👉 10 Things Deel Did to Get from $1M to $100M ARR in 20 Months
Deel recently announced it had crossed $1 billion in ARR, joining the exclusive club of B2B companies that have reached true unicorn revenue status. But how did they actually get there? The foundation was built in those critical early years—the journey from $1M to their first $100M ARR in just 20 months.
When Deel Co-Founder and CRO Shuo Wang took the stage at SaaStr, she didn’t start with today’s billion-dollar victory lap. She starts with the nightmare of those early scaling days.
“I dream about Intercom tickets. I dream about clients telling me, ‘Hey, I did not receive my payment today. What is going on?'” she recalls from the dark days of scaling without infrastructure. “I was on support 24/7. Even during my sleep, I was dreaming about support tickets.”
This brutal honesty has become Wang’s signature—and it’s exactly what propelled Deel from $1M to $100M ARR in just 20 months, making them (briefly) the fastest-growing SaaS company in history. Here are the 10 critical moves that got them there, and the painful lessons they learned when hypergrowth broke everything.
1. Pivoted Fast When Product-Market Fit Was a Mirage
The Brutal Truth: “Everyone loves the idea, but everyone hates the product. No one wants to use our product for two weeks.”
In Y Combinator’s 10-week program, Deel burned through 20% of their time selling a payments platform that nobody wanted. Most founders would iterate incrementally or double down. Wang and her co-founder Alex did something different.
The Pivot: They interviewed 200 companies and 400 founders in just 6 weeks, asking one simple question: “If you’re open to hiring internationally, what are your biggest challenges?”
The Discovery: Companies didn’t just need payments—they needed payments plus compliance. Local labor laws were the real blocker, not payment rails.
The Result: After pivoting from “payments only” to “payments + compliance,” they onboarded their first 100 clients and raised Series A. Three months later: Series B.
The Lesson: When Paul Graham says “make something people want,” he doesn’t mean make something people say they want. Wang learned to distinguish between polite interest and desperate need.
2. Caught the Remote Work Wave 18 Months Before Everyone Else
The Insight: In 2019, Wang noticed her friend Florent at LinkedIn was already working from home 3 days a week. “If big companies like LinkedIn and Google are already supporting that model, and with Slack, Zoom, and Google Meet advancing, work from home is going to be the big trend.”
The Timing: Founded in early 2019, Series A in May 2020 (two months after pandemic lockdowns), $100M ARR by March 2022.
The Execution: While competitors were building for the office-first world, Deel built for global-first, remote-first from day one.
The Payoff: When remote work exploded overnight, Deel was the only solution ready for the new reality. Their global compliance infrastructure became essential overnight, not nice-to-have.
3. Scaled Sales Without Revenue Operations (And Paid Dearly)
The Explosion: From 2 AEs to 50 AEs in one year. “By the end of 2020, we hired almost 30 AEs globally.”
The Problem: “One thing that I did not understand is the support to the sales team, which is very, very important. Today, we call it the revenue operations function.”
What Revenue Operations Actually Means: “The operations team that supports the revenue function, which can support sales, design the quota, design commissions, and design go-to-market strategies and leverage data to make good strategies for the team.”
The Impact: Without RevOps, productivity per AE plummeted. Onboarding became “very inefficient.” Training was broken. The sales machine that should have been accelerating was actually decelerating.
The Fix: They built a dedicated revenue operations team to support quota design, commission structures, go-to-market strategy, and data-driven performance optimization.
The Lesson: Revenue Operations isn’t overhead—it’s the engine that makes sales scale possible.
4. Learned That Customer Success = Revenue Success (The Hard Way)
The Crisis: “With a huge incoming traffic, we didn’t really scale our support team to support that huge demand and huge need. Everyone in the support team, our customer success team, is a little bit burned out, including myself.”
The Personal Cost: “I was on Intercom 24/7. Even during my nighttimes, while I was asleep, I dream about Intercom.”
The Business Impact: Response times increased. Customer satisfaction scores dropped from 4.9 to 4.7. “I’m Asian. I’m super competitive. Everything needs to be perfect.”
The Strategic Response: They didn’t just hire more support people—they reimagined customer success as a revenue function. They booked individual meetings with every client, created QBRs, and started proactive communication about product updates.
The Discovery: During these conversations, they learned clients didn’t know about other Deel products. Huge revenue was being left on the table.
5. Built Account Management to Capture Hidden Revenue
The Realization: “There’s a huge potential and there’s like a big part of the revenue that we’re leaving on the table.”
The Strategy: “It’s time to grow our account management team so that the account managers can go after the clients, share with them the new products and grow the accounts, do upsell and cross-sell.”
The Results: This single decision drove them from $50M ARR in December 2021 to $100M ARR by Q1 2022—doubling ARR in just 3 months.
The Framework: Account management wasn’t just retention—it was expansion revenue. Every existing customer was a growth opportunity waiting to be unlocked.
6. Went Global Early (And Made It Their Competitive Moat)
The Founder Advantage: “I was born in China and moved to the States at the age of 16. My co-founder Alex was born in France, moved to Israel for college, then to the States for his master’s degree.”
