The questions that come up most often when people are looking at this role. If you want the separate read on how Michelle works day to day, see Working with Michelle.
Think of it as a GM or mini-founder role on the business side. Right now there's nobody steering the business except Michelle and one marketer, so this person owns pricing and packaging, growth modeling, scenario planning, partnerships, and finance. You work very closely with Michelle on everything outside of engineering and product.
The default profile is a scrappy, high-slope generalist — that's where the MBB sourcing comes from. But we're also open to a more senior, COO-type operator: a strategic partner to Michelle who can set direction and hire hungry people to run the pieces. What matters in both cases is the same — agency, comfort with ambiguity, and building functions from zero — the difference is just whether you do more of the doing or more of the hiring.
The hair-on-fire priority is growing our team. We cannot scale the business without hiring out CS, AE, and 2 more eng. Ray from Fireworks, Bihan from Decagon, and Grace from Cogent were the first business hires too and they spend the first few months just hiring.
Thereafter, it’s working on the funnel. We have way too much inbound and we're losing people in a slow drip across the signup to contact-sales to conversion path. Two common examples: people who hit "contact sales" but never book the call, and people who build a page but never click publish.
The work is to study the whole funnel, build the nudge and drip sequences that win those people back, watch screen recordings to find where people stall, and sort who needs a salesperson, who's just stuck, and who was never a fit. Then model it so we know which leaks are worth engineering time and which aren't. It's easily 60 days of work.
Around three months in, the role shifts toward acquisition. The two theses Michelle wants to test: partnerships (design and ad agencies, growth consultants, the YC network, the big advertisers like Omnicom and WPP, and PE funds for digital transformation of their portfolio companies), and an ecosystem play, making Flint the brand and community marketers turn to for AI marketing. Those are more Q4 priorities. Around the same time, the role also stands up the sales systems — CRM, call tracking, client management — and, longer term, helps scale the sales team.
The job description leans on finance, but in practice it's a light, set-it-up-once slice of the role — call it ~5% of the job, not a finance-specialist seat. Concretely: keeping the books clean enough that the accountant's monthly questions ("what is this line item?") have good answers, invoice and billing hygiene, and contract management so renewals are clean. The real trick is getting the inputs right upfront — call it a week of heads-down setup — after which it should mostly run itself. We have an accountant for the actual accounting. And as Flint grows and functions specialize, a dedicated strategic-finance role (pricing, modeling, corp strategy) will likely split out from this one.
Yes. The role owns everything outside product and engineering, but you work closely with both — most of all through product ops: grooming Linear, running the beta program for new products (like our ads product), pulling customer feedback into a prioritized "problem stack," and making sure the most important thing actually ships. That connective tissue is sorely broken at Flint today, so standing it up is real, high-impact work. You won't own the roadmap, but you'll be one of its biggest inputs.
Not exactly — Flint is closer to product-led sales (think Retool) than pure PLG. A marketer can't unilaterally push hundreds of thousands of dollars of traffic onto a site; it needs domains set up on-brand, ad accounts connected, and often a pilot. So there's a real motion around product enablement and business/enterprise sales layered on top of self-serve, and pilots matter a lot when selling a marketing product. Signups get qualified on product usage and customer type, then routed to a sales motion or left to self-serve. Practically, the business team will likely end up about the same size as engineering — what we build and how we deploy it matter equally.
The pattern is zero-to-one, then hand off. You take a function from 0 to 1, then write the JD and hire someone to take it from 1 to n, then move to the next thing. Early on it may also involve recruiting. Several people who took the first business hire seat at other startups spent their first few months on recruiting before hiring a dedicated head.