Founding Marketer

Truss — Banking and payments built for construction On-site · San Francisco (5 days/week) · Full-time

The one-line version

We're hiring the person who owns marketing at Truss end to end — who makes the calls and does the work so well that the founder can look at it, trust it, and validate it instead of driving every decision. Brand, growth, content, the website, the ads — you own the whole function and set the bar for quality. And to be clear: the demand is already here, in a big way. Your job isn't to conjure it from nothing — it's to capture it efficiently and build Truss into a billion-dollar brand. If you have real taste and you like being the person others trust to get it right, keep reading.

About Truss

Truss is the banking and payments platform built for construction. Contractors, builders, and subs run on some of the slowest payments and highest fees in any industry — so we let them get paid instantly, pay their vendors effortlessly, and manage cards and cash from one dashboard. We're a venture-backed fintech (Y Combinator) growing fast in a massive, underserved market that most of tech ignores.

It's a real product solving a real, unglamorous problem for people who don't get enough good software. That's exactly why the marketing has to be great: our audience has seen every gimmick, and they trust what feels honest, clear, and well-made.

How we grow today

Here's the important part: we're not asking you to manufacture demand out of thin air. We already generate a lot of it. We're product-led, we don't have a sales team, and the engine already works — your job is to capture that demand far more efficiently and build a billion-dollar brand on top of it. The pieces already in motion:

Network effect. When a customer pays someone through Truss, the recipient signs up to get their money — and often becomes a customer themselves. Every payment is a potential new user.
Word of mouth. Construction is a tight-knit, referral-driven world. When Truss works, people tell each other.
Partnerships. Relationships that put us in front of the right contractors and builders.
Paid (retargeting today). Our ad spend is almost entirely retargeting right now — we capture demand we've already created. We don't yet run real top-of-funnel acquisition.

So this isn't a demand-gen-from-zero job — it's an own-it-and-optimize-it job. Pour fuel on the loops that already work, sharpen the story that spreads, deepen partnerships, tighten how we capture and convert the demand we already have, and figure out what top-of-funnel beyond retargeting should be.

Why this role exists (the honest version)

Right now, marketing rolls up to our founder — who spends most of his time writing code and shipping the highest-stakes features of a fintech product. That's not sustainable, and it shortchanges a function that deserves a senior owner who lives and breathes it.

The team around marketing is strong where it counts: a growth engineer (ex-sales) who's built an in-house AI engine for our ads and can build basically anything, a customer success lead who understands our customers deeply, and a marketing/ops associate. What's missing is a senior owner with genuine taste and judgment — someone who can look at a design system, a landing page, an ad, or a week of social posts and know whether it's actually good, then make it great.

That's this role. Every week there's a call that needs taste — a set of retargeting creatives, a batch of social posts, a new landing page, a designer asking which direction to go and to sign off on it. Today those decisions bottleneck on the founder. You own them, and every call like them. The founder will still look at the work and care that it's great — they just get to validate it instead of driving it, and they stop losing sleep over whether it's good, because you've got it.

What you'll own

Everything that shapes how the market discovers, perceives, and trusts Truss.

Brand and creative direction. You are the taste. Brand voice, visual identity, the design system, what ships and what doesn't. You give clear creative direction to contractors, designers, and teammates, and you have the judgment to know when something is off and the standards to insist it gets fixed.

Top-of-funnel growth. You own the top of the funnel — awareness, traffic, qualified sign-ups — across the channels that actually drive it for us: the network-effect loop, word of mouth, partnerships, and paid. You make our growth loops stronger and our story more shareable, sharpen the creative bar on our retargeting, and figure out what top-of-funnel acquisition beyond retargeting should look like. You work hand-in-hand with our growth engineer and the AI ad engine he's built, so we're not just running ads — we're running good ones that convert.

Content and social. You own the strategy and the standard: what we say, where we say it, how often, and whether it's any good. Are we posting consistently? Is it on-brand? Is it working? You turn that from a question into a system.

