood message instead of trying to introduce the company. Berkowitz cites it as the model for when awareness spend is finally worth it.
Common mistakes
Running paid on a broken foundation
Buying clicks to a slow, unclear, or unindexed site converts spend into bounces. The channel gets blamed when the foundation was the problem.
Doing an awareness campaign because it is the fun, prestigious work
Berkowitz calls awareness 'the shiny cool thing that you want to do'. Early on, people see the campaign, think it looks cool, and go back to searching for a solution to their problem — because you have not yet found the messaging that resonates.
Shipping generic B2B positioning that feels good internally
Teams sign off on one-liners that sound polished but would work equally well for any other company. It feels like a finished foundation and is actually a missing one.
Is it for you?
Best for
A first growth or marketing hire at a pre-Series-B B2B startup deciding where the first dollars and hours go.
Not ideal for
Consumer goods or DTC brands where discovery genuinely happens on Instagram and via influencers rather than through search and problem-solving.
From the transcript
“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…”
“you can't run a successful paid ads program if you have a website that's loading in four plus seconds”
“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…”
“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…”
From the episode
An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth
Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)