Marketing Manager

🚀 I'm hiring a founding Marketing Manager!

A bit of context to start: my client is an early-stage startup building an AI-native assistant for special education teams, helping teachers and administrators handle everything that happens after an IEP is written, from compliance to progress tracking to on-demand answers about any student's caseload.

This is a founding marketing hire, working directly with the CEO and a fractional CMO who's already laid the foundational positioning, messaging, and channel strategy.

What you'll own:
🔹 Driving pipeline through events, outbound, email, and paid channels
🔹 Coordinating a mix of in-house, freelance, and practitioner voices to produce credible content
🔹 Running paid campaigns and owning pre/post-event pipeline
🔹 Kickstarting brand and content efforts (full ownership comes later with a future hire)

You'll be measured on demo requests and qualified pipeline, not follower counts.

You'll thrive here if you:
✅ Have 3–5+ years of B2B SaaS marketing, with real time in demand/growth (not pure brand or content)
✅ Are hands-on with paid across multiple channels
✅ Thrive in startup chaos and wearing many hats
✅ Love ambiguity and taking initiative in what to prioritize

💰 $100K–$150K + equity
📍 100% Remote (US-based)

If this sounds like you, or someone you know, apply or share!

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About our client

Special education runs on spreadsheets, notebooks, and hallway conversations — and it shouldn't. Schools are legally required to deliver individualized services to students with disabilities, but what happens after an IEP is approved is largely invisible and chaotic: services get missed, compliance risk surfaces only after a parent complains, and educators burn out maintaining personal shadow systems just to keep up.

Three things we hear in nearly every customer conversation: compliance exposure (schools face significant legal liability when they can't document service delivery), admin burden (teachers and providers spend hours on paperwork that doesn't serve students), and lack of visibility (administrators are flying blind — they can't see what's happening without chasing individual reports).

Our client is a modern, AI native, purpose built tool for special education. Teachers and service providers easily log every session, track IEP goal progress, and surface compliance risk before it becomes a crisis. Administrators get real-time visibility across their schools and districts, something they're sorely lacking today.

They're a founder-led team with deep roots in EdTech: a CEO who has built and sold to schools at scale, a President who took a school-first GTM motion from zero to $10M and a 2025 exit, and a CTO with production AI experience. They have their first signed customers, a live product launching in August, and a pipeline of schools actively evaluating. This is the ground floor.

The role

We're hiring the first full-time marketer — a demand-first builder who can drive pipeline through events, outbound, email, and paid channels while also coordinating a team of strong in-house, freelance, and community practitioner voices to produce credible, standout content to fuel that demand.

You'll work directly with our CEO, with strategic direction from a fractional CMO who has built the foundational positioning, messaging, audience research, and channel sequencing up front. The infrastructure is started: HubSpot is being stood up, outbound Round 1 is live, and the audience research is there. You're coming in to execute, test, iterate, scale, and own the number.

This is a pipeline role, not a brand role. You'll be measured on demo requests and qualified pipeline, not follower counts. You'll run paid campaigns, manage outbound iteration alongside an ops partner, own pre- and post-event pipeline, and be the person who makes sure every channel has an offer worth responding to.

That said, brand of course matters, and we need to be building engagement with our audience now for the long term. While we'll likely hire someone to own this outright in the future, for now you'll help kickstart this by coordinating (vs executing on) content and brand efforts. It's important you have a sense of what will work and why, what good looks like, but you don't need to be an expert at actually building brand and creating content.

First 90 days

Below is a representative roadmap of what your first 90 days may look like. Most important is to iterate, be flexible, do more of what works while staying rooted in the strategic fundamentals: engage our core audience wherever they are with messaging that resonates with them and ties back to Tandem's unique value.

Month 1:

• Commission and ship Tandem's first hero content asset — eg a practitioner report on SPED compliance. You'll source a freelance author, coordinate practitioner interviews as sources, manage design, and publish. This asset anchors everything in Month 2 and 3.
• Set up LinkedIn paid campaigns for SPED Directors — job title targeting, retargeting, creative variations, thought leader ads. You should be able to do this week 1.
• Get fully inside HubSpot: understand what's been built, close the gaps, ensure every lead coming in is getting nurtured. Workflows are tight. Conversion rates on forms look good, etc.
• Absorb the outbound motion — understand the sequences, the contact list, and what the first round taught us. Build out ongoing testing plan.

