Director of Paid Social & Video

About LawnStarter

LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and outdoor services, with over $100M in annual bookings. We're expanding beyond lawn care to become the one-stop shop for all home services, and paid social is one of our next major bets to scale both customer and provider acquisition across both sides of the marketplace.

About Growth at LawnStarter

Growth is where LawnStarter's customer and provider acquisition engine gets built. We own organic, paid, and partner channels and work cross-functionally with lifecycle and sales to maximize funnel conversion. Paid social is a high-potential channel for us: we've proven it can work, but we haven't had a dedicated owner to turn it into a scalable, predictable growth lever. That's the opportunity.

Requirements:
The Role

You'll own paid social acquisition for both sides of LawnStarter's marketplace — homeowners and service providers — across multiple markets and service categories while keeping spend profitable on each side.

The core channels are Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. Over time, this role could extend to interrupt channels like streaming (Hulu, connected TV) and other push formats.

This is a hands-on, execution-heavy role. You'll own the full funnel: top-of-funnel awareness, mid-funnel consideration, bottom-funnel conversion, and remarketing. You'll build campaigns, design test plans, manage budgets across geographies and seasons, and turn performance data into decisions.

This is a Director-level hire. We expect this person to own the channel end-to-end — executing directly at first, then building and leading a team as the channel scales. We're not hiring a specialist to execute someone else's strategy. We're hiring someone who can build it, own it, and eventually scale it through people.

What makes this role different:

• Multi-audience, multi-geography: You'll run campaigns across multiple audiences, markets, and service categories with different unit economics. Cookie-cutter playbooks won't work.
• Performance over brand: Every dollar is measured against unit economics (CAC, LTV:CAC). You'll need to think like a finance person as much as a marketer.
• Two-sided acquisition: You're running two parallel acquisition programs — homeowners and service providers — each with different creative, messaging, audiences, and success metrics. The balance between them matters: oversupply and undersupply both hurt the business. Most paid social directors have never had to manage both sides of a marketplace simultaneously.

What You'll Own

• Paid social strategy and execution: Full-stack ownership of acquisition campaigns for both homeowners and service providers across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, including structure, creative direction, audience strategy, bidding, and budget allocation. These are two distinct funnels with different creative, messaging, and economics — you'll own both.
• Full-funnel ownership: You're not just running conversion campaigns. You'll build and manage campaigns across the entire funnel: top-of-funnel to drive awareness and demand, mid-funnel to nurture consideration, bottom-funnel to convert, and remarketing to re-engage. Each stage requires a different creative approach, bidding strategy, and success metric.
• Testing machine: A repeatable framework for creative, audience, and funnel experiments. That includes detecting creative fatigue early (volume dropping while CAC rises is a signal, not bad luck) and rotating before performance degrades.
• Budget and performance management: Active management of spend by audience, geography, and service category, hitting performance targets while navigating seasonal swings.
• Cross-channel partnership: Working with SEO, Paid Acquisition, Product, Design, and Analytics to ensure paid social fits into a larger growth system, not an isolated silo. You'll have direct access to a video editor who can cut, resize, and produce creative assets. Your job is to brief and direct that output, not produce from scratch.
• Platform expansion: Meta, TikTok, and YouTube are your core platforms. Over time, this role could extend to streaming (Hulu, connected TV) and other push formats — you'll lead the evaluation and build-out of each new channel with the same rigor you apply to the core three.
• Team building: Once you have a handle on the channel, you'll define the roles needed to scale it and hire the team beneath you. That includes setting the bar for what good looks like, onboarding the people you hire, and building a function — not just running campaigns.

Problems to Solve

Marketplace conversion isn't a constant Conversion economics shift based on pro supply availability, market maturity, and season. A campaign that performs in a mature market won't translate to one we're still seeding. You need a targeting and budget strategy that accounts for that variability, not one that ignores it.

Build the creative testing system We don't have a mature creative testing pipeline for paid social today. You'll build it: hypothesis, brief, test, learn, iterate, and make it repeatable. The challenge is building rigor without building bureaucracy.

Know when to pull back Paid social has a natural efficient window. As spend scales, CAC rises. The right move is pulling back before the data forces your hand, not chasing volume past the point of profitability. If you need to be told when to stop, this role will frustrate you.

Balance a multi-service, multi-market, two-sided portfolio We're scaling into new service categories with different seasonal profiles and economics on both sides. Customer LTV varies dramatically by market — our best markets produce 4x the LTV of our worst — and provider supply depth varies just as much. You'll need to allocate budget across customer and provider acquisition, services, and geographies simultaneously, concentrating spend where unit economics hold on both sides and cutting where they don't.

Who You Are

Performance-obsessed. You live in the data. You check dashboards daily, dig into cohort analysis when something looks off, and make budget decisions based on unit economics, not vanity metrics. You can explain a CAC trend to a finance partner as fluently as you explain creative performance to a designer. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you prefer brand-building metrics or are uncomfortable being held to hard efficiency targets.

A structured experimenter. You don't just "try things." You run tests with clear hypotheses, controlled variables, and defined success criteria. You know the difference between a real signal and noise, and you're disciplined about kill criteria. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you rely on intuition over data or struggle to document and systematize your testing process.

A cross-functional partner. You work effectively with SEO, product, design, and analytics without needing to own those functions. You proactively share learnings, ask for input, and keep paid aligned with the broader growth system. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you prefer to run your channel independently or find cross-team coordination draining.

AI-native. You use AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, platform AI features like Advantage+) not just to write copy faster but to rethink how you work: generating and stress-testing creative hypotheses, building performance analysis frameworks, identifying audience patterns, and keeping pace with a channel that's changing faster than any manual workflow can handle. You have opinions on what's actually useful versus hype, and you're building that muscle actively. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you're skeptical of AI tools, treat them as a writing shortcut only, or prefer manual workflows.

A portfolio thinker. You can hold multiple audiences, markets, service categories, and funnel stages in your head simultaneously without mixing them up. You allocate budget and tailor creative strategy based on where unit economics hold — not by running one playbook across everything. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you prefer focusing on a single audience or market at a time, or find context-switching between variables with different economics frustrating.

This Role Is NOT

• A brand strategy role: This is performance marketing measured against unit economics. You'll care about brand consistency, but your KPIs are CAC and LTV:CAC, not brand awareness or reach.
• A big-budget DTC role: We're a profitable marketplace with seasonal swings, not a VC-funded brand burning cash on awareness. Every dollar needs to prove its return, and budgets flex with marketplace dynamics.
• A solo act: You won't control the full funnel. Landing pages, onboarding flows, and conversion tracking depend on Product, Engineering, and Design. You'll need to influence and partner effectively.
• A pure manager who delegates execution: There's no team yet. For the first phase, you're the one in platform, building campaigns, analyzing data, and making decisions. If you need a team under you to do the work before you can add value, this isn't the right fit.
• A set-it-and-forget-it role: Between seasonality, two-sided marketplace dynamics, and portfolio complexity across audiences, markets, and service categories, your strategy will need constant adjustment. If you want a stable, repeatable playbook, this will frustrate you.

Benefits:
• Base salary: $175,000 - $205,000
• Equity: TBD. This role directly drives company value and we want you invested in the outcome.
• Healthcare: Medical, dental, and vision
• Fully remote: This role requires deep focus for campaign management and analysis. Work from anywhere in the US.
• Unlimited PTO: We focus on results. Take what you need.

LawnStarter provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics. We comply with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in