Founding Growth Lead (Contract-to-Hire)

About Us:

a0.dev is an AI platform that turns app ideas into real, revenue-generating mobile apps. Users enter their idea and our AI designs, codes, tests, and ships it to the App Store, handling everything from infrastructure to deployment in one place. We were one of the first AI mobile app builders in the market and have helped over 300k people bring their ideas to life. We're a small, well-funded, in-person team in San Francisco backed by Y Combinator and other top investors. We believe the future is one where anyone can invest in their ideas regardless of technical experience, and we're building a platform that helps people not just create apps, but launch them, market them, monetize them, and turn their ideas into real businesses that reach millions of users.

The Role:

We're looking for a Founding Growth Lead to own how a0.dev acquires, converts, and retains users as we launch our next product and scale from hundreds of thousands of users to tens of millions. You'll work directly with the founders to find the channels and loops that can carry us to scale, and to turn early traction into a repeatable growth engine.

This is a full-funnel role. You'll cast a wide net, run experiments across paid, lifecycle, and the product itself, and go deep on whatever shows signal. Our next product is AI-native, and the user-facing AI is one of the most interesting growth surfaces we have; how it converts, how it gets users to invite their friends, and how it earns money will be important to your role. You'll work with the founders to shape what that AI says and does based on what you're learning. This is a 90-day contract-to-hire role with a clear path to a full-time founding team seat for the right person. Successful contractors transition into full-time founding team roles with salary and back-dated equity. We'll align on success metrics in your first week.

Who You Are:

• High agency, you figure things out and don't wait for instructions
• You have an eye for good content and understand why it converts
• A doer, you actually ship the experiments and the changes
• Comfortable with ambiguity and moving fast without a playbook
• Strong written communicator
• Use AI tools aggressively to move faster than what would normally be possible
• Fun to work with, brings good vibes

What You'll Do:

• Bring new users to the platform by finding and scaling the channels that work
• Run paid acquisition across Meta, TikTok, Google, and any new channel that makes sense,
• Partner with the Brand and Content Lead on creative production
• Drive SEO and AI search visibility through content, programmatic pages, and how we show up in both Google and AI assistants
• Optimize landing pages, signup flow, and onboarding conversion
• Build lifecycle, retention, and re-engagement programs (email, push, in-app)
• Design virality and referral loops, both inside the product and outside it
• Analyze user behavior and conversations, find where we lose people and where we could earn more, and influence changes to the AI's prompts and capabilities with the engineering team
• Run experiments across the funnel: hypothesis, test, ship, learn, repeat
• Own attribution, dashboards, and the metrics we run the business on

Requirements:

• 2+ years driving growth at a consumer or product-led company
• A track record of creative experiments and original thinking about acquisition
• Hands-on experience running paid ads campaigns, with a point of view on what creative works and why
• Strong analytical chops, comfortable with attribution, cohorts, and modeling in spreadsheets or SQL
• Lives in or willing to re-locate to SF

Bonus Points:

• Experience working on a consumer AI product
• Experience with viral consumer apps, creator tools, or social products
• Experience with SEO at a consumer or product-led company
• You've made ad creative yourself
• You've built or grown something on your own, even if it's small

Why Join Us:

• Competitive pay and benefits
• Meals covered when you're in the office (lunch daily, dinner when you're working late)
• Work directly with the founders with full transparency and influence over how the business operates
• Build and own the growth engine instead of inheriting one
• Real responsibility from day one at a fast-growing YC company
• Path to convert from a 90-day contract to a full-time founding team role with salary and equity

We move fast and respect your time. Our goal is to make a decision within 2-3 weeks of your first conversation. The full process is remote.

Stage 1: Intro call with founder (45 min) A casual conversation about your background, what excites you about a0, and what you'd want out of this role. We'll walk you through the product and where we're headed.

Stage 2: Working session (1 hour) We'll dig into 2-3 growth experiments you've run end to end, then walk through a real challenge we're working on at a0 and hear how you'd approach it. We're more interested in how you think than in a polished answer.

Stage 3: Final interview with a team member / advisor (1 hour) A final conversation to get another perspective, for both sides.

We may schedule one additional follow-up call before making a decision. References in parallel. We're happy to share feedback if you'd like it.