Director of Marketing

At Podia, we’re building the best creator platform on the planet. Our goal is to make the most creator-friendly platform to help people build their websites, run their communities, and sell their online courses and digital products.

Podia is a fully remote company, has helped creators earn hundreds of millions since 2014, and is adding thousands of new creators every week.

Because of the number of people we reach, we run an integrated approach to marketing that uses major announcements to build excitement, then channels that excitement to get eyes on things that contribute to the long-term success of our creators (like community, access to consultants, or content). We choose projects that directly tie to new business, churn, product activation, and other key components of our success.

And we want you to help.

Your job as Podia’s director of marketing will be to drive the core growth engine of the business.

This is not your typical marketing role. You won’t be trying to prove 5% improvements across 8 different channels. You won’t be pumping more and more money into ads to hit a monthly target. You won’t be churning out SEO content or gated ebooks. Instead, you’ll be hunting for Podia’s biggest growth opportunities, regardless of what channel they can be found in.

The right person for this role is a generalist and an ongoing student of marketing. You may have come up through content, product marketing, or growth, but your focus is on finding the bottlenecks of growth and tackling them with whatever tools you have at your disposal.

With that said, here are a few of the ongoing marketing practices you might get involved in:

• Content. After shifting to a freemium model, Podia’s content focus has changed. With free accounts the key driver of top-of-funnel leads, there’s less pressure on content to generate leads and more opportunity to drive revenue with a targeted approach to content.
• Lifecycle/In-app. Podia has some lifecycle in place for free/paid users, inactive users, and people who take actions in the app — but there’s substantial opportunity to get more sophisticated.
• Community. Podia’s Creator Community has several thousand members and is more active than most SaaS communities. But the nature of the creator market means there’s still a ton of opportunity to grow.
• Affiliates/Partnerships. The affiliate program relaunched last year and has grown quickly. Partnerships with other creator companies have recently begun and are showing promise.
• Campaigns/Programs. Podia runs programs that are just cool. Our philosophy (more on this below) is to use big moments to get the attention that leads to long-term systemic improvements — and that means you’ll have a ton of freedom to come up with creative campaigns that lead to more impact than the sum of their parts.

It’s a big role and you’ll wear a lot of hats, but it’s also a role with basically unlimited opportunity to affect the growth trajectory of an already growing company. You’ll start with a small team, and work with the VP of marketing, the marketing team, and the rest of the company to make things that matter to creators.

If you’re still interested, let’s dive in.

Why this is a dream marketing opportunity

Podia has been growing organically for the last six years, and in June 2022 switched from a free trial to a freemium business model.

Since June, we’ve added tens of thousands of creators and continued to invest in freemium. We’re growing, but there are opportunities to grow faster and better, and you could be part of making it possible for anyone to become an online creator.

From a marketing perspective, Podia has grown through a few key channels:

• Content. Content marketing was the first major investment Podia made, and there’s a strong base of traffic to Podia’s site as well as a YouTube channel with over 25,000 subscribers.
• Affiliates. Podia affiliates drive people to Podia’s free plan, and a recently revamped affiliate program has been scaling quickly.
• Word of mouth. Creators talk to each other a lot. A combination of feeding word of mouth (via our overall approach to marketing) and revamping our pricing/packaging to make Podia more accessible has led to rapid growth.

Recently, Podia has been investing in integrated campaigns that launch major programs. In 2023, Podia is awarding creator fellowships every month of the year — and application to those fellowships is part of how we drive our users to our other work (like the multi-thousand person creator community, a user-generated advice library, customer research surveys, or Podia-created courses about how to succeed as a creator).

Part of our marketing philosophy is that we use big moments to improve the performance of systems. Actually, here. Just take a look at all four principles of our marketing:

1. Build systems that target our core growth model and gather steam over time
2. Use big moments to improve the performance of systems
3. Go for high upside
4. Get attention without fighting for attention

All of this is to say — you will have major marketing moments to build excitement for your campaigns. Your team’s work will be seen by hundreds of thousands of creators. You’ll have opportunities to work on unorthodox, outside-the-box campaigns, and creativity is strongly rewarded. Podia values quality, and you’ll have the opportunity to do incredible work.

It’s also to say — this isn’t your typical marketing role. All the marketing we do is integrated (no silos). You won’t be creating a content mill that churns out SEO content. You won’t put together campaign assets and then just hand it off to another team (or let them sit unpromoted on a website). You won’t have channel-by-channel “strategies” — it will be your job to work with the VP of marketing and determine your team’s contribution to the business’ overall growth strategy.

For the right person, this could be a dream job. You’ll have a ton of creative freedom and you’ll work on things that are just straight up cool.

At the same time, the role isn’t for everyone. Marketing at Podia isn’t a service organization, and there’s no paint-by-numbers. There are no traffic targets, SEO (outside of targeted opportunities) isn’t the top priority, we aren’t putting a bunch of money into ad spend, and you’ll spend just as much time working on integrated marketing campaigns as you do on individual channels. This also isn’t a purely managerial role — the person who succeeds in this position will blend management, coaching, and getting things done.

As a company, we value running towards the most important problems over solving the problem that happens to match the tool we have in our hands right now. We like to think all this is a bit unusual, and that also means you won’t be limited by some of the usual blockers:

If you’ve ever been asked to do marketing for a product that isn’t very good, or is in a “nice to have” market, you know how hard it is to watch customers slip away for yet another month of flat growth.

At Podia, our NPS is in the 99th percentile for internet companies. Our customers love us, we’ve helped many of them become successful, and your hard work won’t go to waste.

