Head of Conversion

About the Role

Gaia has millions of opportunities each year to turn interested people into members. We are looking for one person to obsess over that moment. The Head of Conversion will own the journey from a person's first experience with Gaia through becoming a paying member. Your job is to understand why people convert, why they do not, and systematically increase the number who do.

This is not a traditional department-head role. You will not spend your time building a large team or writing strategies for other people to execute. You will work across product, marketing, lifecycle, creative, data, and technology to find conversion problems and fix them. Your superpower isn't that you're the best specialist in every discipline. It's that you can cross the boundaries between data, product, engineering, UX, copy, and lifecycle fast enough to turn an insight into a live experiment before most organizations have finished discussing it.

At Gaia, soft skills are key to success. We seek candidates with strong interpersonal abilities – effective communication, teamwork, prioritization, and problem solving – who can adapt to change, manage conflicts with empathy, and collaborate well with diverse teams. While technical skills matter, we highly value those who build positive relationships, contribute to a supportive culture, and approach challenges with a solution-oriented mindset.

Must be able to work on campus in Louisville, CO. US citizenship or an existing work visa is required. Gaia subscribers strongly preferred. Non-smoker.

Responsibilities

What You Own

Marketing owns acquiring qualified audiences. You own what happens once they arrive. Your domain begins when someone lands on a Gaia-owned experience and extends through becoming a paying member and demonstrating the early behaviors associated with a healthy membership. That includes:

• Registration
• Trial starts
• Onboarding
• Activation
• Content discovery
• Pricing and offer presentation
• Paywalls
• Checkout
• Lifecycle email
• In-product messaging
• Personalization
• Trial expiration
• Recovery
• Conversion analytics

You should see these not as separate Marketing, Product, CRM, UX, and Technology functions, but as one conversion system. You will have the mandate to work across those functions, direct access to the data and tools required to investigate opportunities, and the organizational backing to drive conversion experiments across the customer journey.

What This Looks Like in Practice

• You notice that mobile trial conversion declined. Instead of scheduling a meeting to discuss it, you query the funnel and isolate the drop to one step in checkout. You inspect the experience, analyze the affected users, identify likely causes, quantify the opportunity, prototype a change, rewrite the offer, and launch an experiment with engineering support where necessary.
• You discover that trial members who watch two pieces of content in their first 48 hours convert materially better. You investigate the relationship, design an experiment to drive a second viewing session, define the audience and triggers, write the email and in-product messaging, configure what you can yourself, launch the test, and measure incremental conversion.

How You Operate

Your first responsibility is to understand Gaia's conversion funnel better than anyone else. Key questions you will address:

• Where are people leaving?
• What predicts conversion?
• Which cohorts behave differently?
• Which behaviors matter?
• Where is friction highest?
• Which opportunities are economically meaningful?

You will work directly with behavioral and transactional data, segmenting by acquisition source, device, geography, offer, content interest, onboarding behavior, engagement, and lifecycle interactions. If the instrumentation required to answer an important question does not exist, you will help create it.

You will maintain a continuously prioritized backlog of hypotheses and establish a rapid experimentation cadence. Some experiments will work and many will not. We care about learning velocity and cumulative business impact, not maintaining a perfect win rate.

You should naturally translate conversion opportunities into economics. A 20-basis-point improvement is not interesting because a dashboard turned green. It is interesting because you can calculate how many incremental members, how much revenue, and how much long-term value it creates.

Requirements

What You Need to Be Able to Do

This is a genuinely technical and commercial growth role. We do not expect you to be the best engineer, analyst, designer, and copywriter in the company. We expect you to be capable enough across all of them that you can move from insight to experiment without creating a five-person project. You should be comfortable with:

• Writing SQL
• Analyzing behavioral data
• Working with APIs and event instrumentation
• Modifying front-end experiences
• Using Git
• Building functional prototypes
• Implementing lightweight experiments
• Diagnosing tracking issues
• Using modern AI development tools to multiply your output

You also need to write well. You should be able to personally create:

• Strong headlines
• Calls to action
• Landing-page copy
• Membership value propositions
• Paywall copy
• Onboarding experiences
• Lifecycle emails
• Behavioral messaging
• Experiment variants

When a change requires deeper engineering, design, or infrastructure support, you should be able to define the opportunity clearly, quantify its value, write excellent requirements, and drive the work through completion.

Qualifications

What Success Looks Like

Your north star is incremental, high-quality paid members and the economic value created through improved Conversion. We will measure:

• Guest-to-trial conversion
• Trial-to-paid conversion
• Activation
• Checkout completion
• Incremental members
• Revenue contribution
• Experiment velocity

We will also use guardrails such as early retention, refunds, churn, and member engagement. A tactic that increases conversion but creates low-quality memberships is not a win.

Within your first 90 days, we expect you to:

• Establish a trusted baseline for the funnel and its economics
• Identify the five highest-value conversion opportunities
• Fix critical instrumentation gaps
• Create a prioritized hypothesis backlog
• Establish an experimentation operating system
• Have meaningful changes live in market

A year after you arrive, Gaia's conversion experience should be materially different because of what you personally discovered, designed, built, wrote, tested, and shipped.