Website and digital presence. The website and landing pages are where our inbound demand converts. The founder is driving the current rebuild; you own the site and every page after it as living, high-quality assets — not one-time projects.

Measurement and strategy. You decide which metrics matter, track them honestly, report clearly, and use them to steer. You bring the marketing plan; you don't wait to be handed one.

Your first 90 days

Map how customers actually find us today — the network-effect loop, word of mouth, partnerships, retargeting — and find where the real leverage is.
Audit where we are: brand voice, content cadence and quality, ad creative, and top-of-funnel metrics.
Stand up the top-of-funnel metrics that matter and a simple reporting rhythm the team can trust.
Set the content and social strategy — cadence, channels, and a quality bar — and get the engine running consistently.
Partner with the growth engineer to raise the creative quality of our retargeting and test what top-of-funnel beyond it could look like.

Who you'll work with

The founder — a technical, hands-on builder who wants to hand you this function and get back to the product. High trust, high standards, low bureaucracy.
Growth engineer (ex-sales) — your right hand on paid execution. He plugs into the ad platforms and built our in-house AI ad engine. He can build anything you can design; you bring the taste and strategy he executes against.
Customer success / growth lead — deep knowledge of our customers and their world; a close partner on messaging and positioning.
Marketing / ops associate — support capacity for execution as you build the function out.

What we're looking for

Must-haves

6+ years in marketing or growth, including at least one role where you genuinely owned a brand or a function end-to-end — not just executed someone else's plan.
Demonstrable taste. You can show us work — sites, campaigns, brand, content — where the quality is obvious. This is the single most important thing.
Real range across brand and performance: you care about how it looks and how it converts, and you can move between a creative critique and a funnel metric without missing a beat.
Ownership mentality. You take the weight off other people's plates. You make decisions, hold the standard, and follow through without being managed.
Comfort in early-stage ambiguity — you're happy being the whole function today and building the team later.
All-in on a founding, in-person role. You want startup intensity and outsized ownership, and you're genuinely excited to bet on equity upside at a company right before its Series A.
Strong writer with a real feel for brand voice.
Data-literate: you're fluent in top-of-funnel metrics and ad performance and use them to make calls.

Nice-to-haves

Experience with product-led growth, network effects, referral/viral loops, or partnerships-driven growth.
B2B, fintech, SMB, or vertical/industry SaaS experience.
Experience marketing to construction, trades, or other blue-collar / non-tech audiences.
Hands-on with paid channels and modern AI marketing tooling.

What success looks like

The founder validates the work instead of making the marketing decisions — because they trust yours.
Our brand and website are assets you're genuinely proud to put your name on — the foundation of a billion-dollar brand.
We're capturing more of our existing demand, more efficiently — funnel and conversion are improving, not just spend.
Top-of-funnel is measured and growing — the growth loops are stronger, and our paid is actually good.
We have a consistent, on-brand content engine instead of ad-hoc posting.

Logistics

Location: On-site in San Francisco, 5 days a week. This is a founding role, and we work in person so you can collaborate closely with the founder and the rest of the team.
Type: Full-time.
Compensation: $170,000–$205,000 base, weighted toward equity — meaningful founding-team equity (0.5%). We're pre-Series A, so this package leans into upside, and we're flexible on the exact cash-vs-equity mix for the right person.

How to apply

Send us a note on why this role fits you, plus examples of work where your taste is visible — a website, a brand, a campaign, content you're proud of. We care far more about the quality of what you've made than the logos on your resume. [Application link / email].

A note from the founder: I'm a technical founder, and right now I'm the bottleneck on marketing — squeezing it in between shipping features for a fintech product where the stakes are high. I want to hand this function to someone with better taste than me who will own it completely — someone whose work I can trust and validate instead of making every call myself. If that's the kind of responsibility you're looking for, I'd love to talk.

Interview Process

15 minute sanity check with the founder
1 hour workshop in person with founder
2-3, 15 minute round robin with key team members

Founding Marketer

Job Description