Founding Growth Lead (San Francisco)

We're a San Francisco-based Kiwi startup, backed by leading San Francisco investors like NextView Ventures, Precursor Ventures and Alumni Ventures. We have customers all over the world, from high-growth startups to large US public companies, and we're growing fast with record product engagement. Our founders have been writing prompts since before ChatGPT dropped, and bring a Cambridge ML background and 14+ years of GTM leadership. We have built Taylor - an AI teammate that builds and runs the systems for high-performing sales teams. Running a high-performing sales team is one of the hardest operational problems in business, and when the systems around the team can't keep up, the whole company feels it. Taylor steps into a sales team's workflows and runs the work that good teams need but rarely get done well: pre-meeting prep, call reviews, pipeline hygiene, post-call follow-ups, coaching, and the operational threads that hold a sales org together. About the role: First dedicated growth hire at Grw. Sit across the growth motion— signup, activation, conversion, retention and expansion — with building awareness and top-of-funnel as the immediate priority. Stage: We have product-market fit. What we don't have yet is GTM fit. Your job is to help us find it. That means rapid experimentation across channels and offers, not optimization of a known motion. Our motion is sales-assisted PLG, not pure PLG. Two-week free trial, salesperson closes during the trial. That shapes everything you do — your job isn't just driving signups, it's driving signups that an AE can convert. Reports to the GTM Co-CEO. Work closely with the founders on content and messaging, with our CX lead on activation, and with the AE on PLG-assisted conversion and trigger-based outreach. Responsible for : signups (primary), trial-to-paid conversion (shared with AE), activation rate (shared with CX), retention and expansion signals, full-funnel attribution, growth budget. Our ICP is SMB sales teams of 2-20 reps. Founder-led and sales-leader-led companies, often pre-revops or with their first revops hire. ACV is $8-20K. You'll be marketing to the operator, not the procurement team. What you’ll own: Top-of-funnel, end to end. Every channel that could realistically work for a sales-tech audience — content, creator and influencer co-content, email, AEO, signal-driven outbound, paid, partnerships, communities. You decide which to bet on, you ship the experiments, you double down on what works. Founder-led content amplification. Founders generate raw material. You turn it into a stream of finished output across platforms. Cross-platform content production. Customer stories, founder content, product clips, short-form hooks, long-form thought leadership. Signal-driven outbound and sales enablement. Identify in-ICP companies showing real buying signals, then build the plays our AE can run into them. Website. Copy, landing pages, conversion design, in partnership with the founders. Attribution and measurement. Wire up the tooling so we know where every signup comes from and how it moves through the funnel. Must-haves: Has been a growth or demand gen hire at a seed or early-stage B2B SaaS company with real PMF signal — and personally drove rapid experimentation across multiple channels, not just optimized one. Comfortable in a sales-assisted PLG motion specifically — has either run this kind of motion before, or has worked across both pure-PLG and sales-led demand gen and understands how to bridge them. Pure enterprise demand-gen-only or pure self-checkout-PLG-only profiles are not the right fit. Bias toward experimentation, not efficiency. We're searching for what works, not optimizing what already does. If your last role was "scaling a known channel," this probably isn't the right next move for you. Has shipped some form of signal-driven outbound, ABM-light, or trigger-based plays before — and can talk specifically about what worked. Has worked across the full PLG funnel before, not just acquisition. Has shipped activation, conversion, or retention experiments and can talk specifically about results. Technical: comfortable wiring up attribution, writing basic SQL, using APIs, setting up tracking, building small tools with AI. You won't be waiting on engineering for instrumentation. Fluent with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Clay, etc.) and uses them daily to multiply output. We expect serious leverage from these tools, not incremental help. Comfortable operating without a playbook. This role is about finding what works, not executing a known plan. High agency. Will rebuild things that are broken, ship things nobody told you to ship, and admit when an experiment failed. Nice-to-haves: Has built or run a creator/influencer program before. Knows how to find, brief, and partner with creators credibly. Sells-to-sales experience — has marketed to sales leaders, revops, or founder buyers before. You already know how this buyer thinks and what they read. Has shipped AEO/LLM-distribution work — getting product cited inside the AI tools sales leaders are using daily. E xperience launching a product or a fundraise announcement. Technical capability. Knows how to code — looked at favorably. You'll know you're succeeding when: Signups are on a clear upward trajectory and you can show which channels are driving it. We know which channels deserve real spend with conviction, and which we've ruled out. Founder-led content output is dramatically higher than today, with no additional founder time. The signal-driven outbound engine is generating qualified, in-ICP trial signups every week, with the AE actively running trigger plays you've designed. Attribution tells us the source of every signup, and we can see activation, conversion, and retention rates by source. A ctivation or conversion experiments that have produced a measurable lift that are now in production. The website does the heavy lifting on conversion to free trial. Visitors understand what Taylor does quickly and self-serve flow is the obvious next step. What you won't be doing: Demand gen for an enterprise sales team. We don't have one and aren't building one this year. Running a big ad budget on day one. We won't scale spend until validation says we should. Operating CX or sales day-to-day. You partner with the people who do — you don't replace them. What You Get Competitive base salary - commensurate with experience Meaningful equity - significant founding-employee equity package Full Healthcare benefits - comprehensive health and dental coverage Real ownership - you'll own growth surfaces end-to-end Cutting-edge tools - no limits on what you use; we stay at the frontier A team operating at a high standard - small, experienced, and genuinely good at this Competing with foundation labs - our product ambition is serious Location San Francisco, in office. Expect 1-2 trips annually - to New Zealand or to our annual offsite. If this sounds like your kind of challenge, we'd love to hear from you. How to apply Please send your CV and a short video of why you believe you’d be fantastic for this role to View email address on click.appcast.io #J-18808-Ljbffr