Founding Growth Marketing

About the role

This is our first dedicated growth and marketing hire. You'll own how the market discovers, understands, and trusts Starboard — from a near-blank brand canvas to a repeatable demand engine. You'll establish our voice online, turn the freight conference circuit into pipeline, build SEO from the ground up, and stand up the self-serve lead-gen motion behind Starboard Light, our lighter, faster on-ramp into the product.

You'll work directly with the founder and the commercial team, and you'll have unusual latitude: define the playbook, pick the tools, and build the function. This role suits a builder who's equally comfortable writing a landing page, running a booth, debugging an attribution model, and arguing about positioning.

Responsibilities

• Establish Starboard's brand, voice, and visual identity across web, LinkedIn, and the channels where forwarders actually pay attention.
• Build and own the website and content engine — positioning, messaging, case studies, and thought leadership that make us the obvious choice in a category most people didn't know existed.
• Plan and run Starboard's presence at industry events and conferences (think GLA, JCtrans, and the regional forwarding networks), turning expensive booths and travel into measurable pipeline.
• Own pre-event outreach, on-site capture, and post-event follow-up in tight coordination with sales and SDRs.
• Build a repeatable event playbook: which shows to attend, what to spend, and how to measure return.
• Build SEO from zero — technical foundation, keyword and topic strategy, and a content roadmap that compounds.
• Grow organic traffic into a reliable, low-cost top-of-funnel channel that ranks for the terms forwarders search when they're ready to buy.
• Design and run the demand-gen and self-serve acquisition motion for Starboard Light: paid, organic, lifecycle, and conversion-rate optimization across the funnel.
• Instrument the funnel end to end — sign-ups, activation, and conversion — and report on CAC, pipeline, and what's actually working.
• Partner with product and sales to turn Light users into qualified opportunities for the core platform.

Requirements

• 3+ years in growth or demand-gen marketing, ideally at a B2B SaaS startup, with at least one stint as an early or founding marketer.
• Full-funnel range: you've built brand and run performance, and you can move between strategy and hands-on execution without losing momentum.
• Demonstrated SEO and content results — you can point to traffic and pipeline you've grown, not just posts you've published.
• Strong commercial instinct: you think in pipeline and CAC, and you partner naturally with sales.
• Sharp writing and a good eye for design and craft.

Qualifications

• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias to ship. You don't need a big team or a finished brand book to start; you build them.
• Experience marketing to a non-tech, operationally complex buyer (logistics, supply chain, fintech, insurtech, or similar).
• Familiarity with product-led growth and self-serve funnels.
• Background in freight, logistics, or trade — or genuine curiosity about a massive industry hiding in plain sight.

Skills

• Strong commercial instincts and ability to think in pipeline and CAC.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias to ship.
• Sharp writing and a good eye for design and craft.

Benefits

• Competitive salary plus meaningful early-stage equity.
• Equal opportunity employer.