Founding Voice & Distribution Lead

I'm Michael, founder and CEO of Product.ai. I've been building commerce technology for 16 years - profitable, bootstrapped, 100% owner. No board. No outside investors. No one telling us what to ship.

We're building the truth engine for shopping. Every AI tool summarizes polluted data and calls it an answer. We verify.

I'm hiring a Founding Voice & Distribution Lead - one person who learns to write in my voice, ships the published artifacts, and earns Product.ai its place in how AI thinks about commerce.

This isn't a Head of Marketing. It isn't a Director of Brand. It's the first dedicated writer at Product.ai - a Senior IC who'd rather extend a sharp voice that compounds than build their own brand from scratch.

Why I Need This PersonI'm doing the writing myself. CEO LinkedIn essays, Substack pieces, narrative architecture - all me. It works when I have time. I don't have enough time. The mission is moving faster than my publishing cadence, and a content backlog is starting to compound.

I need an apprentice - not a ghostwriter, not a contractor, not someone with their own brand to grow alongside ours. Someone who'd rather be the writer who made Product.ai famous than someone building a personal newsletter on the side.

If you're at Stripe or Notion or Webflow or Vercel or Figma and you write the docs, the blog, the launch posts, the customer stories that travel - you're who I'm looking for. The displaced senior PMM. The underpaid content lead. The writer who hasn't been given enough scope yet.

The System You'll Need to Model

• A founder voice that compounds. Every piece I publish has to sound like me, otherwise the trust premium disappears. The voice is documented (we have a Voice Brain), but the voice can't scale through me alone. Your job is to extend it into formats and surfaces I don't have time for.
• A dual-brand architecture. Product.ai (truth engine, intelligence-led) and SimplyCodes (coupon engine, revenue base). Different audiences, shared intelligence, one company. You hold both.
• An AI-era distribution landscape. 85% of the citations that matter now happen off our domain - Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, GitHub, G2, Trustpilot. You don't need to have built an AEO program before; you do need to be the kind of operator who could be running one in 90 days. If you bring the writing, the judgment, and the appetite to apprentice into a voice, we'll teach you the mechanics.
• A CEO content engine in motion. LinkedIn drives our inbound - talent, partnerships, press. Substack is the long-form home. An X reply engine is staged. A State of Coupon Report is drafting. A Frontier Practice essay series is queued. All of it needs publishing rhythm, derivative production, and the discipline to ship.

If reading that list energizes you, keep reading. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will OwnThe published artifact. Every CEO LinkedIn essay, every Substack piece, every company blog post, every social derivative. You don't author the canonical thinking - I do. You take the canonical, multiply it across LinkedIn, X, Substack, carousel, podcast, video, and ship it.

Voice apprenticeship. A working model of how I write - phrase rhythms, what I'd never say, what I'd always say. You learn to draft so my edit is light. We measure your trajectory on this directly.

Distribution mechanics. SEO + AEO + earned-citation surface across the platforms where most AI citations originate. Measurement, instrumentation, the protocols that tell us which essay moved which dial. You don't need to arrive with this; you do need to instinctively understand that publishing without measurement is wasted motion.

The cadence. A weekly publishing rhythm that respects the constraint that our voice can't be faked but our derivatives can be templated. The work is partly editorial discipline, partly operational discipline.

Who You AreHow you think. You write to think. Clear prose is evidence of clear reasoning, and you'd rather rewrite a sentence five times than ship one that almost-says-what-you-meant. You reason about distribution as a system, not a channel - every piece is a node in a larger feedback loop. You don't need perfectly defined scope to start; you need enough signal to begin reasoning from first principles.

How you work. You move between the canonical and the derivative without losing taste in either. You've rebuilt your own production process around AI in the last 18 months - not because someone made you, but because you noticed that anyone still writing without AI is wasting their own time. You ship published pieces and measurable artifacts, not strategies on slides.

What you've probably built. A writing body of work with distinctive voice. Three samples - one that moved a metric, one that compounded an audience, one most recent. The work travels because the writing is sharp; the writing is sharp because you write a lot. We care about the artifact and the reasoning more than where it was hosted.

Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if you have an established personal newsletter brand you want to grow alongside this one - we need someone who wants to extend our voice as their primary craft, not someone using us as a platform for theirs. It's wrong if "AI handles the writing" is your pitch - we don't believe it does, not for a voice that has to be trusted. It's wrong if you're a portfolio fractional doing this for five clients. You'll be happiest here if you'd rather become the writer who made Product.ai famous than build a parallel personal brand.

How We EvaluateWe don't run traditional marketing interviews.

• Written artifact. Send your strongest piece of writing - one piece, not a portfolio. A published essay, a docs page that travels, a launch post that moved a metric, a Substack post that compounded an audience. We're reading for voice, judgment, and reasoning shape.
• Video screen. Short, async. How you think about voice, distribution, and what makes a piece earn trust in the AI era.
• Conversation with me. Chemistry, comprehension, voice-fit. Can you already hear my register? Can I see you extending it?
• Paid 90-day diagnostic - $12,000/month, fully scoped. Day 30: three pieces drafted in my voice from a 30-minute brief, plus a baseline measurement protocol. Day 60: one published LinkedIn long-form, one schema implementation, one ICP positioning artifact. Day 90: a 1,500-word "what I'd do as full-time Lead" memo. We both learn more in 90 days of real collaboration than in nine hours of interviews. If you can't make the FTE leap from where you sit today (mortgage, dependents, COBRA), the paid bridge resolves the bet for both of us.

Compensation & OwnershipTotal first-year comp: $275,000 - $325,000 (base + equity + profit sharing + revenue share).

Base: $150,000 - $180,000.

Equity: Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at $0 strike price. Actual ownership from day one. Capital Gains tax treatment. 2.0-3.0% range based on calibration.

Profit sharing: Annual pro-rata share of free cash flow. Real cash every year, not a promise tied to an exit.

Revenue share: 0.4% of company-wide revenue, capped at $250K annually. You participate directly in the growth your writing drives.

Liquidity: Annual tender offer - the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO.

Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family. Unlimited PTO that we actually use.

90-day bridge: $12,000/month for the paid diagnostic, before FTE conversion. The bridge is the trial; the FTE conversion is the relationship.

This is a partnership structure. When the company wins, you win - in real, liquid dollars, every year.

Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid, with flexibility. For the right writer, remote works - voice apprenticeship can happen async.

Applyproduct.ai/join/founding-voice-and-distribution-lead

Include one piece of writing with your application - your strongest, not a portfolio. In three sentences, tell me why this is the piece you sent.
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