Head of Growth

KEANU; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Equity options

Budget for freelancers

Job summary

KEANU in New York City seeks a Head of Growth to own customer and revenue growth end-to-end as the founding growth hire, reporting to the founder; remote or hybrid in NYC.

You’ll own the offer and pricing, landing pages and conversion, category education, the content engine, lifecycle and retention, and paid acquisition with measurement.

This role requires hands-on Shopify and Klaviyo work, coding comfort (HTML/CSS, SQL), and the ability to manage freelancers to build a scalable growth engine.

Qualifications

• 1–5 years in growth, performance marketing, or e-commerce at a consumer brand, agency, or startup; shipped initiatives and driven results.
• Hands-on Shopify ownership and storefront management.
• Demonstrable CRO and offer work: pages built, tests run, results tracked.
• Klaviyo or comparable flows and segmentation.
• Paid acquisition experience with real budgets and honesty about losses.
• Experience directing external creative partners: freelancers, production, agencies.
• Proficiency with content editing tools (Adobe CC, Canva, CapCut) and willingness to edit content yourself.
• Comfort with code: Liquid, SQL, HTML/CSS, basic scripting.

Responsibilities

• Own the growth function end-to-end: offers, pricing, funnel, content, and measurement.
• Lead landing pages, advertorials, listicles, PDPs, checkout, and post-purchase flows; own conversion rate and AOV.
• Develop category education as an acquisition strategy and build a scalable content engine.
• Manage the content briefs, freelancers, and editors; drive speed to ship.

Skills

Growth marketing

E-commerce

Shopify ownership

Klaviyo

CRO

Content editing tools

Liquid / HTML/CSS / SQL

Creative and analytical

Tools

Shopify

CapCut

Adobe CC

Canva

Job description

About KEANU

KEANU is a beverage brand sharing kava - a non-alcoholic alternative that supports relaxation and social connection without compromising health or mental clarity - with the mainstream American consumer. We make instant noble kava drink mixes that deliver an authentic Pacific Islands kava experience in a convenient, great-tasting format: mix with water and enjoy. Where coffee energizes the morning, kava unwinds the evening.

We source noble kava cultivars from our farmers in Vanuatu. Our first release sold out in 67 minutes. We have a waitlist several thousand deep, we're funded, and our next production run is in motion.

Which means you'd arrive at an unusual moment. There's a window between now and that run landing, and everything that determines whether a dollar of ad spend converts gets built in it: the offer, the pages, the emails, the creative bank, the plan for the waitlist. Most growth hires inherit a funnel and optimize it. You'd build ours before the first dollar goes through it.

We're small enough that whoever takes this role is the growth function, not a manager of it.

About the role

We're hiring a Head of Growth to own KEANU's customer and revenue growth end-to-end.

You’ll be the founding growth hire, reporting directly to the founder, remote or hybrid in NYC. You’ll own the offer, the funnel, the content that feeds it, and the measurement that tells us the truth about all of it.

Two things make this job unusual.

What you’ll own

Offer and pricing architecture. Bundle structure, price framing, intro offer depth, risk reversal, subscription mechanics and attach rate. This is the highest-leverage thing you’ll touch and it’s the first thing we want you in. You’ll work from real contribution margin - we’ll give you COGS, freight, pick and pack, processing, and returns per SKU on day one - and you’ll set a target CAC we can actually grow against.

Landing pages and conversion. Advertorial at top of funnel, listicle in the middle, angle-specific PDPs at the bottom, plus checkout and post-purchase. You own conversion rate and AOV as numbers you report, not metrics you watch. You’ll be in the Shopify theme making changes yourself.

Category education as an acquisition strategy. Nobody buys kava without first understanding it. The content that explains the plant is our top of funnel, and figuring out how to do that at scale is one of the highest-leverage problems in the business. There’s no playbook for this and no agency you can buy it from.

The content engine, built for conversion. You write the briefs that direct creators and videographers, manage the freelancers who execute them, and edit yourself when speed matters - Canva, CapCut, Adobe, whatever gets it shipped. You decide what gets made and which angle runs. Comfortable on camera is a plus, not a requirement.

Lifecycle and retention. Klaviyo flow architecture and segmentation. This matters more for us than for most brands: kava is a preparation-dependent product, and someone who makes it wrong the first time doesn’t come back. The onboarding sequence is a retention asset, not a welcome email. Winback and cancel flows are yours too. Retention math is what decides whether our unit economics work.

Paid acquisition strategy. You set the budget, hold the target CAC, choose the tests, and give us the honest read on what’s working versus what merely looks like it is. Once the run lands we’ll bring on a media buyer to run day-to-day execution against your direction - you’re the person deciding where money goes, not the person adjusting bids at 11pm.

