Founding GTM Lead (Growth & Community)

Founding GTM Lead (Growth & Community)

Recruitment led by EQL Tech on behalf of a venture-backed Fintech Leader San Francisco, CA or Phoenix, AZ | Full-Time | On-Site

EQL Tech is representing our client, who is looking for a founding GTM operator who knows how trust becomes growth. You’ll build the company’s community-led acquisition engine from the ground up through referrals, partnerships, local parent communities, and field work - then use data to refine what works and cut what doesn’t. This is a hands-on founding IC role for someone who wants to be close to families, the numbers, and the founders.

About Our Client

The US public education budget ($900B) is being unlocked, allowing parents to take direct control of their child’s funding—averaging $7.5k per kid per year—through state-funded Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).

The problem? The infrastructure is broken. Parents are currently trapped in "government-first" portals that are confusing, slow, and induce "clawback anxiety".

Our client is building trusted infrastructure for families making education decisions. In this market, adoption is driven by credibility, relationships, and lived experience - not just ads or product prompts. The product and GTM motion sit in a trust-sensitive world where parents need confidence before they commit, and where the best growth comes from community signal, not noise.

The Team & Progress:

• Funding: $16M raised from top-tier VCs and angels.
• The Pedigree: Elite engineers and leaders from Stripe, Mercury, Goldman Sachs, and SpaceX.
• The Aesthetic: A modern, delightful consumer fintech experience - think Cash App meets Wise polish

What You’ll Own

• Build our client’s community-led GTM motion from scratch across referrals, partnerships, and parent/community channels.
• Spend real time with families to understand what creates trust, what triggers adoption, and what causes drop-off — then turn that into concrete GTM decisions.
• Design and test referral systems, partnership programs, and community loops that compound over time.
• Build field-led growth in the places where trust is earned: homeschool co-ops, special needs groups, local parent pods, education events, advocacy communities, and similar networks.
• Work across founders, product, and operations to improve onboarding conversion and move toward a clear account-growth target.
• Instrument funnels, cohorts, activation, retention, and conversion so the team can make sharper decisions faster.
• Engage with community leaders, education stakeholders, and other ecosystem partners when it helps our client reach and serve families better.
• Travel frequently for family visits, partner meetings, and community events.

Requirements

What Great Looks Like

• 3–6 years in consumer growth, GTM ops, community-led growth, partnerships, or a closely related go-to-market role.
• Proven ownership of non-paid acquisition loops: referrals, ambassador/community programs, events, partnerships, or field-led growth.
• Comfort moving between the field and the spreadsheet: talking to parents and partners, then translating those insights into funnel math.
• A strong instinct for which partnerships compound and which ones create only temporary noise.
• A bias toward action, experimentation, and iteration over long strategy documents.
• Experience in a trust-sensitive consumer category such as edtech, healthtech, family finance, childcare, or mission-driven fintech.
• High ownership, high output, and comfort operating as a founding IC without a large team or budget.
• Strong academic pedigree and the judgment to work closely with founders on a new growth motion.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a product growth PM role focused on roadmap, feature ideation, or in-product growth ownership.
• Not a software growth engineer role focused primarily on code, tooling, or implementation.
• Not a solutions architect, sales engineer, or customer-success/implementation role.
• Not a paid acquisition marketing role.
• Not a manager role.

If your recent work has mainly been product growth, software growth engineering, or broad marketing, this is probably not the right fit. We are specifically looking for someone who has built community-led GTM motions and can own the full loop from insight to acquisition to conversion.

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco, CA is the primary base; Phoenix, AZ is also acceptable.
• Work model: full-time in person.
• In-office intensity: the team works together six days a week.