Founding Builder, New Ventures
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AI Summary
Identify high-potential business opportunities using data and build AI-powered products from prototype to production. Own the entire lifecycle from market sizing and product development to go-to-market execution and revenue generation.
About the Role
We need a builder who can do what most people do across an entire team: find a pain point worth solving, size it with data, build the product, and take it to market - with AI as the primary tool at every step. This is a role with the mandate and autonomy of a founding team member, backed by Apartment List's distribution, marketplace data, and profitability. The goal is a new business line that contributes meaningfully to revenue within 12 months - and a playbook that makes the next one faster.
You'll report to our Head of Product and work alongside - not inside - our core Product, Design, and Engineering organizations.
What You'll Do
Find the Opportunity
- Live in the data: interview renters and partners, mine support tickets and search queries, and query the warehouse yourself to size pain points and revenue pools.
- Build the opportunity map - 3–5 sized candidate business lines, backed by data and ranked by revenue potential, strategic fit, and speed to validation.
- Kill weak ideas in writing and commit to strong ones with conviction.
Build the Product
- Ship v1s yourself using AI-native development workflows - coding agents, automated testing, rapid iteration across the full stack.
- Move from prototype to production: instrument everything from day one, ship behind flags, iterate from live usage.
- Leverage the Apartment List platform where it accelerates you; make the explicit case to diverge where it doesn't.
- Give feedback on our build processes and AI tooling - you're the guinea pig for what AI-assisted development looks like at scale, and what you learn should make the broader engineering org faster.
Craft the Go-to-Market
- Own positioning, pricing, and the path to first revenue.
- Design distribution through our existing surface area - millions of renter sessions, established partner relationships - as well as new channels.
- Build the funnel, measure it honestly, and iterate until the unit economics work.
Deliver Business Outcomes
- Own a revenue target, not a feature roadmap. Report progress in business terms: users, conversion, revenue, margin.
- Make the scale/staff/kill decision with data, and propose the operating model for what comes next.
- Document the playbook so the next venture starts faster - and mentor others across Product and Engineering on how to build with AI effectively.
What You'll Bring
Must-Haves
- Product + engineering range: you've operated as a product leader and you ship production software yourself. You can point to real products you built solo or near-solo, the tradeoffs you made, and what happened after launch.
- AI-native builder: you build with AI daily - coding agents, evals, AI-powered product experiences. You can demo your workflow and point to shipped output, not slides.
- Data self-sufficiency: you write your own SQL, size your own markets, and design your own experiments. You change your mind when the data disagrees with you.
- GTM craft: you've owned positioning, pricing, and distribution - and you've closed first customers or distribution partners yourself.
- Founder track record: you've taken a product from zero to first revenue and can talk concretely about what worked and what didn't.
- Extreme ownership: you ask for context and a goal, not permission and headcount. You treat GTM and analytics as part of your job, not a handoff.
Nice-to-Haves
- Consumer-platform scale experience: shipping at one of the world's largest consumer platforms, where engagement, monetization, and partner ecosystems operated at hundreds of millions of users.
- Marketplace or two-sided product exposure: you understand how value flows between two sides of a market and where new revenue hides in that flow.
- Business fluency: unit economics and P&L thinking come naturally; formal business training is a plus.
Why Apartment List:
Founder-grade canvas without founder-grade risk. Real distribution, proprietary data, and a profitable balance sheet from day one. No fundraising pressure - we operate with the urgency of a company that needs to win the next 24 months. Competitive salary, bonus, and equity aligned to experience and market benchmarks.
Here's the Pay Range:
At Apartment List, we carefully consider a variety of factors to determine compensation for each position, including the role, level, and work. The US base salary range for this position is:
- Zone 1: $234,000 - $340,000 TTC (including $192,000 - $282,000 base salary) + equity
- Zone 2: $216,000 - $315,000 TTC (including $180,000 - $261,000 base salary) + equity
- Zone 3: $204,000 - $289,000 TTC (including 169,000 - $240,000 base salary) + equity
This reflects the compensation target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Please note, the compensation details provided do not include benefits and perks that we offer.
We also rely on market indicators along with considering your work location, job related skills, experience and relevant education and training, to determine compensation that is fair and competitive for you. Apartment List will consider paying compensation near the higher of the range in exceptional circumstances, where candidates have the experience, credentials or expertise that would warrant such consideration. It is always our goal to hire exceptional talent and we would be happy to share more about compensation during the hiring process.
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