How to find your first growth hire?

7 days ago
4 min read

I was the first growth hire, multiple times.

Company 1 went on to be used by millions of users, with majority of Fortune 100 companies as clients.
Company 2 went on to be used by everyday SaaS tools like Notion, Calendly, Superhuman etc.

...and so on.

I've hired people, and I've been hired.

With this article, I hope to show you a path forward on:

who to hire?
when to hire?
how to find unicorns?

Who to hire?

The general job description of someone that wears a growth hat (growth marketer, growth product manager) is that they can roll up their sleeves and execute across the full funnel.

Growth marketers tend to focus more on the top of the funnel. Whereas growth product managers focus at the bottom of the funnel. But majority of them will oversee the full funnel.

You want to find someone

you can trust to run the business, at early stages.
who has raw compute power (aka they're smart)

If it's a hell yes to both answers, it's worth moving forward.

Learning fast is a core requirement of the job of a growth person.

There are hundreds of moving parts and dozens of tools. Figuring out different permutations and combinations is critical.

Dropping things fast requires a different muscle, and is critical to the job.

In pure-play research fields, you'd need people that can keep going. But in growth fields, you'd need people who can quickly pivot.

When to hire?

The best time to hire your first growth marketer or growth product manager is when you start seeing signs on life. One sign of life is that of product-market fit.

There are people in the industry who claim that you should hire for this position prior to PMF, and I disagree. There's just not a lot of work to be done at that stage.

Growth hires typically roll up their sleeves and can get work done. The downside is with this behavior is that they won't say no if you ask them to build the core product.

Once you have a few customers, have the product built out, and growth is the primary bottleneck, it's time to hire your first growth hire.

How to hire?

My recommendation is to spread out two channels: inbound and outbound.

Some growth folks are open for work. And some aren't actively looking.

To reach the ones that are open to work, reach where they're consuming information.

1. Post in Reforge's job board ($2000/yr), and other community boards. There are many boards these days, such as:

These links may not work as is, but if you can find their invite link and join, I can promise there's a way to post jobs in each of them. Some are paid communities and some are free.

2. Ask courses for their talent directory. Many course providers maintain a talent directory. These are some good quality courses I've taken in the past. They are good starting points to research where you can post.

3. Reach out to an influencer they might follow and include the job post in their newsletter. For example, Elena Verna has a newsletter that I love to read. If an ad is placed in her newsletter, you would get a ton of high quality applicants.

These are some blogs, newsletters, and influencers I follow. They may have advertising opportunities available for you to try out. Lennys Newsletter had a pallet community that you could post on. It's now shut down but this job board exists in another form.

4. Post via a popular ATS site. Most large/mid-size companies use ATS to track applications. Try searching in Google using this filter: 'site:boards.greenhouse.io product manager remote'. You could replace greenhouse with any major ATS board name and it should work. Many job portals constantly crawl these ATS boards, and surface posts.

5. I've also found most of my jobs using Twitter advanced search. Use the common words like 'job' or 'hiring'. Make sure it has a few likes or a few retweets so it isn't blocked by bots. Many founders have stopped using Twitter after Elon's takeover, but I'm sure that the volume is still relevant. You could spread that across to other social media channels like Threads.

6. Angelist helps but it's hard for employers. There are way too many applicants that would apply. Posting helps, but going through each profile is hard.

7. I've also found Crunchbase to generate inbound.

8. Investor job boards. Most investors have their own job boards combining all hiring asks from their portfolio companies. See if you can get added to those boards.

9. Advisors: Sometimes a lot of companies have board members, advisors etc. Ask your advisors to make introductions. Kyle Poyar (PLG/Pricing expert) referred me to a company he was consulting at, that I ended up joining.

You can use a copy of his message.