Founding Growth Marketer

About the role

Full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio), 5 days a week in the office. Must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting. US work authorization required; O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship possible for exceptional candidates.

Sauna is a hybrid of AI and software that acts as a shared brain, turning repeated paths into software and edge cases into AI. Built by Wordware, a 15‑person team backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator with a $30M seed (the largest in YC history). Office is in the Presidio, 50 m from Crissy Field beach.

The product enjoys 74% week‑two retention, a key investor metric. No paid, SEO, affiliate, referral, or lifecycle efforts have been run; top‑of‑funnel comes from a founder sending cold emails. You will own demand generation: turning strangers into sign‑ups, with a real budget from day one, reporting directly to the founder. Early months involve writing posts, briefing videos, buying media, shipping landing pages; once a channel proves out you hire against it. Retention and activation remain with the product team.

Responsibilities

• Own the top of the funnel end to end: start with paid on Meta and Google, then lifecycle, then compounding channels.
• Run a creator program: produce 400‑500 fresh creatives per month for a six‑figure Meta budget, working with creators and agencies.
• Build an affiliate program as a real channel (revenue share, pre‑customer earnings, public sign‑up).
• Build a content engine using Sauna itself as the subject; showcase real work publicly.
• Ship programmatic SEO and AEO with an engineering partner; leverage YouTube, Reddit, and third‑party coverage.
• Write copy for landing pages, ads, emails, posts, video scripts.
• Run launches end to end: positioning, copy, social, email, video brief, press, community.
• Report weekly: number of new people who heard about Sauna and came to look, and cost per acquisition.

Requirements

• Have run actual ads with your own hands: picked channel, wrote creative, set budget, read numbers, killed underperforming.
• Understand conversion events, match rate, and impact of broken tracking.
• Have taken something from unknown to known (product, newsletter, channel, community,