Head of Growth Marketing
Head of Growth Marketing
Location: San Francisco, CA
Employment Type: Full-Time
About Us
Haystack News is the leading news streaming service, reaching 40+ million viewers with a personalized newscast across mobile, web, and connected TV. We have direct relationships with all the major TV platforms (Samsung, Sony, Vizio, LG, Google TV, Fire TV) and hundreds of premium news channels including ABC News, CNN, Bloomberg, and local stations across the country.
We pride ourselves on moving faster and executing better than anyone else in our industry, and we're now building a Premium subscription business on top of the free product. You should join us if you like to ship quickly and often, you want to learn how a Silicon Valley startup actually grows, and you like working in a small team where what you do shows up in the numbers the same week.
About the Role
We're looking for a Head of Growth Marketing to own how Haystack grows new users, paying subscribers, and the revenue that comes with them, across mobile, web, and CTV.
This is a hands-on, player-coach role, not a delegate-and-review one. You'll run the paid acquisition, you'll be in the data yourself, you'll brief and pressure-test the creative, and you'll own the funnel all the way down to retention and LTV on our Premium subscription. You'll have a small team and outside help to lean on, but the work is yours to drive. You set the plan, you find the wins, and you move without waiting to be asked. You'll start very hands-on, and as you prove it out, grow into owning the entire growth function.
What you'll own
Paid acquisition across every channel. Mobile, web, and CTV: Meta, Google, Apple Search Ads, and the CTV platforms. Drive installs and trials down to a CAC and payback we can scale on, and do it on more than one or two channels.
The Premium subscription funnel. This is the part of the business we're betting on. Own it end to end: trial starts, trial-to-paid conversion, and retention. Think in LTV and payback, not cost-per-install.
Creative that's grounded in what's worked. Run a real test-and-learn pipeline with our designer and video producer. Know which creative is winning and why, carry the proven pieces forward, and keep the quality bar high before anything goes live with budget behind it.
The data. You don't wait on a data team to tell you what's happening. You're in the dashboards (and Snowflake) every day, you write your own queries to check whether something worked, and you catch the broken number before anyone else does. When you need a new signal or event tracked to measure something, you work with our engineers to get it implemented and help test it yourself. And you move on the best signal you have rather than waiting for a perfect, complete picture before you act.
AI as part of how you work. We move fast in large part because we lean hard on AI tooling, and we need someone already out on the frontier of it: reaching for the newest tools, building your own automations, and curious about what shipped this week. When you're stuck, your instinct is to get an AI tool to help, not to wait.
What we're looking for
A track record of growing a consumer subscription / freemium product: moving paid subscribers up and to the right, not installs. (Streaming, media, or DTC is a plus.)
At least 5 years growing consumer products, including at least one role of 3+ years where you can point to real impact.
Managed 6-7 figure performance marketing budgets and driven real results with them.
Scaled a product from zero to at least 100K new users/installs.
Real analytical ownership. You can pull apart a dataset, find the thing that's off, and form a point of view from it without being handed a chart. Comfortable in SQL / a warehouse like Snowflake and living in BI dashboards daily.
A quantitative degree that backs the analytics bar (Economics, Engineering, Finance, or Statistics). Business or Marketing can work if your education involved a quantitative curriculum).
Genuinely AI-native. You use the latest AI tools in your actual day-to-day, you've built or automated things with them, and you stay out ahead of what's new. We'll want to see this in action, not just hear about it.
Hands-on performance marketing experience across Meta, Google, and Apple Search Ads, with an MMP (we use AppsFlyer) and the rest of the app-marketing stack (SKAdNetwork, attribution, etc.).
CTV growth experience, or a clear reason you'll pick it up fast, since it's core to what we do.
A strong executor who gets results with finite resources, manages the details, and raises a flag early when something's blocked or overloaded instead of letting it sit.
Startup or small-team background. You're at your best rolling up your sleeves, not running a big org.
Who should NOT apply
Big-company marketers who need large teams, big budgets, agencies on speed dial, or long approval cycles to get anything done.
"I need clean data before I can act." If you stall waiting for the perfect dashboard instead of moving on the signal you have, this isn't the role.
AI in theory only. If AI is a line on your resume but you're not actually building with the tools and keeping up with them, you won't keep pace with us.
Hands-off delegators. If your default is to assign and review rather than do, you'll be unhappy here.
Needs to be managed. We need someone who adds the work to the board themselves and keeps it moving without a nudge.
Why join Haystack
Own growth at the top streaming app for news, with a 40M+ viewer audience to grow and a subscription business that's just getting started.
Build the subscription growth playbook on a foundation that already works (subscriptions, discounts, offers, most of the plumbing), with real budget behind the channels that perform.
Work directly with a leadership team that moves fast, leans into AI, and gives you the autonomy to run.
See your work in the numbers every week, not every quarter.