Overview
You're building the growth function from scratch at Alma, an 8-person food/wellness startup. You'll use AI tools (Claude Code, etc.) to automate content creation, build growth systems, and execute marketing campaigns that would traditionally require a full team. You report directly to the founder and own all growth metrics.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Founding Growth Generalist |
| Sales Motion | Not sales - growth/marketing |
| Deal Complexity | N/A - B2C/D2C product |
| Sales Cycle | N/A |
| Deal Size | N/A |
| Quota (est.) | User/revenue growth targets TBD |
Company Context
Stage: Early-stage (likely pre-seed or seed based on 8-person team)
Size: 8 employees
Growth: Actively hiring for first growth role - no existing marketing/growth infrastructure
Market Position: Unknown - food/wellness space is crowded, unclear differentiation without more context
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Building Systems (40%) | Content Creation (30%) | Execution & Testing (20%) | Analysis (10%)
Key Activities
- AI-Powered Content Generation: Build workflows using Claude Code or similar to produce blog posts, social content, email campaigns at scale. You're not just prompting - you're building repeatable systems.
- Growth Experimentation: Run tests across channels (SEO, paid, social, partnerships). Most will fail. You need to be comfortable killing things quickly and moving on.
- Channel Management: Own 3-5 marketing channels end-to-end. No specialists to delegate to - you're writing the copy, building the landing pages, analyzing the data.
- Distribution Automation: Create systems to repurpose content across platforms, automate outreach, manage community engagement without manual labor.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- You're the entire marketing team. When something breaks (and it will), there's no one else to fix it. Every channel, every campaign, every metric is your responsibility.
- Building AI systems requires real technical chops. You need to code or at least understand APIs, automation platforms, and LLM integrations well enough to build production-grade tools.
- The founder is evaluating you based on a demo project, not experience. This means they have high expectations for what one technical person can build. The bar is "replace a marketing team."
- No existing playbook or brand guidelines. You're defining the voice, channels, and strategy from zero. If you need structure and clear direction, this isn't it.
- Food/wellness is saturated with competitors. Standing out requires creativity and execution speed, not just technical skill.
What Success Looks Like
- Measurable growth in key metrics (users, revenue, engagement) that you can directly attribute to your systems
- AI-powered workflows that produce quality content/results at 5-10x the output of manual work
- Repeatability - not one-off wins, but systems that keep working without constant babysitting
Who You're Targeting
Primary Audience:
- Likely health-conscious consumers or food service businesses (unclear from limited info)
What They Care About:
- Unknown without product details - could be nutrition, convenience, sustainability, cost
Requirements
- Technical ability to build AI-powered tools and automation workflows (Claude Code experience specifically mentioned)
- Track record of building growth systems or marketing automation - not just running campaigns
- Comfortable with ambiguity and self-direction in an 8-person startup with no marketing infrastructure
- Can demonstrate capability through a working demo - talk is cheap, they want to see what you can build
- Willing to do unglamorous execution work alongside strategy (you're not managing a team, you're the team)
Application Reality
The Challenge: Build and demo an AI tool/workflow that moves the needle on marketing or growth. This is intentionally vague - they want to see how you interpret the problem and what you choose to build.
What They're Actually Testing:
- Can you ship something that works, not just a prototype?
- Do you understand growth mechanics well enough to build something meaningful?
- How do you think about automation and AI as force multipliers?
- Can you scope and execute without detailed requirements?
No Safety Net: No resume screening means your background doesn't matter, but also means your demo has to be exceptional. You're competing against anyone technical enough to build something impressive.