Performance Marketing Lead

About the Company

Our client is a seed-stage consumer collectibles startup building a new way for fans and collectors to discover, purchase, open, and trade authenticated collectibles online. The product combines the excitement of live digital pack-opening with real-world graded cards and transparent buyback options.

The company is led by repeat founders with a strong track record of building and exiting high-growth technology companies. The founding team has deep experience across consumer technology, data infrastructure, marketplaces, and venture-backed startups. The business is early, fast-moving, and intentionally lean, with a focus on building a high-performing team and a highly scalable consumer acquisition engine.

The product is already live across web and mobile, with early traction driven primarily through organic growth and creator/influencer activity. The company has not yet built a paid acquisition function, which makes this the first dedicated performance marketing hire.

About the Role

The company is hiring a Performance Marketing Lead to build its paid acquisition engine from the ground up. This is a hands-on operator role, not a strategy-only or agency-management position.

This person will own paid user acquisition end-to-end, including channel strategy, campaign execution, creative testing, attribution, reporting, CAC/ROAS/LTV analysis, and experimentation cadence. The goal is to build a repeatable acquisition machine capable of bringing in the next 100,000+ collectors at economics the business can sustain.

This role reports directly to the CEO and will work closely with a Growth Engineer on tooling, attribution, automation, dashboards, and instrumentation.

What You’ll Own

• Build the company’s paid acquisition engine from zero
• Own paid acquisition across Meta and Google, with fluency across channels such as TikTok, YouTube, programmatic, and paid creator amplification
• Manage CAC, ROAS, LTV, and payback math with clear, defensible reporting
• Build and manage a high-velocity creative testing system
• Launch, test, kill, scale, and iterate campaigns based on performance data
• Stand up reliable attribution and user acquisition dashboards
• Partner with engineering to improve tooling, tracking, automation, and measurement
• Turn paid acquisition into a predictable, compounding growth channel

Core Principles

• Every dollar of spend should have a hypothesis behind it
• Creative testing is a major growth lever
• Metrics must be trusted before spend is scaled
• Busywork should be automated whenever possible
• Fast experimentation and learning speed are key advantages

Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on performance marketing or user acquisition experience for a B2C product
• Strong ownership of CAC, ROAS, LTV, payback, and paid acquisition economics
• Deep experience in Meta or Google Ads, with working fluency across additional paid channels
• Ability to analyze data independently using SQL or equivalent tools
• Experience building or scaling paid acquisition at an early-stage consumer company
• Strong creative testing instincts and the ability to move quickly from idea to launch
• Comfortable working without a large team, agency dependency, or heavy structure
• Strong communication skills and comfort with direct feedback
• AI-native workflow, including use of tools for creative production, copy testing, audience research, reporting, and operational leverage

Ideal Profile

The ideal candidate has built a paid acquisition function before, preferably at a seed through Series C consumer startup. They are not looking to simply plug into an existing growth machine; they want to build one.

They are deeply hands-on inside ad accounts, comfortable owning the numbers, and able to connect spend directly to business outcomes. They understand consumer psychology, creative velocity, and performance marketing discipline. They can operate with urgency, communicate transparently, and work closely with product and engineering.

Nice-to-Haves

• Personal interest in collectibles, sports cards, sneakers, watches, comics, memorabilia, gaming, or other high-emotion consumer categories
• Strong sports fandom across NFL, NBA, MLB, soccer, or similar markets
• Experience with creator-led acquisition or influencer-paid campaigns
• Experience with marketplaces, limited drops, pack-based products, gaming, collectibles, trading, or fantasy/sports-adjacent platforms
• Experience building attribution from scratch using tools such as Singular, Adjust, AppsFlyer, or internal systems
• Public writing, talks, or playbooks on consumer user acquisition

Work Environment

This is an in-person, high-cadence startup environment in New York City. The team expects employees to be available in the office at least three days per week. Relocation assistance of up to $20,000 may be available for the right candidate.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision for employees
• 50% dependent coverage
• Parental leave
• New York office with strong in-person culture
• Relocation assistance up to $20,000