Overview
You're the first lifecycle marketing hire at Notability, building their retention and engagement function from the ground up. You'll set up automated email/push campaigns, create user segmentation strategies, and run experiments to improve activation, engagement, and retention metrics. You report to a VP Marketing with Meta/Instagram experience, so expect consumer tech growth tactics and data-driven decision making.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Lifecycle/Growth Marketing (B2C SaaS) |
| Primary Motion | User retention and engagement (not acquisition) |
| Key Channels | Email, push notifications, in-app messaging |
| Success Metric | Retention curves, activation rates, feature adoption |
| Autonomy Level | High - building from scratch |
| Cross-functional | Heavy collaboration with product, data, engineering |
Company Context
Stage: Growth stage (acquired by Ginger Labs, part of larger portfolio)
Product: Note-taking and PDF annotation app for students and professionals
Size: Part of mid-sized app portfolio
Market Position: Established player in productivity/education space competing with Goodnotes, OneNote, Evernote
User Base: Primarily students, educators, and knowledge workers on iOS/Mac
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Campaign Setup (30%) | Data Analysis (25%) | Experimentation (20%) | Cross-functional (15%) | Strategy/Planning (10%)
Key Activities
- Building Lifecycle Infrastructure: Setting up your tech stack (likely Braze, Iterable, or similar), creating user segments, mapping out lifecycle stages, and building automated campaign flows from scratch. Lots of initial setup work.
- Retention Campaigns: Designing and launching email/push campaigns for onboarding, feature adoption, win-back, and re-engagement. Writing copy, coordinating with design, setting triggers and timing.
- User Segmentation: Analyzing behavioral data to create meaningful user cohorts (power users vs casual, students vs professionals, iOS vs Mac). Working with data team to define and track segments.
- A/B Testing: Running experiments on messaging, timing, creative, and offers. Most tests will be inconclusive or show small lifts. You'll need to run many experiments to find meaningful wins.
- Performance Analysis: Building dashboards, monitoring funnel metrics, digging into cohort retention curves, identifying drop-off points. Presenting findings to leadership monthly.
- Cross-functional Projects: Partnering with product on in-app messaging, with engineering on technical implementation, with data on tracking and attribution. Lots of Slack coordination and meetings.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- You're building this function solo, so there's no playbook or mentorship on the lifecycle side. You need to figure out priorities, tech stack choices, and what success looks like on your own.
- Consumer app lifecycle is grind work - lots of small tests, incremental gains, and campaigns that don't move the needle. Big wins are rare.
- You'll spend significant time on technical setup and troubleshooting (tracking implementation, integration issues, data delays). Less time on creative strategy than you might hope.
- Measuring true impact is messy - attribution is fuzzy, holdout tests take months, and retention lifts are often small and noisy.
- You're competing for user attention with notifications from every other app. Most messages get ignored. Open rates will be lower than you expect.
- Since this is newly created, there may be ambiguity around budget, resources, and what success looks like in year one.
What Success Looks Like
- You improve Day 7 retention by 3-5 percentage points within 6 months through better onboarding flows
- You build a functioning lifecycle tech stack and have automated campaigns running across 5+ user journeys
- You establish baseline metrics and start showing consistent month-over-month improvements in activation and engagement
- You identify and activate a lapsed user segment, bringing 10-15% of them back to the product
Who You're Working With
Internal Partners:
- Product team (defining what features to push, in-app messaging strategy)
- Data/Analytics team (building segments, attribution models, dashboards)
- Engineering (implementing tracking, API integrations)
- Design (creating email/push creative assets)
- VP Marketing (weekly check-ins, strategy alignment)
What They Care About:
- Product wants data on feature adoption and usage patterns
- Data wants clean requirements and realistic analysis timelines
- Engineering wants to minimize ongoing maintenance burden
- Leadership wants to see retention curves improve and CAC payback shorten
Requirements
- 3-5 years in lifecycle, growth, or CRM marketing at a consumer app or B2C SaaS company
- Hands-on experience with marketing automation platforms (Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, or similar)
- Comfortable with SQL for user segmentation and campaign analysis
- Track record of running A/B tests and using data to drive decisions
- Experience building lifecycle programs from early stages (not just optimizing existing campaigns)
- Strong cross-functional communication - you'll be coordinating across product, data, and engineering regularly
- Bonus: Experience in education/productivity app space or working with freemium/subscription models