Founding Growth & Partnerships Lead

📍 London / Remote

🚀 Early-stage | Pre-PMF | High ownership

About SplitStay

Planning a trip with other people is still surprisingly broken.

Dates get buried in WhatsApp. Budgets live in someone's head. Accommodation links are scattered across chats. Everyone has different preferences and constraints — and nobody wants to make the final decision.

SplitStay is building the coordination layer before booking.

We help groups turn fragmented preferences — dates, budgets, locations and accommodation requirements — into a shared travel decision they can actually act on.

Travel is our first application. We're currently focused on one thing above everything else:

finding product-market fit.

We're shipping frequently, putting what we build in front of real groups and learning as quickly as possible.

Now we're looking for someone entrepreneurial to own the other half of that equation:

finding the right groups and getting them using it.

Before applying:

Pitch deck submitted with our YC application:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FTsHBfOq5j-f1qnjWUYUA9BfQ1i5ovWi4j4-xLCCalo/edit?usp=sharing

Meet the founding team and watch our YC Founder Video:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rubenvanhees_traveltech-ai-activity-7487974203799887872-wAih

Your mission

Discover where SplitStay pulls hardest — and turn that signal into repeatable distribution.

You'll work directly with the founder and alongside product and engineering to answer:

Who needs SplitStay most?

How do we reach them?

Can we get them to actually use it?

Do they come back?

Can we reach the next 100 groups the same way?

You won't inherit an established ICP, mature funnel or GTM playbook.

You'll help discover them.

What you'll actually do
Find our highest-potential communities

Identify groups where travel coordination is frequent, fragmented and painful.

We're currently exploring areas such as:

• HYROX, running, cycling and endurance sports
• retreats and group experiences
• festivals and cultural events
• conferences and professional communities
• university and alumni groups
• clubs and other passion-based communities

But these are hypotheses — not conclusions.

If there's a better wedge, we want you to find it.

Get real groups using SplitStay

This is the most important part of the role.

You'll find organizers, community leaders and potential distribution partners, understand how they coordinate travel today, and turn those conversations into real groups using SplitStay.

Early on, that may involve doing things that don't scale.

That's encouraged.

10 groups genuinely using the product can teach us more than 10,000 impressions.

Run GTM experiments every week

We want product and GTM operating as one learning system:

Hypothesis → cohort → experiment → usage → signal → learning → next experiment

As we ship, you'll put what we're building in front of the right users.

Then you'll bring what you learn straight back to the team.

The objective isn't activity.

It's learning faster than everyone else.

Find repeatable distribution

When something works manually, help us determine whether it can scale.

That might look like:

event organizer → participants

sports community → athletes

retreat → attendees

club → members

community → traveling groups

We're not interested in collecting partnership logos.

We're interested in partnerships that repeatedly produce real SplitStay usage.

What success looks like

Not followers.

Not impressions.

Not meetings.

Not partnership decks.

We care about:

qualified communities → organizers activated → groups onboarded → participants coordinating → successful group decisions → repeat usage

Ultimately, you'll help us answer one question:

Where does SplitStay create enough value that people actively want to use it again?
Who we're looking for

Your exact background matters less than evidence that you make things happen.

You might come from:

travel • sports • events • marketplaces • communities • partnerships • early-stage growth • founder's office

Or you may have built something yourself.

You'll probably thrive here if you:

• have taken something from 0 → 1
• naturally open doors and build relationships
• are comfortable reaching out to people you've never met
• turn conversations into action
• think in experiments rather than lengthy strategies
• distinguish real signal from vanity metrics
• move quickly without needing a detailed playbook
• are resourceful when the obvious route doesn't work
• enjoy significant ownership and ambiguity

Founder experience, community-building experience or an existing network across travel, sports or events is a major plus.

Why join now?

Because the most important answers haven't been discovered yet.

Our strongest ICP.

Our best acquisition channel.

Our most powerful distribution partnerships.

Our eventual GTM playbook.

You'll help discover them rather than inherit them.

You'll work directly with the founder and an international team, with significant autonomy to identify opportunities and turn them into experiments quickly.

If we find product-market fit together, you won't have joined SplitStay to execute someone else's growth engine.

You'll have helped build it from zero.

How to stand out

Please don't send us a generic cover letter.

Instead, answer these three questions:

1. What's something you've personally built, grown or brought together from zero?

2. You have 10 working days and £0 in paid acquisition. How would you get 10 real groups to use SplitStay?

3. Which specific community or ICP would you test first — and who would you approach to reach them?

We care more about initiative, judgment and evidence of execution than whether your CV follows a conventional path.

If you see an opportunity and your instinct is to start testing it, we'd like to meet you.