£40,000 basic + 10% of FounderON revenue, uncapped.
UK-based, remote.
In a nutshell...
FounderON is an online community for ambitious founders. It has 550 members, a library of courses, a masterclass programme and a founder who exited his last business in 2021.
It's not yet what it should be.
The ambition is that FounderON becomes the most valuable resource for founders anywhere online. The best business content, the most engaging videos and courses, and the place a founder goes when they have a problem that has been keeping them up at night and they need people who have solved it.
We're looking for one person to own that.
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This job is to build a business...
You'll own FounderON's growth, its programming, its retention and eventually its revenue. You'll have a founder who has done this before supporting you, a body of work to build on, and an unusual amount of freedom to decide what this becomes.
The compensation reflects that. £40,000 basic is the floor, not the offer. Ten per cent of FounderON revenue, uncapped, is the offer - and the plan is for that revenue to grow substantially over three years. If you do this well, the variable element becomes the larger number by some distance.
This suits someone who wants ownership rather than a salary. If you would rather have a bigger basic and less upside, this is not the right role.
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What you would own...
These are outcomes, not tasks. How you achieve them is largely yours to decide.
Every question gets an answer, the same day.
This is the single most important commitment FounderON makes. A founder posts a problem; they get a useful answer before the day is out. Not eventually, not sometimes, every time.
Early on you will answer many of them yourself. The real work is building a community where other members answer first and better, and where your job is connecting the right person to the right question rather than being the person with every answer.
Measured by: answer rate at 100%. Time to first useful answer, same day.
Members stay.
Retention is the number this business lives or dies on. A member who joins, lurks for two months and drifts away costs more to acquire than they ever contribute.
You would own everything that determines whether someone stays: what happens in their first week, whether they ever post, whether anyone notices when they go quiet, and whether the community is somewhere they think about on a Tuesday afternoon when something has gone wrong.
Measured by: monthly churn, and the proportion of new members who post something in their first seven days.
The community is active.
Right now around 3% of members contribute in a given month and the founder writes most of the posts. That is a broadcast channel with a comment box, and it is not what people will pay for.
The target is a community where members generate the value, where the best answers come from people who are not Chris, and where being a member means access to several thousand operators rather than access to one.
Measured by: weekly active members, and the proportion of active members who post or comment monthly.
The programming is worth turning up for.
A weekly masterclass, recorded and live. Question videos answering what members actually ask. Courses that are genuinely the best available anywhere, not merely good.
Initially the founder presents most of this. Within a year it should mostly be other people - experienced operators who want to teach a room of founders, recruited and curated by you. Finding them, keeping the quality high, and saying no to the ones who want to pitch rather than teach is a large part of this job.
Measured by: sessions run, attendance and catch-up views, and how much of the programme runs without the founder in it.
It becomes a business.
Longer term, and not in your first six months. FounderON will earn from membership subscriptions, from a marketplace of services members can add to their subscription, from affiliate partnerships and from sponsorship.
You would move from running the community to running the commercial side of it: which partners, which sponsors, which services members actually want. This is where the uncapped element of your compensation becomes significant.
Measured by: FounderON revenue.
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Who is this for...
We care much more about what you've built that where you've worked.
You'll have built an audience, a community, a media property or a content business, and you can show what it became. A newsletter you grew, a community you ran, a channel you built, a publication you launched. Scale matters less than evidence that you made something people came back to.
You have a view about what FounderON should be. We are not looking for someone to execute a plan. There is a plan, it is detailed, and we would like you to disagree with parts of it. The strongest candidates will arrive with an argument about what this could become that we have not thought of.
You are comfortable being early. This is a small operation. There is no team beneath you at the start, no budget you can throw at problems, and a lot of things that do not exist yet. You will do the work as well as decide it.
You understand this audience, or want to. Members are founders running real businesses with staff, payroll and problems that keep them awake. They can tell immediately when someone has never done it.
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What we're not looking for...
Someone who wants a defined role with defined hours. Someone whose experience is entirely social media management. Someone who needs a manager. Someone who would rather have £55,000 flat.
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To apply...
Tell us about something you built and what happened to it. Then tell us what you would do with FounderON in your first ninety days.
No CV needed unless you want to send one.