Ello is on a mission to maximize the learning potential of all children, regardless of resources, starting with eradicating childhood illiteracy. Its first product is the world’s most advanced reading coach, powered by proprietary speech recognition and generative AI. It listens, understands, and engages with children to teach them critical reading skills. 

We’re now building on the success of Read with Ello and putting together the pieces of the world’s first complete AI teacher for children. We’re a highly technical team building delightful, learner-centered experiences which leverage the massive recent advances in AI. Our products put children on a path of lifelong learning, creating the foundation for their future and ours. Together, we believe we can close literacy and educational gaps around the world. 

We are backed by world-class investors, just closed a Series A, and we’re ready to bring on new talent to help achieve our vision.

About the Role

As our first marketing manager focusing on experimentation, you will rapidly launch growth experiments across marketing disciplines in order to identify Ello’s next growth channels. You will use a balance of creativity and full-stack marketing experience to design, test, and evaluate new customer acquisition opportunities, and bring the most promising ones to life.

You will be creative; while your strong foundations in full-stack marketing will guide your work, you will think outside the box to drive results. You will also be entrepreneurial; you will take the clear goal for this role, and be scrappy and relentless in achieving it. We don’t expect you to know it all, but we expect you to be curious and eager to learn.

In summary, you will launch and improve new channels for Ello, and in doing so accelerate our extraordinary early growth. You'll work directly with the CEO, Head of Growth Marketing, and product teams.

As one of the earliest members of a small, rapidly growing team, you will take a leading role in developing our go-to-market strategy, as well as influencing all aspects of the business. Success in this role will lead to rapid progression in the company.

‍Responsibilities

• Creative experimentation - explore, design, and experiment with new channels in service of our customer acquisition goals. This may - but is certainly not limited to - local launch strategies, communities, affiliates, direct mail, and publicity. The sky is the limit.
• Foundational channel development - launch, test and improve the ‘basics’ to ensure Ello’s customer acquisition is efficient and effective. This includes email, social media, and referrals and may involve managing agencies and contractors in support of your goals.
• Qualitative customer learning — learn everything about our users (parents and children) and what makes them tick through exposure to customer calls, Facebook ad comments, product feedback, and more.
• Cross-functional collaboration – work with the product and engineering teams to bring your insight of both the user and the market into our product development process.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in marketing at a high-growth company, ideally a venture-backed company in the early stages of scaling.
• 2+ years in an entrepreneurial role where you had significant autonomy.
• A deep understanding of customer behavior and how marketing should fit with that behavior.
• Exceptional communication skills, both written and oral.

Nice to have

• 3+ years of experience testing and running organic growth channels; this may include email, social, SEO, content, PLG or other channels.
• Demonstrated management experience (vendor/agency management is a plus)
• Experience using analytics tools such as Mixpanel. 

We will look for candidates who can demonstrate

• A results-oriented attitude: You pursue opportunities with a relentless enthusiasm to over-deliver on targets and expectations. And what you achieve has at times been noteworthy.
• A creative mind: You like to think out-of-the-box. You don’t reject existing wisdom, but you do just use it as one input, alongside new data and the specifics of the context we find ourselves in. A blank sheet of paper is exciting to you.
• Entrepreneurial mindset: You are resourceful, scrappy and results-oriented, thriving on finding innovative solutions to test and drive growth.
• Incredible communication skills: You are able to simplify, communicate, and sell ideas. You have a love for storytelling and a natural ability to engage and inspire users.
• Teamwork: You have a low ego, give and receive feedback well, and prefer open, direct communication. 
• An interest in the mission of Ello: You are excited to work hard on Ello’s mission. Education doesn’t need to be your passion but doing work that improves lives is.

Here are some reasons to join us

• Do work that matters and make a true impact on child development at scale
• Be part of an exceptional team doing exceptional work at the forefront of AI
• Tremendous career development opportunities during our exciting early phase
• Thrive in an inspiring, creative, and diverse environment with amazing and smart colleagues from all over the world
• Get challenged and develop your professional skills with a steep learning curve from day one

Our Team

Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, K-12 education, and child development across institutions such as Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, and more. We were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch and have recently closed a funding round; previously announced investors include leading US and European VCs including Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, Homebrew, WndrCo, Human Capital, and K9 Ventures.

We’re a small, collaborative team that takes each other’s voices very seriously. Because our mission is to support all children, it is critical that our team is representative of the wider community. We place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture.

We want to create an environment in which we can all be our best selves, use our strengths to take Ello forward and develop our own skills. We want to have fun while working hard to do impactful things that we’re proud of – and we believe it’s possible to do both.