Growth Product Marketer

Growth Product Marketer

Location:  Bangalore-based, remote — working core hours that overlap the US day (our team and customers are US-based)

Engagement:  Contract to start, with potential to expand

Reports to:  Founder / CEO

Works with:  Engineering and AI-automation partners who build alongside you

About MarcoPolo Learning

MarcoPolo Learning builds award-winning learning experiences for young children. Since 2013, we've reached hundreds of thousands of families and thousands of classrooms across North America, with our Emmy-nominated MarcoPolo World School app and The Polos TV series bringing STEM and global discovery to life for early learners.

We're now an AI-first company. Our newest product, Miss Audrey AI, puts a proactive AI teaching assistant in the hands of early-childhood educators, and it's the foundation of a new, bottom-up growth motion: teachers discover the product for free, get hooked on using it, and convert to paid. We've always built great product. Now we're building the growth engine to match it, and this is the role that owns it.

Backed by top-tier investors and running lean, we're looking for someone who wants to build that engine hands-on — not manage it from a slide deck.

The role in one line

Own the freemium-to-paid subscription funnel: get teachers in the door for free, get them to the “aha” moment, and convert them into paying subscribers and advocates — and build the data and mechanics that make that repeatable.

This is not a general marketing role

To be clear about what this is and isn't: this is not brand marketing, social media management, content calendars, or SEO — those come later, with a larger team. This role is a hands-on, commercially minded growth product marketer who lives inside the product funnel. If your instinct when you hear “we need more paying subscribers” is to open the funnel data and start shipping experiments — not to write a strategy memo — this is for you.

You'll work in a fast-moving, AI-first startup where the expectation is that you use AI tools daily to build faster and to ramp on a market that's new to you. We're not hiring you to think and delegate. We're hiring you to build, measure, and convert.

What you'll own
Build and own the freemium-to-paid funnel. Sign-up → activation → habitual usage → paywall → upgrade. You own the end-to-end self-serve subscription experience for individual educators, distinct from our top-down district sales team.

Design the monetisation and usage mechanics that drive conversion. This is the core game of a great subscription business, and you'll build it: free-tier usage limits and metering, “you're at 90% of your usage” nudges, in-product paywalls and upgrade prompts, time-boxed and FOMO offers (“50% off if you subscribe now”), and the “ask your administrator to upgrade” path when the end user isn't the buyer. You'll tune how much access users get, when it tightens, and how the upgrade moment is presented.

Build referral and virality loops. Give teachers more capacity when they invite peers, turning happy free users into a lead source. Design the loop, the incentive, and the messaging so growth compounds.

Own activation and onboarding. Decide what a new user sees, is told, and is prompted to do so they hit their first real value moment fast — and set up to convert.

Instrument the funnel and make the data trustworthy. Clean event tracking, funnel and cohort analytics, and the plumbing behind it. Marketing here only works on clean data, and right now that infrastructure needs to be built. You'll define the events, watch the funnel, and know why conversion moves.

Turn product usage into qualified sales signals. Surface patterns — e.g. clusters of free teachers inside the same district — and hand them to the US sales team so they can reach the administrator with evidence. Bottom-up usage should feed top-down selling.

Own lifecycle messaging across the funnel. Email and in-product messaging that moves people from free to active to paid — writing it yourself or directing whoever does.

Run the experiment loop. Decide what to test across gating, pricing, onboarding, and messaging; read the results; keep pushing activation and conversion up.

Report the numbers that matter. Sign-ups, activation rate, free-to-paid conversion, early retention, and referral/virality — with a point of view on what to do next.

Expected outcomes

You'll be measured on movement in the funnel, not activity:

• Activation: a rising share of new free users reaching first value and habitual use.
• Conversion: a built, instrumented, and improving free-to-paid conversion rate.
• Monetisation: working paywall, usage-limit, and upgrade mechanics that turn engaged free users into paying subscribers.
• Lifecycle growth & virality: a live referral loop that generates qualified new users, plus lifecycle messaging that measurably lifts conversion.
• Retention: healthy early retention of both new free and newly paid users.
• Funnel optimisation: a real experiment cadence with results that compound.
• Product adoption & sales feed: usage signals reliably surfaced to the US sales team to open district conversations.

What you'll need (essential)

• 4–7 years in B2C / consumer product marketing or growth — you've marketed a product to individual consumers, not primarily to enterprises. (Think consumer apps and subscription products, not B2B/enterprise software.)
• Proven freemium-to-paid experience. You can point to a subscription or freemium funnel you built, improved, or scaled, and explain what moved the conversion rate.
• Strong grasp of subscription growth mechanics: activation, trial/freemium-to-paid conversion, usage-based gating, churn and retention, and pricing/packaging.
• Genuinely hands-on. You build and ship — funnels, flows, experiments, copy — rather than hand work off. You're comfortable directing a technical build via AI tools or a partner engineer and reviewing the output, even when you're not writing all the code yourself.
• AI-native. You already use AI tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude) daily to prototype, build, and get up to speed on unfamiliar markets fast. This is how you'll bridge the gap on a US education market that will be new to you.
• Data and experimentation fluency. Comfortable defining events, reading funnel and cohort data, and running clean experiments.
• Strong written English for conversion copy and clear communication with a US-based team.
• Startup pace and self-direction. You ask the right questions, propose a plan, and execute with minimal oversight in an ambiguous, fast-changing environment.

Strongly preferred

• Experience in a subscription consumer business — streaming, consumer app, D2C, or a freemium product where the whole game was getting free users to upgrade (a Spotify-type motion).
• Experience working with or for a US-based company while based in India — you understand US customers, US working styles, and collaborating across time zones.
• Hands-on experience building referral/virality loops and usage-metered monetisation.
• Prior startup experience (you know what it's like to build with limited resources and moving goalposts).

Nice to have

• EdTech, or any product sold to consumers, parents, or educators.
• Familiarity with tools already in use here: HubSpot, Customer.io, N8N, ClickUp, and no-code / AI website builders (Webflow and similar) for fast prototyping.
• Enough design sense to shape clean, conversion-focused web and email flows (you don't need to be a visual designer).

Engagement details

• Type: Contract to start, with potential to expand as the growth motion proves out.
• Location & hours: Bangalore-based and remote, with daily working overlap with our US team.
• Reports to: Founder / CEO and leadership team.
• Works closely with: Engineering and AI-automation partners who support the technical build.
• Start: Immediate start preferred — this is a priority hire.