Head of Growth
Please read first
This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.
You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
We require US work authorization, but are open to O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.
About Sauna by Wordware
Every tool you use was built as an island, so you became the glue between them. You carry a name from Gmail into the CRM, a time from the CRM into Calendly, a note from Calendly into a doc. AI showed up and mostly became an eleventh window to paste into.
Sauna is a hybrid of AI and software standing on one shared brain. It holds your context and hands you real software built on top of it. You talk to it like a chatbot and use what it builds like an app: software for the path you repeat, AI for the edge that never repeats. Keep it to yourself, or share the brain with your team.
The clearest way to see it is a tool doing what its whole category cannot. An ordinary Calendly shows a stranger your free slots. Your Calendly writes the invite email itself, because it knows how the two of you know each other, and it offers a board member the slot over your gym block, because it knows which of your busy hours bend and for whom.
Wordware is the team behind it, 15 people backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator with a $30M seed, the largest in YC's history. We build from an office in the Presidio, fifty metres from Crissy Field beach, and we work absurdly hard because we can see and feel the outcome every day.
About the Role:
Here is the honest state of things.
People who try Sauna stay. Our week-two retention is 74%, which is the number investors care most about and the one we are proud of. Almost nobody knows the product exists. We have done no paid, no SEO, no affiliate, no referral loops, and nothing on lifecycle. Our top of funnel is a founder sending a hundred cold emails a day from his own inbox between product decisions.
You would own demand and build the function around it. Everything that takes a stranger from never having heard of Sauna to arriving and signing up, plus the team that eventually does it at scale.
The first months are hands-on regardless of the title. You will be buying the media, writing the copy, and standing up the measurement yourself, because there is nobody else to hand it to and because we do not believe you can direct work you have never done. Within twelve months we would expect you to be hiring against the channels that proved out and running a real budget across them.
Retention and activation live with the product team. You bring quality people to the door and you own what it costs to get them there.
Your first 30 days:
Before real money moves, the measurement has to be real. You will work with Amelia on analytics to stand up:
Conversion tracking that fires on the events that matter, server-side where it needs to be
Match rate on Meta and enrichment score on Google, pushed as high as they go
A fully loaded CAC that counts free trial credits as marketing spend, because they are
An honest read on unit economics per channel, including inference cost, since usage is our cost of goods
Sauna is a usage-based product with real variance in what a customer costs us. Meta and Google are not built for that. Getting the measurement right is what makes the rest of the job possible.
What You'll Do:
Own the top of the funnel end to end: paid on Meta and Google first, then lifecycle, then everything that compounds around them.
Run a creator program. A six-figure monthly Meta budget needs 400 to 500 fresh creatives a month to keep working. That is a program you build with creators and agencies, not a set of ads you write.
Build an affiliate program and treat it as a real channel. Revenue share, a reason for people to earn before they are customers, and a public place to sign up.
Build a content engine with the product itself as the subject. Use Sauna to do your own job in public, and show real work rather than talking about capabilities.
Ship programmatic SEO and AEO with an engineering partner. Answer engines cite YouTube, Reddit, and credible third-party coverage, so the work runs wider than our own pages.
Write the copy yourself. Landing pages, ads, emails, posts, video scripts.
Run launches end to end: positioning, copy, social, email, video brief, press, community.
Report one number every week: how many new people heard about Sauna and came to look, and what each one cost.
Own allocation across channels, and hold an honest view of what is incremental. It is easy to scale spend past the point where it buys anything.
Build the team as channels prove out. We would rather have one exceptional person with a suite of agents than five people doing pieces of a job.
Own the weekly number with me, and be the person who says when to pull back.
Who You Are:
Minimum:
You have run actual ads with your own hands. You picked the channel, wrote the creative, set the budget, read the numbers, and killed what was not working. You get a real budget here, so this is a floor.
You understand what a conversion event is, why match rate matters, and what happens to a campaign when tracking is half broken.
You have taken something from unknown to known. A product, a newsletter, a channel, a community, or your own company. You can tell me the starting number, the number a year later, and what you did in between.
You are a systems thinker. You can step back from a task, map the whole system your job sits inside, and say which parts a machine should be doing.
You have built something that does part of your job for you, with a feedback loop in it. Not a chat thread with context in it. A loop that gets better because you corrected it.
You write unusually well. Punchy, specific, opinionated, and able to hold someone else's voice.
You know what is working on X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok this month.
You are technical enough to ship a landing page and brief SEO work without filing a ticket for every change.
You have owned a real budget end to end and can talk about a time you scaled spend and it stopped working, and what you learned from the shape of the failure.
You have hired growth people and can describe who you would hire first here, and why that role and not another.
You have opinions about which channels are incremental and how you would prove it.
Probably not a fit if:
You would only want to work on conversion inside a funnel that already has traffic.
You need an established brand, a spend history, and a team in place before you can get moving.
You would rather direct the work than make it.
Your depth is one channel and you would rather stay in it.
You have been directing a team for long enough that you would not want to open the ad manager yourself for the first six months. That is most of this job at the start.
Compensation & Benefits:
Salary: $200,000 to $280,000, depending on experience and how much of the role you can own from day one + meaningful early-stage equity.
You will also have a real media budget, set with Filip.
Standard Wordware benefits: medical, dental, and vision; daily lunch and dinner in the office; 401(k); gym budget; the Presidio office with a sauna and the beach across the road.
How to apply:
Answer one question in three paragraphs or fewer:
Tell us about a system you built that does part of your job for you. What was manual before, where does a human still touch it, and what happens when it produces something bad?
We read this before anything else on your application.
The Process:
We keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks.
1. Application: Submit your resume and answer a few short questions.
2. 15-minute intro call: Quick check to align on location, motivation, and logistics. If it's a go, we move fast from here.
3. Growth deep-dive: Walk through a channel you owned zero-to-scale and how you would approach ours.
4. Final conversation: We answer your questions and scope out the work trial.
5. Work trial: Paid, in person, usually a few days to two weeks. You work on a real project with us. See how we work, see if it fits, both sides.