Sell to the Side with Power

The beneficiary and the decision-maker are often different people

A product can visibly help one party in a transaction while a second party controls whether it ever gets used. The pattern, as Alex Bouaziz has described it from Deel's early days, is that the correct buyer is whoever holds the power in the exchange, not whoever gains the most from the product.¹

Deel's product helps the worker: faster payment, compliant contracts, more control. So Bouaziz and co-founder Shuo Wang sold to workers first. By his account they "used to sit down and manage hundreds of people per day and try to convince those freelancers to ask their clients to pay them." It did not work. As Bouaziz put it, "in the power dynamics, a freelancer or a person working as an independent contractor never really has the upper hand. They just happen usually to even get paid. So the go-to-market was completely wrong."¹

Flipping the pitch to the power-holder

The correction was to pitch the client instead: an offer framed around giving the employer "a great solution so that you can start paying your team globally and give them a great experience." Bouaziz has identified two things that changed at once.

First, the pitch now reached someone with the authority to say yes. The client controls how money moves; the contractor only receives it. Second, distribution inverted from one-by-one to one-to-many. In his telling, "when you get one customer, you'd have all of their team on the platform as well." Closing a single client onboarded every contractor that client paid, replacing the earlier motion of one contractor lobbying one client.

The diagnostic that follows, in Bouaziz's framing, is a single question asked of any product that sits between two parties: who can unilaterally adopt this? If the current target has to persuade someone else before the product gets used, the seller is either aiming at the wrong side or running a much harder consumer-style bottom-up motion than intended.

Where the rule bends

Bouaziz does not present this as a universal law, and the record notes a counterexample family: bottom-up, end-user-led products such as Slack, Dropbox, and Figma sell to the less powerful side and expand upward. The reconciliation he implies sits in the diagnostic itself, not in seniority. A freelancer cannot unilaterally adopt a payment rail, because the client must send money through it, whereas an individual engineer can unilaterally adopt an editor. The test is who can act alone. Selling to the power side does not mean neglecting the other one: Deel kept building the worker experience even after the pivot, which is part of why client teams adopt happily and why workers later pull employers toward Deel-native features like its DLUSD wallet.¹ The two moves are complements rather than substitutes; revenue enters on the side with power, but the product still has to earn the other side's use.

This concept sits close to several others cited in the same body of interviews. It is a special case of the broader stakeholder-mapping habit, and Bouaziz treats service trumps product and everything is sales as the companion moves once the seller is already in front of the side with power. It also rhymes with entrepreneurial sales as a description of how the conversation is run, and with understand the problem not the solution, Wang's habit of confirming that the problem is real before trusting the first solution's distribution assumption.

Bouaziz is candid that the evidence is thin: one company, one recovered mistake. Deel spent only weeks on the wrong side because the founders were watching conversion rather than the sympathetic narrative of helping the worker, which is what made the trap cheap to escape.