Founding Growth Lead

payloop is a young South African payroll product with a real, opinionated POV: do the maths and the paperwork brilliantly. We've shipped articles, a tax guide, an API surface, and the beginnings of a customer base. Now we need someone who treats growth as a craft.

This is a founding-team hire — taste, judgment and the work you've shipped matter more than years on a CV. If you've ever felt physically uncomfortable looking at generic SaaS copy, you'll feel at home.

• Own the full funnel: organic content and SEO, paid acquisition, lifecycle email, in-product growth loops, and the customer-story engine.
• Write — a lot. Landing pages, guides, ads, lifecycle emails, sales follow-ups. Taste is the deliverable.
• Run experiments end-to-end: hypothesis, build, measure, write up. We don't want a dashboard; we want learning.
• Sit close to the founder and engineering — the best growth bets here will be product-shaped, not channel-shaped.
• Build a small content programme that ranks for the SARS / PAYE / bank-export queries we already partially own, then expand it.

• A portfolio of growth work you can walk us through: numbers, decisions, and what you'd do differently now.
• Strong writing. Plain language, no fluff, opinions backed by detail.
• Numeracy with cohort metrics, funnel maths, attribution caveats — and the patience to tell true stories with them.
• Comfort owning paid channels (Google, Meta, LinkedIn) without outsourcing the strategy.
• Bias to ship: one landing page tested this week beats four planned for next quarter.

• Familiarity with South African SMB or fintech buyers — accountants, founders, payroll managers, finance leads.
• Some HTML/CSS or React competence — you'll be near the codebase, even if you're not deep in it.
• Editorial experience or a writing background.

• Meaningful founding-team equity and a seat at the small table where strategy actually gets decided.
• A product with substance: real customers, a real tax engine, a clear scope (we don't move money yet) that makes the story easy to tell.
• Hybrid: Cape Town office days with the team; remote-friendly the rest of the week if you're elsewhere in South Africa.
• A budget for the tools, tests and content production you'll need to do the work well.
• A founder who will give you the latitude to own this completely — and the candour to push back when it matters.