Head of Growth Marketing

At Ello, our mission is to maximize the potential of all children. Our first product, Read with Ello, is an AI reading teacher that listens to a child read from real books. It uses evidence-based reading instruction to help them when they get stuck and behavioral psychology to motivate them to keep going. We’re now building on the success of Read with Ello and putting together the pieces of the world’s first complete AI teacher for children. We’re a highly technical team building delightful, learner-centered experiences which leverage the massive recent advances in AI. Our products put children on a path of lifelong learning, creating the foundation for their future and ours. Together, we believe we can close literacy and educational gaps around the world.

We are backed by world-class investors, just closed a Series A, and we’re ready to bring on new talent to help achieve our vision.

About the Role

As our Head of Growth Marketing, you'll design, build, and scale out Ello’s growth engine. You’ll be relentless in your effort to lower our blended CAC and bring on new users at scale. You will bring full-stack growth capability to drive repeatable and scalable results across all digital marketing channels. We don’t expect you to know it all, but we expect you to be curious and eager to learn. You will own all aspects of Performance Marketing: paid acquisition, email marketing, landing pages and conversion rate optimization. You will design, execute and evaluate campaigns, and in doing so accelerate Ello’s extraordinary early growth. You'll control a large growth marketing budget and manage the entire process alongside a creative agency.

You are comfortable with both getting stuck in and doing the work and with delegating. You will bring on junior channel specialists to run our successful channels while you explore what’s next. Lastly, you believe performance marketing is about the intersection of creativity and rigorous experimentation.
As one of the earliest members of a small, rapidly-growing team, you will take a leading role in developing our go-to-market strategy, as well as influencing all aspects of the business. Success in this role will lead to rapid progression in the company.

‍Responsibilities

• Performance marketing: Responsible for end-to-end performance marketing strategy and management across all channels including email marketing, referral programs, and affiliates. You’ll have a specific focus on:
• Paid marketing: set up and run ads (initially in FB/IG), and project manage the creative machine behind them.
• Conversion optimization: identify bottlenecks, design experiments, and regularly ship funnel changes. Identify opportunities to improve ROAS, conversion and audience expansion
• Channel experimentation: Explore new scalable performance channels
• Qualitative customer learning: learn everything about our users (parents and children) and what makes them tick through exposure to customer calls, Facebook ad comments, product feedback, and more.
• Cross-functional collaboration: work with the product and engineering teams to bring your insight of both the user and the market to our product development process.
• Ownership: Manage the budgeting process, including forecasting. Run Daily/Weekly analysis of attribution and performance levers

Requirements

• Clear and proven history of scaling marketing channels in a D2C business.
• 3+ years of experience in marketing at a high-growth company, ideally a venture-backed company in the early stages of scaling.
• 3+ years of experience in performance marketing or growth marketing. Demonstrated management experience (vendor/agency management is a plus)
• A deep understanding of customer behavior and how marketing should be optimized to contribute to growth goals and conversion through the user funnel.
• Experience using analytics tools such as Mixpanel. Experience with other tools that will allow you to excel such as Fullstory and Webflow is preferred.
• A track record of being highly analytical and experimental in your role
• Exceptional communication skills, both written and oral

Nice to have

• 3+ years of experience testing and evaluating organic growth channels; this may include SEO, content, PLG or other channels.

We will look for candidates who can demonstrate

• A results-oriented attitude: You’re a growth hacker that gets excited by the opportunity to do whatever it takes to grow. You pursue opportunities with a relentless enthusiasm to over-deliver on targets and expectations. And what you achieve has at times been noteworthy.
• Strategic thinking with exceptional judgment, adept at balancing big-picture vision with practical time and budget management, ensuring focused and efficient execution.
• A resourceful and scrappy marketing approach, thriving on finding innovative solutions to test and drive growth. Incredible communication skills: You are able to simplify, communicate, and sell ideas. You have a love for storytelling and a natural ability to engage and inspire users.
• An analytical mindset: You continuously evaluate things to find potential changes and improvements while solving problems on the go. You like to execute on the operational level while simultaneously developing long-term strategy.
• Teamwork: you have a low ego, give and receive feedback well, and prefer open, direct communication. An interest in the mission of Ello: you are excited to work hard on Ello’s mission. Education doesn’t need to be your passion but doing work that improves lives is.

Here are some reasons to join us

• Do work that matters and make a true impact on child development at scale
• Be part of an exceptional team doing exceptional work at the forefront of AI
• Tremendous career development opportunities during our exciting early phase
• Thrive in an inspiring, creative, and diverse environment with amazing and smart colleagues from all over the world
• Get challenged and develop your professional skills with a steep learning curve from day one

Our Team

Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, K-12 education, and child development across institutions such as Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, and more. We were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch and have recently closed a funding round; previously announced investors include leading US and European VCs including Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, Homebrew, WndrCo, Human Capital, and K9 Ventures. We’re a small, collaborative team that takes each other’s voices very seriously. Because our mission is to support all children, it is critical that our team is representative of the wider community. We place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture. We want to create an environment in which we can all be our best selves, use our strengths to take Ello forward and develop our own skills. We want to have fun while working hard to do impactful things that we’re proud of – and we believe it’s possible to do both.

At Ello, we view diversity as a moral imperative and a competitive advantage. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, skin color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to directly assess skills and experience. If you need any accommodations throughout the interview process, please reach out to erin at ello.com.