Head of Marketing

About the role

At Misfits & Machines, we build AI-native adtech platforms. Our lead platform is moving from build into beta. We have a category thesis, a tagline, a manifesto, and a defined audience. The tech is amazing. What we lack is someone to take that strong idea and make it something the market actually echoes back to us.

The hard part: There’s an obvious, easy-to-explain category where well-funded competitors already sit. Positioning ourselves there would be safe—and fatal. The position we believe in is harder to articulate, harder to sell on first contact, and far better. It makes a claim about how ordinary businesses become known that incumbents cannot. Your job is to sharpen that position and make it real—not invent it from scratch, and not soften it into the legible thing everyone else is selling. The pull toward the commodity ditch will be constant; holding the line while still shipping revenue is the core difficulty.

Marketing exists to create demand, not to serve it. Most future buyers are not in-market today; reaching them is the job. Our ratio: ~60% creating demand (category, brand, reach, argument) and ~40% capturing it with your own hands (site, signup funnel, lifecycle, paid, AEO, instrumentation). Our platform is self-serve; if the path from interest to first dollar is broken, that’s a marketing failure and it’s yours.

Responsibilities

• Own marketing for Misfits & Machines—all of it, as a team of one, leveraged by AI.
• Create demand:
  • Pressure-test, sharpen, and evolve the category thesis into positioning and narrative that survive real buyers.
  • Build brand voice, identity, and standards with our creative team—brand as demand creation, not a guidelines PDF.
  • Develop reach across channels that build mental availability, including broadcast and audio.
  • Craft the story in market through content, social, editorial, and PR that carries an argument instead of filling a calendar.
• Capture demand yourself:
  • Own the self-serve funnel: signup, activation, onboarding. Dive into analytics to find where people quit.
  • Run lifecycle and email: nurture, retention, winback.
  • Manage paid channels where they earn their place, with discipline to distinguish between buying existing demand and creating new.
  • Ensure search and answer-engine visibility when people start looking for the words we give them.
  • Build instrumentation that defends top-of-funnel spend and shows what converts.
• Turn product reality into market reality by collaborating with product, engineering, and creative.
• Build AI workflows we haven’t thought of yet.
• Hire your team when the math supports it.

Requirements

• A belief system about how marketing works, with an origin story—ideally one that cost you something.
• Proven experience making a market actually use a new idea: carried a position through campaigns, product, and press until customers and competitors used the words. This is non-negotiable.
• Ability to distinguish between a position that is right and one that is merely legible, and the will to defend the harder one.
• Unmistakably practical: you’ve shipped landing pages, written email sequences, read funnel reports, and killed campaigns when the numbers said to—recently, with your own hands.
• Experience marketing a platform, ideally one worth nothing until both sides showed up. Share how you broke the cold start.
• Deep familiarity with the small business owner as a buyer—the owner-operator who signs the check and has never bought television, not a procurement committee.
• Presence: you’ll be the face of this platform on stages, on camera, and on podcasts. You need the energy that makes strangers lean forward.
• You build with AI, not just use it: have opinions about tools, have rebuilt your own job around them, and can show something you’ve made.
• Ten-plus years of real depth in brand, category, demand creation, or product marketing. Broadcast literacy (TV, radio, audio, CTV) is a strong plus.
• Willingness to push back when you think we’re wrong. We’d rather argue with you than manage you.

This role is not a fit if your center of gravity is MQL-to-SQL modeling, or if you’re looking for a sales, BD, partnerships, or revenue role. It’s also not a CMO seat—you’ll earn that by proving the model first.

First year milestones

• Months 1–3: Absorb the product, thesis, and customer. Deliver an honest read on where the position is strong or soft, and what you’d sharpen. Stand up the stack, instrument the site and funnel, and set baselines.
• Months 4–6: Evolved positioning adopted across leadership, product, and creative. Site rebuilt around it. Content and social carrying the argument. First paid tests running. Lifecycle sequences shipped.
• Months 7–12: By month twelve, we should know:
  • Whether the market has started using our words instead of the commodity category’s.
  • Whether demand is being created at the pace the platform requires.
  • Whether the path from first visit to first dollar has improved on real volume.

Pay

Structured as salary-and-bonus, not an equity-driven early-stage package. Base is set at the upper end of senior commercial leadership compensation for this market, with meaningful annual variable tied to milestone-based deliverables in year one and transitioning to pipeline and revenue variable in year two.

Benefits

• Fully remote within the US.
• 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and disability; vision option available.
• Traditional and Roth 401(k) with a 4% company match.
• Flexible paid time off, 9 paid holidays plus 2 floating holidays.
• Paid parental leave.
• Annual office supply allowance, monthly internet stipend, and employer-paid cell phone.
• Opportunities to connect virtually and in-person twice a year with the fully remote team.