Founding Growth Lead

About the Role

Alpha is a new consumer trading app, built to bring a gamified, mobile-first trading experience to a mainstream audience. We're looking for a Founding Growth Lead to own user growth end-to-end as Alpha moves from waitlist to launch. This is a founding seat: you'll personally build the growth function from the ground up, working directly alongside the founding team to establish the channels, mechanics, and systems that will define how Alpha scales. This role is for a builder who has personally taken a consumer product from zero, owned the metrics, and wants to do it again with a category-defining product.

Responsibilities

• Own the waitlist and referral economy at tradealpha.app — including queue rewards, contests, and ambassador programs that turn early users into Alpha's first growth engine
• Design and ship the gamification economy — leaderboards, daily rewards, and contests
• Build and run paid and unpaid acquisition end-to-end across TikTok, Reels, X, YouTube, and Google — producing creative and lifecycle directly without long agency handoffs
• Own lifecycle marketing across push, email, and in-app messaging to drive activation and retention through the trading experience
• Personally run KOL and community-led acquisition — DMing and onboarding trading group leaders, FinTwit / FinTok / YouTube traders, and individual whales
• Operate Alpha's communities across Discord, Telegram, and X Spaces, turning early users into a core retention and referral surface
• Design and implement user retention loops, pulling your own data to identify drop-off and ship weekly experiments against it

What we're looking for

• 3+ years of experience in growth or GTM at a pre-Series B consumer startup, with at least one stint as founder or CEO of a consumer product
• Hands-on ownership of acquisition, activation, retention, and referral metrics in a prior role — not contribution, ownership
• Demonstrated ability to ship directly: writes own copy, builds own landing pages, runs own outbound, pulls own data
• AI-native by default — produces creative, copy, and analysis directly with AI tools as part of daily workflow
• Comfort operating as a solo IC for 6+ months and building the growth function from scratch

Nice to haves

• Prior experience in social, finance, banking, or trading consumer apps
• Experience designing and shipping gamification mechanics (leaderboards, contests, rewards, referral economies)
• Prior experience working with KOLs, creators, or community leaders as an acquisition channel
• Based in NYC or open to NYC