Founder's Associate

Sphere Digital Recruitment; Greater London; On-site; GBP 25,000 - 45,000; Full time

Job summary

Sphere Digital Recruitment is seeking a Founder's Associate for an early-stage consumer venture in London. The position is based in the city with four days in the office, and offers a hands-on, start-up experience for a junior to mid-level candidate.

The role involves moving between strategic thinking, market research, customer conversations and practical execution, with ownership over projects from initial research to execution in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Interest in understanding how businesses make money and identify commercial opportunities.
• Comfort with blank-sheet ideation and turning vague ideas into tangible opportunities.
• Willingness to speak to customers and commercial partners to gather feedback.

Responsibilities

• Research unfamiliar markets and emerging trends to uncover business ideas.
• Develop concepts from a blank sheet into commercially viable opportunities.
• Analyse business models, pricing, margins, CAC, revenue potential and profitability.
• Engage with customers and partners to validate assumptions and shape decisions.
• Turn ideas into experiments and learn quickly to move forward.

Job description

Founder's Associate | Early-stage business

London, 4 days office

Salary - open (DOE), looking for junior to mid level

We're working with an ambitious founder who has a proven track record of building and scaling successful consumer businesses, with multiple ventures established and two successful exits. Their latest business has achieved significant international growth, generated billions of social media views, and secured retail distribution with major global retailers.

Now, they're turning their attention to an exciting new venture and they're looking for an exceptional individual to join at the very beginning.

No two days will look the same. You'll need to be comfortable switching between strategic thinking, detailed analysis, customer conversations and practical execution.

A bit about the role

• Research unfamiliar markets, understand emerging trends and uncover potential business ideas.
• Take ideas from a blank sheet of paper and develop them into commercially viable concepts.
• Analyse business models, pricing, margins, customer acquisition costs, revenue potential and profitability.
• Get out into the market, speak to customers and commercial partners, test assumptions and use real-world feedback to shape decisions.
• Assess opportunities, challenge assumptions and make clear, commercially grounded recommendations.
• Turn ideas into experiments, test what works and learn fast rather than spending months planning.
• Help prioritise opportunities, solve ambiguous problems and make decisions that shape the direction of the business.
• Take ownership of projects from initial research through to execution, getting involved in whatever is needed to move things forward.

A bit about you

• You naturally want to understand how businesses make money, who their customers are, what those customers are worth and where the biggest commercial opportunities lie.
• You enjoy starting with a blank sheet of paper, exploring possibilities and turning vague ideas into tangible opportunities. You're more excited by creating something new than simply maintaining an existing operation.
• You're comfortable getting to grips with unfamiliar markets, assessing business models and thinking about pricing, margins, ROI, customer acquisition and P&L.
• You understand the importance of speaking to customers early, testing assumptions and adapting your thinking based on what you learn.
• You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, identifying what really matters and changing direction when the evidence points elsewhere.
• You can take an ambiguous problem, work through it independently and come back with a clear recommendation rather than simply presenting more questions.
• You take responsibility for outcomes and think about the bigger picture: the customer, the product, the revenue, the costs and whether an idea genuinely deserves to become a business.
• You might have built a side project, launched a business, spotted an opportunity at work or taken ownership of a problem nobody else had figured out.