Founding Head of Marketing

About Us

SwiftSku is a Y Combinator backed early stage startup. SwiftSku's cofounder, Mit Patel, grew up helping his family run their small convenience store doing all of the pen and paper work ranging from managing inventory and prices to bridging the language barrier between his immigrant parents and vendors. Mit’s family is just one of tens of thousands of immigrant owned convenience stores in the US where more than 85% of independent convenience stores are owned by Indian immigrants. These small mom and pop businesses desperately need our help to stay alive as big chains are gobbling up one family store after another.

SwiftSku not only keeps the mom and pops in business, but helps them to thrive with our complete backoffice ecosystem. Our mobile app and Point of Sale combination makes running their business easy like never before. Our space is not super sexy and has very few tech companies let alone startups. We’re looking for missionaries who want to make a real difference keeping family businesses alive in American society and globally.

Job Overview

As a founding member, you will work directly with both founders Mit and Dan. SwiftSku’s marketing traction to date has been limited and we are looking for a superstar with a “get shit done attitude” and a tremendous degree of ownership to take our marketing from zero to one. Our mom and pop target market has almost no online presence, but are a fairly tight knit demographic just waiting for a brilliant marketer to unlock.

💼 Core Requirements

1. You’re a former Founder/Operator with at least 3 yrs of Growth/Marketing experience at a high-growth B2B startup and want to build a growth engine from scratch.
2. You approach problems with a tools first mindset and are always looking for where AI can replace human efforts.
3. You will have to figure out Offline Marketing Channels from scratch and then quickly scale whatever seems to work.
4. You are a wizard when it comes to Data Mining & Enrichment. Our cold calling sales folks will count on you to produce quality data to cold call on day 1.
5. You can build useful Salesforce reports in your sleep and then take data driven actions from your findings. You don’t live by “guess and check.”
6. You will have to figure out how to create virality within the tight knit community of Family Convenience Store Owners.

About You

• You are excited about helping small family-owned businesses.
• You’ve got tremendous hustle and grit. As the VERY FIRST marketing hire at an early stage startup you understand that leads don’t fall in your lap. People don’t know us. There’s no tried and true playbook. There’s no existing process, big brand, or anyone to lean on. Just you working with me, the founder, and a whole lot of grit.
• You know that at a startup you do whatever you must to get the job done. You’re creative and flexible to try anything and everything to get our ICP on the phone with sales.
• You want to propel your career (and maybe build the skills to found your own company).
• You’re metrics-driven. Can you work backwards from a revenue target to figure out where leads are coming from, where to double down, and where to cut efforts? Missing the mark? Where should we invest to fix our pipeline?
• You’re quantitative and analytical. You make effort/budget investment decisions based on results from your experiments. You can clearly show the founders what’s working and why. You should probably have dreamed about conversion rates in your previous roles.
• You are an exceptional storyteller with fantastic communication skills.
• You’re a great written async communicator that can work well with our mostly remote team
• As a part of the core leadership team you will think strategically and make high-impact decisions.
• You love talking to customers and feeling the impact of your work.

Who is this not a fit for?

• You’re a manager not a doer.
• You can’t work hard right now. If you have other priorities outside of work, being the first marketing hire at a startup is probably not the right move.
• You need a traditional environment and structure.
• You think there are things that “are not your job”.
• You are allergic to numbers, math, data driven decision making.

Additional Desired Skills

1. You have launched Facebook campaigns from scratch on your own and have run them at a scale of $10k+ per month budget with an eye for profitability and payback windows.
2. You are a spreadsheet wizard and know how to use the latest tools. You should be excited to use the best tools to increase your leverage.
3. Social Media Management
4. Creating Brand Awareness from Scratch
5. Creating & executing on a content strategy
6. Recruiting talent for your department
7. Community Marketing
8. Product Marketing

Bonus Points

• Convenience retail industry experience
• Understanding of Indian/Gujarati culture
• You’ve worked at a fully remote company before. Your role will be in person with the founders, but most of the company is remote.