The Global Strategy: “Since day one, we’re not only a U.S.-focused company because of the nature of the product—it can definitely benefit global clients.”
The Execution: They sent tiny teams to Europe, Latin America, and APAC. “Even though it is one person that does SDR job, does closing, does partnership, does marketing, covers 20 countries in each continent.”
The Infrastructure Play: “When we truly find product-market fit and we’re really able to grow our business, it is really good foundation and infrastructure that we can use to grow exponentially later on.”
The Results: Today, they split revenue almost equally between U.S. and international markets.
The Lesson: If your product can serve global customers, build global infrastructure from day one—even if it’s lean.
7. Made Data the Foundation of Every Strategic Decision
The Philosophy: “Data is very, very important. We should make decisions, leverage data. If we do not have data, we should find all kinds of ways to collect data.”
The Obsession: “There are many times that we have changed our Salesforce setup so that we can collect data from our AEs when they won a deal, when they lost a deal, or got additional information from the client.”
The Team: “Today, we have a full house revenue operations team. I have a very technical background. I am a very data-driven person. Even our head of marketing, head of sales is very analytical and really, really good at using data to build sales efficiency and next strategies.”
The Application: Every expansion decision, every hiring plan, every go-to-market strategy was backed by rigorous data analysis.
8. Treated Sales Like Engineering (Process + Systems + Data)
The Mindset Shift: “Today sales is not an art, it’s a science. We should run the sales team, build the process as an engineering project, leverage the data, build the systems, understand the fundamentals.”
The Implementation: They built processes, systems, and data infrastructure to support sales performance at scale.
The CRO Role: “It is really rare to have a founder as a CRO. The key function of this role is making money for the company. If you are in charge of making money for a company, you will be able to oversee the most efficient way to produce revenue.”
9. Personally Interviewed First 400 Hires for Cultural Alignment
The Remote Challenge: “We’re a fully remote company and it is very, very important that everyone that we hire can adapt to this remote culture and is comfortable to work remotely.”
The Process: “For the first 400 people that were hired company-wide, I interviewed all of them just to make sure that the culture is aligned. They can get a project done independently.”
The Results: “Most of the first 400 employees were still with us at $100m ARR.”
The Insight: In a remote-first world, cultural alignment isn’t nice-to-have—it’s the foundation that enables everything else.
10. Built Systematic Feedback Loops from the Front Lines
The Philosophy: “Always listen to your team. Listen, especially to your sales team and your support and customer success team, because they’re in the front line and their feedback is directly positively correlated to your product’s roadmap.”
The Practice: “Even today, even though I’m not on Intercom, I’m not on Zendesk 24/7, I still review the tickets. If there’s anything escalated to me, I would jump in and set up meetings with clients directly.”
The Value: “They’re the most valuable asset to you because they will be able to provide you immediate feedback so that we can grow together.”
The Three Meta-Lessons from Deel’s Hypergrowth
1. Forecast Everything, But Plan for Chaos
“It’s really hard to forecast when the timing is really good and everything could change. But during this uncertainty, we need to find some ways to measure certainties. Forecast is not only about headcount planning but also revenue numbers—to hit the revenue numbers, what kind of resources do we need?”
2. Process Beats Speed (Eventually)
“When we’re small, my co-founder Alex and I were chill. We’d say ‘let’s do this today, let’s try that tomorrow.’ But as we grew, process became so important. At the very beginning it may slow down growth, but in the end it’s a really good foundation to scale the team.”
3. Execute at “Dual Speed”
“We execute fast, we build product fast, we expand our business fast. We test all of them with very light investment, very simple models. We fail faster, we learn, we find solutions, we understand what’s going on, and then based on our learnings, we execute.”
The Hard Truth About Hypergrowth
Behind Deel’s record-breaking growth lies a simple truth: they were willing to break things fast and fix them faster. Wang’s advice to founders chasing their own $100M ARR milestone is refreshingly honest:
“A lot of things are unpredictable. But that is OK, as long as we trust the team, we work together, and everyone is empowered to solve the problem together.”
The three non-negotiables for any company chasing centaur status:
- Go global early if your product can benefit global clients
- Make strategic decisions and leverage your data as the foundation for efficient strategies
- Set clear milestones and targets together so the team understands what success looks like
Deel’s journey from $1M to $100M ARR in 20 months wasn’t just about being in the right place at the right time. It was about building the right infrastructure, hiring the right people, and making the right strategic bets—even when everything was breaking around them.
As Wang concludes: “Today, we are in this world where a lot of founders are trying to find product-market fit. If you already have product-market fit, it’s really good timing to go global early, make strategic decisions leveraging your data, and set clear milestones and targets with the team together.”
The path to $100M ARR is different for every company, but the fundamentals remain constant: obsess over customers, build systems that scale, and never stop listening to the market. Deel’s 20-month journey proves that with the right strategy, team, and execution, hypergrowth is possible—you just need to be ready for everything to break along the way.
