This is the first growth hire, and the most impactful hire in the company. Hilt raised on the ingenuity of the product, not a repeatable go-to-market — which doesn't exist yet. You build it. Working directly with the CEO and an experienced GTM consultant who owns strategy, you own execution: standing up and then designing the go-to-market engine across the company's ICPs, distilled from twelve down to roughly three — quant and high-frequency trading firms, fintech (including crypto and banking-as-a-service), and regulated financial firms.
The ideal hire was hire n1 (1-5) at xx company, and took it from $500k to $18m in 20 months. Someone who was a founding gtm person that worked at a b2b cyber company (think vanta, drata, tenable, xbow, cyera, snyk, etc).
Day to day, you'll research each buyer cold — CISOs, security analysts, heads of infrastructure, CFOs — and write positioning sharp enough that a technical buyer stops. You'll pair the right channels with the right messages into motions, run them end to end, and turn the ones that work into priced, repeatable playbooks with a cost and a conversion rate on each. Expect LinkedIn outbound and ads, email, conferences, and per-segment landing pages, all on a modern growth stack with heavy AI leverage. You A/B test relentlessly — three ad creatives per ICP, kill what doesn't convert, watch where buyers drop off — and you're measured on exactly one thing: pipeline and revenue that wouldn't exist without you. Not activity, not meetings booked, not effort. What you actually moved.
What You'll Own
- The entire go-to-market engine, end to end — nothing exists yet; you make it
- Buyer research across the ICPs (quant/HFT, fintech/crypto, banking-as-a-service, regulated financial firms) — know each buyer's triggers cold
- Sharp positioning and copy: landing pages, outbound sequences, LinkedIn posts and ads
- Priced, repeatable playbooks with a cost and conversion rate attached to each motion
- Clean target lists, sequences, and per-segment landing pages on a modern growth stack (CRM, outbound, enrichment, LinkedIn) with heavy AI leverage throughout
- Motions run in parallel; track what moves a buyer toward a conversation and kill what doesn't earn its keep
- Ramp: month 1 — start executing, hit real volume, run existing playbooks reliably without supervision; month 3 — propose and run improvements (A/B tests); month 6 — ship your own playbook for an ICP, booking demos and landing clients
Requirements
- Analytical — reads data, puts a cost and conversion rate on a motion and defends both
- Growth-native — experimentation, funnels, and metrics are how you think, not a thing you were trained on once
- Sharp writer — can make a technical buyer stop in two sentences and explain a finding to a CISO or a non-technical exec without losing either
- AI-leveraged operator — lives in a modern growth stack and uses AI (Claude, Cursor) throughout to move faster than a team would; manual-everything is a genuine turn-off for the founder
Execution and Ownership
- A builder, not a worker — owns the outcome, not the task
- Driven to the edge of obsession; nobody had to tell them to care
- Reliability (done means done), honesty (says what's true when it matters), ownership (no "not my job"), initiative (moves before being asked), intensity without ego
- Present and locked in — chronic lateness, disappearing, or coasting are disqualifying
Background
- Any real signal of drive and intelligence counts
- Building a GTM motion from nothing
- First-growth-hire track record taking a company from sub-$1M to a high multiple
Nice-to-Have
- B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, or adjacent-technology experience
- Any track record of building a go-to-market motion from nothing
- First-growth-hire experience scaling a startup from sub-$1M to $10M+ (all bonus, none a gate — the work sample decides)
Who Will Thrive Here
- A builder who reads "long hours, isolated environment, high stakes" and feels something tighten with excitement rather than loosen
- Someone at a chapter of life where they can genuinely go all in, with no competing obligation strong enough to pull them off the build
- Obsessive about outcomes, allergic to coasting, wants to be measured on what they moved
- Comfortable being the only person between the company and the customer — total ownership of the number
- Wants the "training arc": strip everything away, work at an unreasonable level for a defined period, and come out different