Growth Marketing Leader

About Manifest

Manifest is the operating system for Main Street small businesses. We are the first AI-powered learning and growth platform for SMB entrepreneurs, helping small businesses dream bigger. We pair an AI Companion, a KPI insights dashboard, and human expert coaching across four vertical brands: The Dog Gurus (pet care), LumariPRO (salons and suites), Impart (deathcare), and VetSuite (veterinary).

SMBs represent 50% of U.S. GDP and nearly half of all employment, yet half fail within five years. We exist to change that. We are at approximately $1M ARR, preparing to be Series A ready by January 2027, and building a growth playbook that can be repeated across verticals.

You will be the primary strategist and operator for customer acquisition, focused on our pet care and Pro Beauty verticals. Your job is to deeply understand our customers, develop the channel and spend strategy, sharpen our messaging, run rapid experiments, and scale the approaches that work. You will work alongside an existing execution bench that includes a growth marketer, content marketer, and HubSpot administrator.

The Opportunity

Our product is landing, retention is strong, and our sales team converts well. The bottleneck is top-of-funnel volume: we currently generate approximately 15–20 free trials per month, and those trials convert well. We now need to increase that volume by 3–4x and acquire 100 new customers by the end of October.

We have relied heavily on paid acquisition over the past 6–9 months. We need a growth leader who can deeply understand the business, product, and market; diagnose what has and hasn’t worked; and develop a clear reach strategy across paid search, SEO, affiliate and influencer marketing, retargeting, outbound, and other promising channels.

This is a zero-to-one growth challenge. We are not marketing an established brand or optimizing a mature acquisition engine. We are building awareness and trust from scratch, determining which channels and messages work, and creating playbooks that can be repeated across verticals.

This is an owner’s seat. You’ll set the strategy, place the bets, and personally run the experiments that matter most. You’ll have real ownership, a CEO who makes fast decisions, and an existing team that can help turn winning strategies into repeatable execution.

What You’ll Own

Reach strategy. Build the channel and spend plan for pet care first and Pro Beauty second, with playbooks designed to repeat across additional verticals.

Top-of-funnel growth. Increase qualified trial volume by 3–4x, with an immediate goal of helping Manifest acquire 100 new customers by the end of October. The focus is reach and acquisition diversification, rather than mid-funnel optimization or product-led growth.

Message-market fit. Own positioning and message testing, with an initial focus on two core customer jobs: helping small business owners manage their teams and helping them make more money. Diagnose where messaging stalls, design tests, and get winning messages live in days rather than weeks.

Channel experimentation. Test a focused set of channels at a time, including paid search, SEO, affiliate and influencer marketing, retargeting, and outbound. Make fast, evidence-based decisions about what to scale, revise, or stop.

Measurement. Establish a disciplined testing cadence, improve measurement in an environment with imperfect attribution and an untrusted CAC, and maintain a weekly scoreboard that makes performance and next steps clear to the entire team.

First 90 Days: What Success Looks Like

Days 1–30: Quickly assess the business, customer, market, and past growth efforts while launching immediate, high-conviction tests. Deliver a clear channel, messaging, and spend strategy that serves as a mutual checkpoint for continuing the engagement.

Days 31–60:Build on early results, improve measurement, and scale, revise, or stop initiatives based on performance. Demonstrate measurable growth in top-of-funnel volume.

Days 61–90: Deliver meaningful top-of-funnel growth and show a credible path to 3–4x volume, with repeatable playbooks emerging for pet care and Pro Beauty and less dependence on paid acquisition.

Who You Are

Strategic and hands-on. You find the insight, set the plan, and execute it using the resources available.

A zero-to-one operator. You have built awareness and customer acquisition for an early-stage business, new venture, or unfamiliar brand.

Experienced in SMB or D2C growth. You understand how to reach individuals or small business owners. B2B enterprise-only experience is unlikely to translate.

Specific and data-driven. You can name the campaigns and channels you owned, the results they produced, and what you did when performance stalled.

Fast and disciplined. You structure experiments to produce useful signals quickly, then scale, revise, or stop based on the evidence.

A clear communicator. You provide frequent, concise updates and make performance, risks, and priorities easy to understand.

AI-native. You use AI to accelerate research, creative development, testing, and execution.

How We Work

We coach, ask powerful questions, and help the people around us grow. We move fast, prioritize ruthlessly, and reprioritize without ego. We are honest with each other because the mission deserves it.

Structure

Engagement: Fractional, approximately 20+ hours per week. The initial 30-day strategy will serve as a mutual checkpoint. Openness to a future full-time role is welcome but not required.

Location: Remote, U.S.-based.

Reports to: CEO, working closely with the CPTO and growth and sales team.

Start: Immediate.

If you’ve built demand from the ground up and can pair strong strategy with hands-on execution, we’d love to talk.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and experiences.