Head of Growth (DUST)

Head of Growth

We're hiring for DUST - https://www.dust.systems/

(Los Angeles/San Francisco)

What is DUST?

Every night the whole planet goes unconscious for eight hours, and the mind doesn't switch off. It dreams. It replays the day. It carries your stress into sleep and wakes you at 3am without telling you why. A huge part of your life with your mind happens in the dark, and almost nobody designs for it.

We do. DUST designs for the mind at night.

We're an MIT Media Lab spinout, and we founded the field of Dream Engineering: shaping what happens in the mind during sleep, on purpose, with sound and timing and sensors. In our studies we steered what people dreamed about successfully 92% of the time. The same tools can shape the stress that follows you to bed and the nightmares that keep coming back.

Hundreds of millions of people have nightmares bad enough to wreck their nights. Close to a billion have insomnia. Most of them will never see a sleep specialist. We can reach them from a phone next to the bed while they fall asleep. Our science runs from Harvard Medical School to Stanford Medical School. We just raised our seed, led by Future Ventures.

And people already know about us. The work has been on 60 Minutes, in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and the BBC made a documentary about it. Athletes use our tools to design product in their sleep. We make overnight installations, museum commissions and live music. The inbound is real, and we don't have the hands to answer most of it.

What nobody owns yet is the path from someone heard about us to someone uses this every night and pays for it.

The Role

At most companies this is three jobs: marketing, growth and business development. Here it's one, because all three run on the same thing, a new category with real attention behind it. You'd work directly with the CEO and our partnerships team.

The work is sequenced. The first months are about measuring what we already have and finding out which parts of our attention actually turn into users. Campaigns, partnerships and commerce ramp as that signal comes in.

• Positioning. Making Dream Engineering make sense to a normal person without shrinking it down to a sleep score. This is the hardest part of the job and everything else depends on it.
• Growth marketing. Waitlist → app launch this fall → nightly habit → paying subscriber. Lifecycle, App Store, referral, content, and paid where it earns its place. You own the funnel and the numbers in it.
• Communications. Press, launches, the newsletter, social. Press finds us. Nobody is running it as a program yet.
• Partnerships and business development. Sourcing, structuring and closing across media, consumer brands, sport and clinical. You'd be a senior outside voice for DUST, the person partners want in the room, comfortable with a global brand, a film studio and a sleep clinic in the same week.
• Commerce. Launch strategy for the hardware and CPG, from bedtime teas to functional toothpastes to devices you wear to sleep.
• Culture and community. Overnight installations, the DxE symposium, the dream journal, the research library, museum work. This is how people find us and how the idea spreads, and it's some of the best business development we have.

You Are

• About 7+ years across consumer growth, marketing and business development. Ideally you've launched both a subscription app and a physical product.
• A track record of opening doors and closing them. You've signed partners and won work, not just built pipeline.
• A writer first. Landing page, partner email, press note, and they all sound like us, not like a template.
• Analytical and experimental. You think in funnels, cohorts and activation, and you can tell a vanity metric from a real one and say so out loud.
• Judgment about claims. We sit next to mental health and we're in clinical trials. Our credibility with scientists, clinicians and journalists is the whole asset, and you have to want to get it right.
• You believe the night matters. You want to change how people think about it, not only sell them something for it.
• Self-directed enough to run a funnel, a press program, an experiment backlog and a partner pipeline without a team around you. That comes later.
• You keep moving when the plan changes, because at this stage it changes weekly.

You Might Be An Exceptional Fit If

• You're a former founder, early operator or head of growth who has worked across marketing, sales, product and analytics at once.
• You've taken a consumer product from early attention to real revenue, especially one that needed explaining before it could be sold.
• You've helped a new idea become a cultural thing people talk about, and you know which parts of that were luck.
• You've built partnerships in more than one world: entertainment, sport, retail, CPG, healthcare, cultural institutions.
• You've worked next to scientists or clinicians and know how to market with the evidence rather than around it.

Success Looks Like

• First month.A clear picture of the funnel we actually have: where signups come from, what gets someone to open the app a second night. A shared view of the inbound we've been sitting on, sorted by what's worth answering.
• Months two and three.A working press and launch cadence around the public app launch. The first structured growth experiments across the channels that plausibly matter. A prioritized partner pipeline with real conversations in it.

• By six months

  , you should be able to tell us: who our highest-value user actually is; which message makes the category land; which channels bring people who stay; where the line between free and paid should sit; and which two or three partnerships are worth more than the other twenty combined.

Compensation

Salary plus early-stage equity, calibrated to experience. We're happy to talk structure early so you have clarity before you put in a lot of time.

You'd work directly with the CEO and with our science collective of principal investigators from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and beyond.

There's no funnel to optimize yet. Whoever takes this job decides how a whole new category gets explained and sold, and gets a lot of people to think about their nights differently.