Director of Marketing

About Aptible

Our Mission

Aptible helps developers do their best work by empowering them to use any cloud infrastructure securely. We’ve already helped hundreds of innovative companies succeed at becoming trustworthy custodians of sensitive data, and we’re just getting started.

Our Team

Aptible is a fully distributed company, and we’ve been remote since 2013. We’ve grown our customer base considerably since then by focusing on great product. Our team is small but we’re growing fast, and we’re starting to hire for roles and teams we’ve never before had.

This role is an opportunity to be an early contributor and leader at a company that has a substantial revenue base relative to our modest team size and is investing to scale out a company that will accelerate growth.

Our Aptible handbook is where we've set out to help current and prospective Aptible team members get a clear sense of who we are. We endeavor to speak publicly and openly about ourselves, though we do have a handbook-internal where we discuss proprietary matters internally. We invite you to read the handbook to help you determine if Aptible might be a fit for you, and to inspire any questions you'd like to ask us about our team or mission.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We prioritize diversity within our team and value different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences. We encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply.

About this Role

Aptible has built a relatively large customer base filled with highly engaged software developers. We’ve gotten to where we are in a completely product-led way, with essentially no marketing or sales headcount.

Our Director of Marketing will be our first marketer, and will work closely with our COO and CEO to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy and build our marketing team. This role is an opportunity to build out Aptible’s marketing strategy from scratch, just as we are looking to release new product functionality that will support more aggressive growth. We’re profitable, enjoy high net dollar retention, and strong relationships with our existing customers. We don’t have effective marketing, which is where you come in.

What we know for certain:

• Our go-to-market will always be product-led
• Our pricing will always be based on usage
• We’ll focus on selling to developers by empowering them to be successful at shipping product faster
• We’ll continue to achieve 100% (or near-100%) satisfaction ratings from our developer customer base
• We will remain intensely customer-focused, and deliver only valuable and reliable product that makes it easy to provision cloud infrastructure resources such that monitoring and testing of security is abstracted away

We think this is a rich canvas but a wide open opportunity for Aptible’s first Director of Marketing to develop a marketing strategy that charts our best path towards exponential growth, especially as we expand our addressable market:

• Historically, we’ve narrowly focused on digital health companies out of convenience and momentum, but this industry focus is not entirely intentional; our product is just as valuable in fintech, govtech, even edtech etc. 

• Historically, we’ve sold to startups only because our product is best when it is adopted early and grows with a company; our 2022 product roadmap will solve this problem by integrating directly with existing cloud infrastructure in customers’ own accounts (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure)

• In general, we’ve relied on word of mouth within our target segments to grow; as we broaden our appeal outside of digital health startups, we want to create a developer-friendly marketing strategy that will drive acquisition across industries and company sizes. We expect our marketing roadmap will consist of some or all of:

  • Technical thought leadership content
  • Developer community building
  • Startup accelerator and VC partnerships
  • Partnerships with open source projects and B2B SaaS companies that offer self-hosted options
  • Open source tools marketing
  • Open sourcing some or all of our software

How You’ll Ramp (30/60/90)

We expect Aptible’s Director of Marketing to help drive growth in the immediate term, and to chart a course towards growing our marketing team throughout 2022 to best support accelerating growth moving forward. What we expect for you during your first 3 months:

• By Day 30

  • Work with our execs, product, and engineering to write down a new version of our personas and a refreshed messaging house
  • Lead a text refresh of our Contentful marketing website based on these personas/the new messaging house
  • Take ownership of our existing paid and content agency partnerships, driving performance and content creation, delivering a handful of case studies, thought leadership content, and new paid creative/campaigns
  • Turn on our social presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. posting with regularity to help build our brand

• By Day 60

  • Improve customer and free trial marketing nurture campaigns in Hubspot, along with regular content such as product newsletters
  • Deliver several additional product collateral and thought leadership pieces in partnership with our agencies and our internal team
  • Support growth in our community efforts by helping provide messaging, demand gen, etc.
  • Cultivate partnerships with several companies who refer customers to use Aptible as an easy/secure way to set up self-hosted versions of their SaaS tools
  • Publish an initial “rest of 2022” marketing strategy (which we will continuously iterate on), including a marketing hiring roadmap

