Founding Growth Lead

Full-time · Remote · B2B (independent contractor) · Cash + equity THE OPPORTUNITY Most growth roles hand you one product, a mature playbook, and a dashboard someone else built. This is the opposite. Pergola Studio is an AI-native venture studio building toward a growing portfolio of B2B SaaS companies. We design, build, launch, and scale products serially - with shared infrastructure, shared playbooks, and learnings that compound with every new company we start. The three products aren’t the destination; they’re proof the machine works. Today, that portfolio is three live products - all built to MVP, fully instrumented, with GTM motions launched and strong early traction: AlpacaRelay - AI email marketing PageKiss - AI landing page optimization ApronPrep - Restaurant compliance We are hiring our first dedicated growth person. You will own the growth engine across the entire portfolio: three products today, more tomorrow, and one compounding set of playbooks and infrastructure that you design. What you get that almost no growth role offers: • Leverage of a portfolio, focus of a startup. You work across three businesses simultaneously. When an experiment works for one product, you industrialize it for the other two. Three times the surface area for learning, with diversification a single-product growth role can never give you. • Direct work with proven founders. Regular 1:1 access to a serial founder who built a unicorn SaaS business, alongside co-founders with deep operating and strategy backgrounds, plus frequent interaction with a community of high-performing entrepreneurs and operators around the studio. You’ll work directly with the founders on capital allocation across three P&Ls. This is an apprenticeship in company-building, compensated. • Early, but de-risked. Founding-team upside - equity, scope, a seat at the strategy table - without the pre-product lottery ticket. The products exist. The instrumentation exists. The programmatic SEO engine (six-figure page counts) exists. Early traction is real. What’s missing is the person who makes it all compound. • A role that scales with you. The growth scope across this portfolio is enormous, and it grows every time the studio adds a product. Prove out the engine and this role becomes portfolio-level growth leadership. We are explicitly hiring for someone whose ceiling is higher than the job description. THE ROLE You are, above all, a problem solver with a growth number to hit. Organic search is your deepest weapon - and the center of gravity for this role - but you are not “the SEO person.” When the data says the next dollar of effort belongs in paid search, a creator partnership, an affiliate program, or a channel nobody has named yet, you follow the data. Channels are means; growth at favorable unit economics is the end. Growth here is an engineering discipline. You’ll architect programmatic SEO systems and debug their indexation behavior in production. You’ll stand up your own tracking when off-the-shelf isn’t good enough. You’ll write the CAC model, then write the query that feeds it. We pull our own data here: you define the metric, design the test, and read the results yourself. Then you’ll zoom out. The point of the technical depth is better strategic decisions: which product gets the next dollar, which channel deserves conviction, where the economics say push and where they say stop. Terminal and whiteboard, fluently, both. RESPONSIBILITIES Market strategy & voice of customer • Define and continuously refine the ideal customer profile, market segmentation, and overall GTM strategy to establish a clear path to product-market fit. • Develop product positioning, messaging frameworks, and content strategy that differentiate our products in a competitive market landscape for AI-native tools • Conduct structured customer interviews and synthesize insights that inform customer acquisition, product roadmap, pricing, onboarding and retention strategy • Build a coherent GTM architecture across the portfolio: shared playbooks, consistent measurement, and per-product positioning that enables sustainable growth in each company • Own competitive intelligence across our markets including: benchmarking competitors’ features, pricing, message and marketing footprints; use this intelligence to inform our marketing decisions • Carry the growth number. You'll own quarterly targets for traffic, signups, pipeline, and CAC by product, and be measured on outcomes rather than activity, and be responsible for achieving these targets within budget. Organic search & discoverability • Own organic acquisition strategy across three product domains, with clear goals for indexed pages, non-branded traffic, share of voice, and downstream signups. • Lead technical SEO hands-on: crawlability, crawl-budget allocation, index-coverage diagnostics, sitemaps and robots strategy, canonicalization, rendering (SSR/SSG/hydration), structured data, Core Web Vitals, and internal linking - working directly in our stack to ship fixes. • Operate and extend large-scale programmatic content systems (six-figure page counts): template quality, deduplication, publishing pipelines, and the index-health monitoring that keeps them honest. • Build our answer-engine strategy (AEO/GEO): understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI surfaces retrieve and cite content, and shape our properties so our products are the ones they reference. We already track AI search visibility; you’ll own and sharpen that program. • Own domain authority: backlink strategy and verification, digital PR, directory presence, and link-profile risk management. Multi-channel growth Pergola Studio - Founding Growth Lead 3 • Plan, launch, and manage paid acquisition across Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, and Reddit - budget allocation, bidding, creative testing, and the discipline to kill spend that doesn’t pay back. • Identify, test, and scale emerging channels: creator and influencer partnerships, affiliate programs, communities, marketplaces, co-marketing - run each as a structured experiment with explicit kill criteria. • Own conversion end to end, landing page through activation. One of our products literally sells conversion optimization; you’ll eat our own cooking. • Build and maintain the truth layer: GSC, GA4, GTM, custom pipelines, and dashboards. If a growth number gets cited in this studio, you built the system that makes it trustworthy. • Construct CAC, LTV, and payback models by channel and product; drive capital-allocation recommendations grounded in unit economics. • Manage vendors and specialist contractors against measurable outcomes; turn what works for one product into infrastructure the other two inherit. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS • 4+ years in growth, SEO, or performance marketing at a B2B SaaS company (PLG or SMB-focused strongly preferred), with demonstrated personal ownership of a growth KPI - organic traffic, signups, CAC, or revenue. Owned, not advised. • Deep, hands-on technical SEO: you can diagnose why a page isn’t indexing from GSC data and server logs, not from a tool’s health score. • Experience running or meaningfully scaling programmatic SEO (10,000+ pages), including crawl-budget and index-coverage management. • Hands-on paid search/social campaign management on Google Ads plus at least one other major platform, with real budgets and accountability for payback. • Daily-driver proficiency with GSC, GA4, and GTM, including implementing and debugging tracking yourself. • Ability to build a defensible CAC/LTV/payback model from raw data without hand-holding. • Excellent written communication; able to operate autonomously in a remote, async, documentation-heavy environment. WE WOULD LOVE TO SEE • Growth case studies with numbers you can defend under questioning. • Scripts, tools, or automations you built for yourself when off-the-shelf wasn’t good enough. • Something you’ve ranked, indexed, or grown from scratch - side project, niche site, or in-house. • Public writing or talks on SEO, growth, or marketing analytics. • Early-stage startup experience and the ambition to grow into portfolio-level growth leadership.