Founding Product Manager: New Markets

About the role

Scout's TAM is currently two states: California and Oregon. The product solves a problem that exists in every state with virtual, hybrid, or alternative-education programs — understanding what students are doing when they're not in the classroom — but each state has its own compliance requirements, its own reporting requirements, its own buying process, its own best growth channels, and almost certainly its own answer to "what actually gets a school to take a meeting." We want to be selling in roughly twenty states within three years. You own how we get there.

Your job has four parts: Figure out which states, and why. Build the thesis. Which states' regulations create the exact pain Scout already solves? Where are there enough programs to matter? What would we need to build to serve them? You'll do real research — reading state education code, talking to program directors and charter authorizers, mapping how these schools actually buy — and you'll bring product requirements back to our founders.

Then prove demand, by hand. You'll run top-of-funnel experiments in states where nobody has heard of Scout. You'll go to conferences and state charter associations, you'll lead outbound efforts, you'll host events, you'll build free public tools to solve specific compliance headaches — whatever works. Part of your job is discovering whether what worked in one state will work in the next.

Lead the team. Our current team consists of two generalist growth specialists — recent grads, extremely smart, running experiments now. You'll set the experiment agenda, raise the bar on how they design and measure, review their work, and be the person they learn the craft from. You will not be their manager on day one, but you'll have room to grow into it within 6-12 months if it's working, and you'll hire the rest of the team from there.

Build the playbook. The primary deliverable isn't pipeline; it's a written, repeatable motion for entering a new market that one a growth specialist can run mostly on their own, with an honest breakdown of what transfers between states and what doesn't. Success will look like: six months in, in 5 new states, we have 5 pilots running.

Requirements

• You have 2–4 years in product management, growth, go-to-market, BD, or a founding-team role, including at least one stretch where you were early and there was no playbook
• You've done product discovery in a market or segment, where you discovered the wedge, you didn't inherit it
• You think in experiments, not activities. You can tell us your hypothesis, your method, the number that would have made you stop, and what you actually learned, including from the experiments that failed.
• You've talked to a lot of potential and current customers and can recount what a specific person said and how it changed your plan
• Regulatory detail interests you rather than bores you. Our entire market is shaped by education law, and the wedge is usually hiding in the rules.
• You'll do the unscalable things yourself, not expecting people to do it for you: booking a booth at a conference, making 100 cold calls, getting on a plane to meet people in person, building tools to scale outbound

Nice-to-have, but not required

• Knowledge of SQL, Python, TypeScript, and/or experience with tools like Claude Code and Codex
• Having been early at a startup where nothing was set up yet
• Experience in complex or enterprise SaaS with long, committee-driven sales cycles
• Public sector, education, healthcare, or another regulated buyer

Compensation

We'll offer you a choice between three packages: more cash and less equity, more equity and less cash, or somewhere in the middle.

Base: $125,000 - $175,000

Equity: 0.2% - 0.4%

Milestone bonus: $25,000 every time you land our first 5 pilots in a new state

Benefits

• Great health, dental, and vision insurance
• Lunch every day, and dinner if you're here late
• Daily commuter stipend
• Gym membership near the office
• Monthly book stipend and monthly new-tool stipend, plus a real budget to buy software for the company without a procurement fight
• Regular team offsites
• Relocation stipend if you're moving to New York for this

Schedule

This job is in our NYC office, five days a week, 9am to 7pm.