The creator market isn’t going anywhere. More and more people keep joining the creator economy, and Podia is there to tap into the demand. Creators need a platform to run their business, and that’s what we give them — a must-have product in a high-growth market.

If you’ve been stuck marketing a “boring” (or worse) product, you know how hard it is to wake up and fake enthusiasm about what you’re selling.

Podia gets emails from creators every day. Every single day there's a creator using Podia to earn their first dollar online. You’ll never doubt that your work matters, because every day you’ll see more creators sharing how much they love Podia.

We have customers all over the world — people who are starting side hustles or starting business or quitting jobs because of the income they make from Podia.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by following the “playbook” or trying to hit …questionable… KPIs, you know how it feels to have your creativity limited.

We’re not interested in a cobbled-together playbook of “best practices” or arbitrary goals. Everything we do at Podia starts with the creator and continues to the business — we want to do what works, and that means looking past playbooks to find the real levers for growth.

In this role, you’ll work with the VP of Marketing to write a new playbook and run with it.

If you’ve had to share results with other departments (or get sucked into enablement, or deal with fire drills when other teams don’t hit their goals), you know what it’s like to do everything right and still feel like things went wrong.

Podia is 100% self-serve. There is no sales team. Marketing finds and converts the entire pipeline, and the recent switch to a freemium model means the pipeline is full and growing.

If you’re still excited after reading that, let’s get into the details.

Requirements

We’re looking for someone with:

• The drive to hunt down every opportunity to grow the business. Improving the messages in our lifecycle marketing? Capturing high-intent search traffic via new comparison pages? Revising our top help docs? Generating UGC through the community? Reviewing the messages in in-app onboarding? You can help across every channel, and the right person for this role is eager to roll up their sleeves and get to work on whatever area of the business is the biggest opportunity right now.
• An eye for great messaging. Across every channel, the message matters. The right person for this role knows how to create a message that resonates, and they know how to incorporate that message into all the marketing a company does. The right person for this role is a really excellent writer.
• The drive to keep learning. You are a student of marketing, and you seek out every opportunity to learn more about your craft.
• A love for digging into what creators need. We do a lot of customer research (dozens of interviews, transcript analysis, surveys, etc.), and your job is to understand both what creators want to hear and what they need to hear, so that you can help them be more successful.
• A creative mind for distribution. Email, social, SEO…those are only starting points. You’re always thinking about how to get more eyes on your work by tying it to larger campaigns, involving other companies/creators, making it more interesting, and generally finding new ways to be found.
• Writing and coaching skills. This is a player-coach role that will involve both managing and execution.
• At least 4 hours overlap with US Eastern Time
• Years of experience isn’t the most important criterion, but you probably have 8+ years of experience in a content, product marketing, or growth role and a few years’ experience as a people manager

We get hundreds of job applications for every open role. If you’d like some tips on how to stand out, read this thread by our COO, Len Markidan

It’d be REALLY great if you also:

• Have created and/or sold an online course, membership, coaching service, or download
• Have worked with digital creators

These are nice-to-haves, but not requirements. Don’t be discouraged if they don’t apply to you. If you’re confident you’re otherwise perfect for this role, please apply!

Benefits

Here’s what you’ll get if you join Podia:

• Competitive compensation. We want to hire the best people, and we’re ready to pay for them. We use a standardized salary scale set at the 90th percentile of US salaries for each role—regardless of where you are in the world 💰
• Ultimate flexibility. We try to have some overlap time every day, but outside of that, work whenever and wherever you work best 🗺️
• Extreme autonomy. No micromanaging here. After onboarding, you’ll be given high-level direction and then left to solve it the way you feel is best. 📚
• That said, the rest of the team is always ready to lend a hand—or even an ear if you just need to bounce some ideas 💡
• You’ll be working with a diverse team from a range of countries and backgrounds. We work hard to make Podia an inclusive workplace for everyone 🌈
• We have a rapidly growing base of passionate customers. Your work will be seen and appreciated by many people ❤️
• Great benefits including three weeks paid vacation (plus another week during the December holidays), sabbaticals every three years, professional development credit, paid family leave, a new laptop every three years, and more ☺️
• 401(k) match, covers 100% of health insurance premiums and 80% for dependents (US-based employees) 💊
• (Paid for) annual retreats to spend time with the team and have fun together ✈️

Sound like you? Want to be part of a smart, nimble, motivated team working hard to build something big?

Named one of the “Best Remote Companies to Work For in 2022” by We Work Remotely, we’ve been around since 2014, have the greatest customers in the world, and a team that will stop at nothing to help our creators win. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, we’d love to hear from you! 📣

About the hiring process:

Interested in joining our team? Great!

We’ll begin reviewing applications immediately, and continue to review them as they come in. There's no benefit to applying in the first five minutes, and we'd rather you take your time. We heavily weigh the answers to our application form rather than data from LinkedIn or resumes. We typically reduce the candidate pool down to a small handful who move on to a small test project.

The project phase is a short paid test project, run very much like something you could expect to do if you were hired for the role. We’ll give you a week to complete the project, but expect that you’ll only need ~4 hours.

We’ll review the test projects, provide feedback in a single revision round for promising projects, and then based on the results of the revision round, select candidates to go on for an interview.

You’ll have four total interviews over Zoom, including:

• The VP of Marketing (Hiring manager)
• The COO
• The content team
• The CEO

The last interview will be with Spencer, our CEO, who can answer any questions you have about the broader goals and workings of the company.

After that, we'll decide on our final candidates and ask for professional references from both a previous co-worker and a manager. We'll reach out to those references to set up a brief 10 minute call or email.

Finally, all going well, we'll make a written offer to the successful candidate🥳

We’re looking forward to chatting 🙂