Measurement. Building the attribution, cohort reporting, and creative analytics (Motion or similar) we don’t have yet. You’re the person who knows which number is real - including when the number is coming from a vendor we’re paying.

Input on what we make. We’re about to commit raise money to a production run. Flavors, pack sizes, whether there’s a single-serve trial format - all of it shapes subscription attach and reorder rate before a single ad runs. We want your view before the PO is cut, not after.

What you won’t do

We’d rather be specific about this than have you find out in month two.

• Day-to-day media buying. Rented, once the run lands. You direct it.
• Volume creative production. Freelance editors and creators. You brief and select.
• Amazon. An agency handles listing optimization, Sponsored Products, and review velocity when we turn it back on. You hold them to a number. It comes in-house when it’s material.
• Affiliate infrastructure. You own creator selection and the economics; the tracking platform and payouts are a vendor problem.
• Retail and TikTok Shop. Real channels, deliberately unowned for now. We’re not spreading one operator across four channels before DTC repeat purchase is proven.

The shape of the job is one person with judgment and hands, plus a variable agency layer around them that we can scale or cut.

What success looks like

Targets set together in your first month, and the calendar depends on when the run lands. Roughly:

Phase one, before the run lands - a tested offer architecture with the math behind it. Landing pages live for each stage of awareness, with the category-education advertorial as the top-of-funnel piece. Klaviyo flows built, including the first-preparation sequence. A creative bank deep enough to test properly on day one. A segmented plan for the waitlist, because several thousand people who’ve been waiting are the cheapest revenue we’ll ever have and they deserve better than one blast.

Phase two, first months after it lands - waitlist converted and measured. Paid live against a target CAC you set, with a testing cadence, a real backlog, and honest win/loss criteria. First cohort data on repeat purchase and subscription attach. CAC and conversion instrumented so we trust them, and the first budget reallocations made on what you measured rather than what the platform reported.

By month 12 - LTV/CAC healthy and defensible, at least one channel beyond Meta past the test phase, Amazon stable and growing, and the growth engine running on a system rather than on your heroics.

Who you are

You’re an operator, not a channel manager. You’ve grown a DTC brand from early traction toward real revenue by building offers that sell and funnels that convert… and you did the building yourself.

You’ve changed a business by changing an offer. You know that a conversion rate going from 1% to 3% does more for CAC than any bid adjustment ever will, and you’ve done some version of that yourself.

You’re comfortable in code. Not an engineer, but you can edit Liquid, write SQL against your own data, read a GA4 report skeptically, and wire up an API call without waiting on anyone.

You’re equal parts creative and analytical. You’re as interested in why a hook worked as in what it did to CAC, and you can go from concept to shipped asset without a handoff.

You write well, because growth at this stage is often writing.

You’re chronically online in a useful way and notice what’s working in culture before the case study comes out.

You’re comfortable holding an agency to a number, and comfortable firing one.

You’re a kava enthusiast, or eager to become one.

What you’ll need

• 1-5 years in growth, performance marketing, or e-commerce at a consumer brand, agency, or startup - enough to have shipped things and watched some fail, not so much that you’ve stopped doing the work yourself.
• Hands-on Shopify ownership. You’ve ideally managed a storefront.
• Demonstrable CRO and offer work: pages you built, tests you ran, what the numbers did.
• Klaviyo or comparable, built by you: flows and segmentation, not campaign sending.
• Paid acquisition experience with real budget, and the honesty to discuss your losses as fluently as your wins.
• Experience directing external creative partners: freelancers, creators, production.
• Proficiency with content editing tools (Adobe CC, Canva, CapCut) and willingness to edit yourself.
• Comfort in code: Liquid, SQL, HTML/CSS, basic scripting.

Nice to have: Amazon Seller Central. Affiliate networks (Impact.com or similar). Subscription or consumables. Experience launching a product or category that consumers had to be taught about before they’d buy. Something you made that went genuinely viral. Fluency with AI tools in your daily workflow.

Not required: kava experience. Almost nobody has it, and we’d rather hire someone sharp and curious than someone credentialed and incurious.

Our offer

Competitive package of cash compensation, equity options, and benefits for an early-stage startup - we’re willing to pay well for the right person.

• $120K-$150K base
• Equity options. We want all of our early employees to share in the success of the company, and this is the first growth hire at a company that just started working.
• Health insurance and additional benefits
• A budget for the freelancers and agencies you’ll direct, so you’re not doing everything yourself