Founding Growth - Permanent
Experienced job Paris (Paris)
Job description
We are looking for an exceptional growth operator to join as a founding member of the team: a true partner who is deeply excited about our mission and will take ownership of how the world discovers Upstream.
Our product is loved and paid for today by users who found us almost entirely through word of mouth. Working in tandem with our CEO, you'll take us far beyond that: shipping experiments every week, testing acquisition motions to clear verdicts, and finding the first repeatable channel to drive the next phase of our growth.
👋 About us
Hey, we’re Upstream 👋
We went through YC and raised a $3 million pre-seed round from amazing investors. We’re based in Paris and have strong ties to the US. We have extensive experience building products and scaling teams, and we’re obsessed with building incredible, user-centric experiences.
We like working in person, with kind people. We work from our own beautiful office in the heart of Paris, between Opéra and the Louvre. And we’re looking for an exceptional growth operator to build an amazing company with us.
💭 The Upstream Team
🏗️ What we’re building
Upstream is the inbox that handles itself. Our agents organize your inbox, cut the noise, follow up at the right time, and draft replies in your exact voice: you just tweak, hit send, and get back to work.
It's built for people who live in email: founders, execs, investors, operators. They tell us Upstream gives them hours back every week, and it shows: our users pay for it, rave about it, and spend their whole day in it. The product already delights everyone who finds it. Your job is to make the world find it.
🧢 What the job involves
As the founding growth hire at Upstream, you'll play a fundamental role in shaping the company and how it reaches the world. This role is primarily hands-on experimentation. You're walking into a company with great foundations (amazing investors, and a product that already converts and retains) and a go-to-market that's yours to invent. We have an ambitious growth plan for the next 12 months, and you'll be the one driving it.
🎯 Your Mission: Find Upstream's first repeatable acquisition channel
Working in tandem with the CEO, run high-tempo weekly experiments on positioning, messaging, and channels to discover what reliably produces activated Upstream users, and turn what works into playbooks and agents the company can run.
In practice, expect to:
Ship several growth experiments every week, each with a hypothesis and a clear verdict
Test acquisition motions (a channel worked a specific way) to a documented decision: invest more, or move on
Test message angles against real segments, and roll the winning one out across all surfaces (site, onboarding, product, and every asset)
Run a full-scale launch every couple of months: a story worth announcing, every surface hit at once, amplification organized in advance
Make everything yourself: the copy, the landing pages, the short videos, the outreach lists
Turn what works into playbooks and agents, so winning motions scale without headcount
💡 Some topics you’ll think about:
Finding the channel: which motion reliably turns strangers into activated users?
Sharpening the positioning: why Upstream and why now, when everyone claims AI email?
Nailing the message: what makes a founder drowning in email stop scrolling?
Going off-playbook: what's the growth experiment nobody else would dare run?
Scaling with agents: how much of a go-to-market can run on agents?
Desired profile
👨💻 About you
We’re looking for the following key traits in the person who will join us:
Inner fire. You measure yourself in numbers and revenue, and a flat week genuinely bothers you. Only the curve bending satisfies you.
Ships fast and imperfect. You'd rather put something rough in front of real people today than something polished next week. Quick and dirty over polished and late.
Full-stack maker. Hands dirty, sleeves rolled up: you write the copy, build the page, cut the video, and ship it the same day.
AI-native. You multiply your output with AI: agents, workflows, and automation are woven into how you work, and you can show us what you've built for yourself.
Messaging craft. You find the angle and the phrasing on your own: sharp copy, native-grade English, words that can go out without the CEO reading every line.
Evidence-obsessed. Before launching anything, you state what counts as a win. You focus on the learnings and failures of each experiment, and you don't hesitate to kill your own ideas.
Creative moonshot instinct. You dream big and reach for the experiments nobody else would try, not just the standard channel checklist.
Resourceful. Given a high-level goal, you figure out the rest: you do a lot with very little, and come back with results, not questions.
We also look for the following traits in every single member of our team:
Humility & Respect. You understand that diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints is a strength to cherish and cultivate. You’re excited to work in a multi-cultural environment with people from many different horizons.
Ownership & Proactivity. You can ship and get things done. You’re comfortable owning problems end-to-end, and feel ownership of bringing them to closure.
High intensity. You are excited to work with dedication and intensity. We do value balance in everything we do, and believe that recharging one’s batteries early and often is key. Yet we’re very early stage, and we need to put in the effort and time to make our ambitions a reality.
Collaborative mindset. You care about shipping your work more than being right. You’re excited to work with the whole team to bring new ideas from concept to production. You’re open to feedback and know how to listen deeply.
❤️ You’re a great fit if:
You've lived the pre-product-market-fit search somewhere: you know what it's like when nothing is proven yet and pace is everything.
You've personally run a few different acquisition channels (ads, content, SEO, outbound...) and you've seen what great looks like in pace.
You’re excited to work in a fun and light-hearted manner, and enjoy bringing your whole self to work, including everything that is weird about you.
🚫 This is probably not for you if:
You're looking for a strategy, brand, or product marketing role with long timelines
You need a proven channel and a budget to get going: you’re wired for optimizing and scaling, rather than testing 10 wildly different things and killing 9
You want a team to manage or a playbook handed to you
You need polish and process to do your best work
✨ Life at Upstream
Equity and salary reflect the high level of impact of this role. We want to work with the best and we’re ready to pay for it.
We offer best-in-class healthcare coverage (100% coverage for you and your dependents)
We value diversity of viewpoints, backgrounds, and origins. We believe amazing talent comes from all kinds of life journeys, and we love having people join us from all over the world. We make it dead simple to relocate to Paris:
Managing your sponsored visa process
Financial support to cover your relocation expenses
Help with French paperwork: social security account, tax forms and more
French lessons to help settle in your new Parisian life
We favor people who are hungry and learn very quickly over extensive expertise and experience, so don't hesitate to apply if you're unsure!
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