• By Day 90

  • You’re reporting on an increase in qualified product signups and active users
  • You’re setting goals for marketing and hitting them 

Your Strengths

As you can see, the role is a combination of product, demand gen, brand, content, and customer marketing. You may have particular strengths in one or more of these areas, but not all, and that’s OK. Some of what we are looking for:

• You have 5+ years of experience marketing a B2B software product to developers, bonus points for experience marketing infrastructure, security, or compliance platforms. As a result of that experience, you have strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to marketing to developers
• You understand Aptible’s platform as a service and could likely use it yourself to deploy a “hello world” app as a result of your technical experiences and skills
• You have a portfolio of developer-friendly content (either product or thought leadership) or marketing campaigns that you can share, along with insights into what worked or what didn’t work about each
• You are a strong writer and clear copywriter, having created product marketing that successfully compelled developers to sign up for a product and/or developer thought leadership content working with subject matter experts
• You’ve managed marketing partnership and/or event strategies: you’ve worked with other companies to create mutually beneficial marketing relationships (lead sharing programs, etc.) or created and led execution of an events calendar (meetups, conferences, etc.)
• You’re a power user of Hubspot, Google Analytics, the ad platforms, and social media, and are completely comfortable/self-sufficient using tools such as Zapier, Google Docs, Shortcut, Github (for markdown file creation/editing), Contentful (CMS), etc.
• You’ve recruited and led a team of marketers before, bonus points if cross-functional (between for example product, content, demand gen, etc.)
• You constantly level up your marketing skills, likely having taken courses via Reforge or Pavilion or similar
• You are self-directed, work with urgency, empathetic, and can collaborate transparently

Compensation :

We set compensation based on benchmarks for comparable companies and positions. Using this data, the target salary for this position is $266,000/year.

Our Benefits

• 90th Percentile Compensation & Transparent Comprehensive Philosophy: Aptible believes that the only way to attract and retain great team members is to have a highly competitive and transparent compensation philosophy. Accordingly, Aptible endeavors to pay every employee a base salary in line with 90th Percentile total compensation for their personal market and Aptible's market. We provide the data so you can see exactly how we determined your compensation, and we automatically keep your comp up to date as the market changes. Read more about our Talent and Compensation Philosophy in the Aptible Handbook.
• Work from Anywhere: Enjoy the flexibility of working from home, a local co-working space, or your favorite coffee shop.
• Open Vacation Policy: We encourage you to take the time you need, when you need it — for any holiday or matter of personal importance.
• Paid Parental Leave: We offer job-protected Paid Time Off — 14 Weeks, Fully Paid — for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child.
• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance:   We offer comprehensive health care for employees, with 100% of premiums paid by Aptible.
• Hardware & Software: We help you create your ideal office setup and provide any software you’ll need.
• Company Travel: We come together in-person at least two to three times per year, in locations around the globe.

Our Interview Process

We seek to make the experience of interviewing with us as delightful, efficient, fair, respectful, and transparent as possible.

A typical process at Aptible might include the following steps, and takes approximately 3 Weeks to complete. We try to move as quickly as possible, but if you have any time constraints, please let us know and we'll do our best to accommodate.

1. An introduction to Aptible with the hiring manager (30 minutes via Zoom)
2. A discussion-based interview with an Aptible team member (45-60 minutes via Zoom)
3. A take-home work sample exercise (You will be compensated for completing this.)
4. A discussion-based interview with an Aptible team member (45-60 minutes via Zoom)

We believe that the work sample exercise is an important part of the process, in that it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your skills in a concrete way. We take the time to design these exercises such that they: a) give you a view into the actual work you'd do at Aptible, and b) are standardized, so every candidate is evaluated using the same criteria.

Lastly, Aptible conducts calls with 3-4 References, ideally managers who have directly supervised you in the past and/or colleagues who can speak to your work.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form, and we will reach out soon to see how we may be able to assist.