Why this role exists

MakePop is an AI-first marketing agency for young CPG and health & wellness brands. We are not an agency that bolted AI on. We are building the platform our marketers actually run on, and the marketer sitting in this seat defines what that platform becomes.

Right now one person is carrying nearly all client fulfillment. That is the immediate reason to hire. The bigger reason is that you will be the first person in this seat who is not a founder, which makes you the model for how the work gets done and how the tooling gets built. When you hit a wall, our engineers fix the platform, not the process.

This is a senior seat. You are the marketing leader for the brands you carry — you set the strategy and you are accountable for it. You are not a coordinator relaying messages between the client and the people doing the work.

There is a window in the next 12 to 18 months to build the next generation of brands and the marketing technology that runs them. We want you to join us as that wave crests.

What you own

You are the Director of Marketing for a book of client brands. You will start with two or three while you learn the platform, ramp toward eight as you find your footing, and toward fifteen as the platform matures. For each brand you own:

The relationship. You are the face of MakePop to that client. You run the meeting cadence: set it, prep it, lead it, follow up on it.
The strategy sprint. You run the engagement-opening sprint that produces the client's ICP, problem set, positioning, and offer. Our COO is in every sprint you run as your backstop. That does not go away once you are ramped — it is how we hold the bar and how the sprint itself keeps getting better.
The marketing plan. You turn the sprint into the plan, and you own the plan as it changes.
Orchestration of execution. Creative, media buying, paid social and search, influencer, email and SMS, e-commerce. You direct all of it. There is no team of specialists reporting to you — that is deliberate, and it is the whole idea of the company. Today part of the work runs through our AI platform and the rest runs through our founders and engineers. Your job is to direct that work, not to staff it and not to perform it. You are not the person building campaigns inside ad manager, and you will not become that person when the platform falls short. Our COO backstops that, so you stay on the client and the plan.
The playbook behind the work. For everything the platform does not do yet, you decide how it should run, get it run, and write it down. Those playbooks are what engineering turns into product.
Analysis and the story it tells. You read the numbers, decide what they mean, and tell the client a clear story about what happened and what we do next.
Client comms and access. Accounts, data, assets, approvals. You keep the engagement unblocked.
Project management of the work. With the platform doing the heavy lifting on tracking and follow-through.

Carrying a book that size is only possible because the platform does the work an agency normally throws bodies at. Your job is to be the judgment on top of it.

What you answer for is retention. Not hours logged or deliverables shipped. Whether the founder feels real momentum and keeps paying us. Loop throughput and performance economics are how you get there, and how we see trouble coming, but the number that matters is whether your brands stay.

What you have to be good at

These are the ones we cannot train around:

Analysis. You can pull performance data apart yourself and reach a defensible conclusion. This is the single hardest thing to teach and we are not going to teach it.
Fluency in the metrics that drive decisions. ROAS, CPA, contribution and gross margin, LTV, and how an attribution model shapes what you are looking at. Not platform metric trivia: whether Meta is counting a link click or an ad click, impressions versus ad views, Meta's default attribution window against GA4's model, the technical definition of impression share. Nobody will quiz you on that. Knowing it is the platform's job, and telling you when it changes your read is also the platform's job.
Creative judgment. Given eight ad concepts you can say "one and two, combined with the hook from six" and be right. Your first instinct is audience, offer, pricing, persona. ROAS and CTR are how you find out whether you were right, not how you decide.
Concreteness. You can turn a strategy into this brand's next three tests. Frameworks and positioning decks are where your work starts, not where it ends.
Feedback our engineers can build from. You are the first person outside the founders to run this platform, so what you report is what gets built. We need it specific and prioritized: what you were trying to do, where it broke, what the workaround cost you, and how often it happens. Not "it's clunky." You will have a direct line to the engineers and a standing slot to use it, and using it well is a requirement of the job rather than a favor you do us when there is time.
Storytelling, in two directions. You help the brand tell its story to its market, and you tell the results story to the client and to us.
Client rapport that survives bad news. Clients trust you because you are straight with them, not because you say yes to everything. You never overcommit. Nothing escalates past you.
Being energized by people. Client calls should be the good part of your week. If another call on the calendar makes you wince, this is the wrong job.
Working AI-first. You already reach for AI to do the work, not to make the work look done. You are willing to abandon a way of working you are good at because a better one exists.
Translation. You can put any of it in plain language for a founder who is not a marketer.

What you will and will not do inside the platforms

We want your time going to clients, strategy, and judgment — not to clicking through ad managers. But we are honest about where the platform is today, so this has two halves.

Not your job

You are not our media buyer. Campaign builds, bid strategies, and the day-to-day mechanics of the ad platforms are not yours, and they will not quietly become yours when the platform falls short.
You will not administer Shopify. Themes, apps, catalog surgery, bundling mechanics: not yours.
You will not build email flows, chase deliverability, or manage list mechanics.
You will never need a terminal, a git command, an API key, an IDE, or a config file. If something we build asks you for one of those, we built it wrong.

What you do need

You need genuine working familiarity with these systems even though you will rarely be inside them. While we are still building the platform out, you have to understand how these tools actually function in order to direct the work and to judge whether what comes back is right.

Concretely: enough Shopify to reason about what products, variants and collections mean for a catalog change; enough of the ad platforms to read a campaign structure and say whether it matches the strategy; enough email and SMS to know what a flow is and where one breaks.

The distinction that matters: you should understand how the systems work without needing to know which lever to pull for any given task. Knowing the systems is what lets you direct them and tell us where we have built the wrong thing. Expect the familiarity we need from you to shrink over time — every month, more of this should be something you ask for rather than something you have to understand.

Nice to have

CPG or health & wellness experience
Agency or fractional experience across multiple concurrent brands
Utah based, or comfortable with meaningful early time working closely with our team in Mountain time

How you will work

You will spend your first stretch at the elbow of our COO, who currently runs this work, until you own it outright. She stays your backstop after that. She is in every strategy sprint you run, and she backs you up on anything else you need support on until the systems are in place to do it for you. That is a standing offer, not a ramp-up courtesy — while we are still building, the gap between what the platform does and what the client needs is ours to cover, not yours to absorb.
You are building the machine while you run it. The pattern: you define the process, you run it manually with us, you write the playbook, and then you work with engineering to turn that playbook into platform, one step at a time. You will be in that loop constantly, and what you tell them shapes what gets built. The judgment we want most is which steps should exist at all. Plenty of what agencies do out of habit deserves deleting rather than automating.
Small team, five people. Nobody reports to you. Everyone here sells a little. Everyone here builds.

First 90 days

Days 1 to 30. Shadow and then co-run live client engagements. Learn the platform. Take over the meeting cadence for your first two or three accounts.

Days 31 to 60. Run a strategy sprint end to end, with our COO in the room. Own the marketing plan and the reporting story for those brands.

Days 61 to 90. Add accounts on a path toward a full book. Feed a prioritized list of platform gaps to engineering, with the ones that cost you the most time at the top.

Compensation and structure

$10,000 to $16,000 per month. We will go higher for a candidate who clearly clears the bar.

Options / equity. Ownership can be part of the package for the right candidate.
Full time, with two ways in. If you already have a book of business, we will talk about bringing it with you and what that is worth on top of base. If you are consulting today, we can start you in a consulting capacity and transition you to full time on a defined timeline.

To apply

Send us a short note about a brand you ran, what you decided, and what happened. We care more about the decision than the result.

Director of Marketing