The Duckbill Group is a small and growing company looking for its first full-time marketing hire to level up our marketing.

Why now? Simply put, our business is growing and we’ve taken our marketing machine as far as it can go given our expertise and time. We’re looking for someone far better than we are to dedicate themselves to improving our marketing.

Duckbill presents a unique challenge for a product marketer: we operate three distinct lines-of-business with their own customer personas, GTM strategy, and sales approach. Each line of business works together, feeding each other and growing each other. Those lines of business are:

• Our AWS cost management consulting, which is focused on enterprise B2B.
• Our media business, which operates multiple media publications and generates its own revenue via sponsorships.
• DuckTools, our niche SaaS app in the AWS cost optimization space.

Your work will primarily focus on our consulting and SaaS at first, and we expect you’ll naturally begin splitting time evenly between them after a while.

You will be our first full-time marketing hire, taking over the duty from one of our founders (the CEO, whom you’ll report to). This gives you the opportunity to shape a marketing function as it grows from its early days. You will be expected to get your hands dirty and execute on the plans you create. Our expectation is that you will figure out new ways for us to grow our audience and better reach our prospective customers, which will naturally lead to a mix of contractors, agencies, and additional staff as we grow.

While “first marketing hire” causes some to dread the conversations around convincing everyone marketing is important, we’re happy to say you won’t have any of those issues here. We’re all big believers in the value and power of effective marketing here.

Responsibilities

• Be responsible for determining the right marketing activities to do and ensuring their execution. We currently use SEO, email, organic social, and digital events for our growth, but we'd love to hear your ideas.
• Regularly measure progress of our marketing activities and experiments, and make adjustments as needed
• You should have a proven track record in driving growth, revenue, and inbound leads. You will have KPIs you'll be responsible for hitting (audience growth and inbound leads).
• Provide your marketing expertise to the founders as input to our marketing strategy.
• The content side of sales enablement is a big part of this role. You’ll work closely with our sales staff to ensure they have the best collateral for their needs, as well as continually honing our messaging for both the sales team and for our website.
• We use a lot of email marketing in Duckbill in the form of automated funnels and some basic segmentation and personalization. We’re hoping to improve our segmentation and per-segment messaging. You’ll be responsible for this end-to-end.
• Oversee the growth of our Media publications and ensure our total audience reach continues to grow. We’re currently experimenting with organic content, but we’re betting you have other great ideas.
• Manage and direct the various marketing contractors and vendors we rely on. They'll take their direction from you, and you'll be responsible for identifying new contractors/vendors as needed.
• Manage the marketing spend and sticking within our budget.

Some example upcoming projects

• We’re releasing our first lead magnets along with automated email sequences to accompany them soon. We’d like to do more of these but aren’t sure which opportunities are the best for us.
• We’re beginning to experiment with content creation for SEO and organic traffic. There’s opportunity here for building a team of writers and an expansive content plan.
• We’d like to start some email marketing specifically for our target customer base, perhaps in the form of a monthly email newsletter.
• We’ve learned of the power of webinars as a result of our work for sponsors, but haven’t yet started this ourselves. We’d like to experiment with them.
• Help us build the SaaS GTM plan--from scratch! We’ve got some ideas, you’ve got plenty more.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in an B2B SaaS startup in a marketing role
• Prior experience managing contractors, vendors, or staff. While you won't have any employees under you, you will be expected to manage and direct any marketing contractors/vendors you bring in.
• Significant experience in inbound, content-oriented marketing using both organic and paid tactics
• Prior experience in an early-stage startup. We’re a small company and you’ll need to be used to working in one and all that entails.
• Prior experience leveraging a founder’s public influence to drive growth. Much of our lead generation is the result of our founders being active in public; you will need to leverage and grow that further, and prior experience doing so is important to us.
• You should be comfortable with writing a lot and reading even more. 90% of team communication within Duckbill is written, whether it’s Slack, a Google Doc, or email. We use long-form writing for communicating ideas and discussing them.
• US-based and legally authorized to work in the United States (sorry, Legal requires it 🙁 )

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience in the AWS cost optimization space. If you have it, awesome. If you don’t, no problem--you’ll learn it with us.
• Prior experience leveraging a founder’s public influence to drive growth. Much of our lead generation is the result of our founders being active in public; you will need to leverage and grow that further, and prior experience doing so is important to us.
• Experience with various marketing tools. We use Pipedrive for CRM, ConvertKit for email, Buffer for social media. Clearly, we have room to expand and you should be familiar with the options and how to evaluate them for our use.
• Prior experience with executives who build software products on AWS.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation for this role ranges between $120,000 and $140,000 per year depending on experience; we do not provide equity.

We provide a 401(k) with a 100% match up to 6% of your salary. The 401(k) vests immediately, too.

We provide healthcare, vision, and dental with premiums fully covered by the company. Of course trans benefits are covered; trans rights are human rights. Dependents are covered 50%.

“Unlimited PTO” is often misused to pressure employees into taking less vacation than they should, so we offer 3 weeks of PTO that accrue monthly, plus unlimited sick leave.

“Paid parental leave” is challenging for a small company. Being a parent is far more challenging, so we of course offer paid parental leave for new parents of any gender.

We provide an allowance of up to $3,000 for setting up your home office, or we’ll cover the cost of a membership at a coworking space.

About Us

We look for three things in every candidate: smart, humble, and hungry. That is, we actively seek out people to join us who are emotionally intelligent, desire to build up the team rather than solely themselves, and passionately pursue goals and outcomes.

We are a fully remote company with team members in San Francisco, Portland, NYC, and more. We’re a small company (you’d be employee #9!) and a young company (our two year anniversary is March 1, 2021).

We are not venture-funded, and have no intention of becoming so. We’re financed instead by the magic of revenue and profitability. We focus on growing steadily and remaining profitable as we do.

Diversity & Inclusion

We’re building a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other. We hire adults. We value transparency, autonomy, experimentation, and kind, direct feedback. We welcome nontraditional candidates, and people of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We’re an equal opportunity employer and our hiring process is structured to put you at ease and help you demonstrate your best work. If we are doing a poor job of this at any time, please let us know. We hire for strengths, not absence of weakness. Come do great things with us.

Salary

$120,000 — $140,000

Location

🇺🇸 US-only