Month 2:

• Publish the hero asset; soft gate it; put paid media behind it — newsletter placements and LinkedIn.
• Launch Webinar #1 — practitioner-hosted, SPED Director guests, practical topic anchored by the hero asset findings. You own logistics, promotion, and follow-up.
• Build BoFu pages: comparison, product, and pricing pages. Good for high-intent traffic and AEO; you lead with in-house and AI support.
• Begin pre-event outbound for the flagship fall conference: target list, sequences, dinner or roundtable booked.

Month 3:

• Execute at the flagship fall industry conference: booth, event follow-up pipeline, hero asset in hand.
• LinkedIn paid 60-day checkpoint: which creative and targeting produced leads and opportunities? Scale, iterate, or pivot?
• Newsletter placement check: did it hit target? Commit to monthly or adjust the offer.
• Iterate Round 2 outbound: new segments, new copy angles based on what's converting.
• Look into paid search/SEO/AEO - what's our baseline, what's the opportunity, should we prioritize ASAP or in near future?

What you'll own ongoing

• Event pipeline: Pre-event outbound, at-event follow-up, post-event nurture. Support logistics and how we show up at the events.
• Outbound iteration: Sequences, segments, copy testing, performance reporting. Eventually we may add SDR/AI SDR capacity here too.
• Paid channels: LinkedIn ads for SPED Directors/Charter CEOs, industry newsletter placements, Google paid search. You manage the budget, creative, targeting, and optimization. These are all tests at this point, only do and scale what works.
• Community and sponsorships: Industry associations, practitioner newsletters, key publications. You own the relationships and the deals.
• HubSpot/lifecycle: Build and test nurture programs to thoughtfully convert leads into opportunities over time.
• Kickstart content engine: Get this going with support. Quality over quantity. A few key assets can do a lot of work with the right distribution. Your focus is nailing the distribution and prioritizing the most impactful content to start with.
• Product pages and XEO: Comparison, product, and pricing pages that capture high-intent traffic. You lead with in-house and AI support. Ensure they are set up for organic (SEO, AEO) distribution and convert.

What we're looking for

Must-haves:

• 3–5+ years of B2B SaaS marketing, with meaningful time in a demand or growth role — not pure brand or content. You've run paid campaigns. You know what a conversion rate is and why it matters.
• Hands-on with paid — Have operated in at least one and ideally multiple channels, understanding nuances of how different channels work and how to test into them.
• Editorial judgment and taste — You can tell the difference between content that a SPED director will trust and content that sounds like a vendor. You've briefed writers or managed content production even if you weren't the primary author.
• Genuinely AI-native. You use AI daily — content production, research, competitive analysis, building your own workflows. You can show us, not just tell us, what you've built and are excited to build next.
• A self-starter who owns a number. You've been accountable to pipeline or demo requests, not just activity metrics. Ambiguity energizes you; you don't wait to be told what to prioritize.
• Comfort in startup chaos. Processes won't be tight, the CRM won't be perfect, and priorities will shift. You bring order rather than waiting for it. You're a simplifier.
• Generalist with a growth mindset: As the first marketer, you'll need to do a bit of everything. That means a desire to dabble and learn a bit outside your experience and comfort zone.

Strong plus:

• Has commissioned or managed content in some capacity (report, guide, benchmark) and put paid media behind it.
• Experience with outbound sequences — can read performance data and know what to test next.
• HubSpot administration experience — not just using it, but building it: deal stages, lead source properties, workflows.

Nice to have:

• Experience marketing to K–12 education buyers — schools, districts, or education-adjacent institutions.

Details

• Location: Remote (US).
• Reports to: CEO, with strategic direction from fractional CMO.
• Start: By Mid-August 2026 / ASAP.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary starting at $100k+ (depending on experience)
• Meaningful early-stage equity
• Health benefits
• Unlimited PTO
• Home office stipend (plus a provided company laptop)
• Fully remote team (with candidates required to live within the United States)