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The Director of Brand & Content will architect the brand's identity and voice at Product.ai, overseeing brand strategies, content direction, and recruiting narratives, while collaborating directly with the CEO to establish a cohesive branding framework.
I'm Michael, founder and CEO of Product.ai. I've been building commerce technology for 16 years - profitable, bootstrapped, 100% owner. No board. No outside investors. No one telling us what to ship.
We're building the truth engine for shopping. Every AI tool summarizes polluted data and calls it an answer. We verify.
I'm hiring a Director of Brand & Content - a peer, not an apprentice. Someone who arrived having already owned brand at a real company, who brings opinionated craft into the room, and who has explicit permission to push back on me. The brand we have to build is bigger than I can hold alone. I need a co-author, not a ghostwriter.
Why I Need This PersonProduct.ai is at the inflection where the mission needs a brand architecture that survives beyond me. Right now the brand IS me - my voice, my LinkedIn, my publishing rhythm. That doesn't scale to where we're going.
I need someone who has done this before. Built a brand function from scratch, or owned one through a major reposition. Someone who brings their own taste, their own track record of saying no to the CEO and being right. Not a voice competitor - I'll still write the canonical mid-form pieces. But the brand system, the institutional voice, the recruiting brand, the dual-brand architecture between Product.ai and SimplyCodes - those need a co-architect with peer authority.
If you're the operator who owned brand at a fast-growing company through a category-creation moment, who's tired of being the senior IC who can't get the decisions made, who wants direct CEO access and the authority to build the brand the way it should be built - that's who I'm looking for.
The System You'll Need to Model
What You Will OwnBrand architecture. The brand operating system that the next 30 hires inherit. Verbal identity, narrative architecture, the dual-brand decision tree. Sole authority - you don't reconcile across three other VPs, you decide.
The institutional voice. Product.ai company-page, SimplyCodes company-page, the recruiting-brand voice, the partnership voice. Distinct from my personal voice and explicitly designed not to compete with it. You build the system that lets us speak as a company without diluting how we speak as me.
Editorial direction. Final say on what we publish, where, when, in what voice. Pushback authority on me when my draft is wrong for the surface. This is the partnership posture - not apprentice, not deferential.
The recruiting magnet. The Frontier Operator Codex, the 49 trial projects, the discipline pages. These need editorial leadership that turns them into operators applying. You own that conversion arc.
The team you grow into. First hire under you is a Founding Voice & Distribution Lead (or you absorb that scope yourself, depending on what shape you arrive in). Second hire is a visual / video producer. You design the org as you go.
Who You AreHow you think. You think in systems and ship in artifacts. Brand is architecture, not decoration - every visual choice and verbal choice is load-bearing or it's noise. You reason from first principles about how trust compounds, and you've earned the right to push back on founders without being defensive about it.
How you work. You operate at strategy altitude and execution altitude in the same day. You can write the brand brief and the LinkedIn post and the JD with the same voice signature. You've rebuilt your own production process around AI in the last 18 months - not as a story to tell investors, but because it's how you now ship 3x what you used to.
What you've probably built. A brand function at a company you joined as the first or second brand hire - through a reposition, through a category creation, through a Series A-to-C arc. The proof is the artifacts: brand systems still in use, narrative architectures still cited, hires still attributing their decision to your content. Your track record includes saying no to a CEO and being right about it. We care about what you built, not which logo was on the door.
Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if you want to manage a team of 12 before you ship a piece - we're 16 people total, you'll be hands-on for at least 18 months. It's wrong if you mainly optimize for working at a logo brand - we're a 16-year-old company most people in your network haven't heard of. It's wrong if you don't actually want to write - half the job is writing, in your voice and in the institutional voice. You'll be happiest here if you've been waiting for the role where you get sole brand authority, direct CEO access, real economic upside, and the chance to build something whose verbal identity outlives you.
How We EvaluateWe don't run traditional marketing interviews.
Compensation & OwnershipTotal first-year comp: $350,000 - $450,000 (base + equity + profit sharing).
Base: $185,000 - $225,000. Top of market for Director-tier brand in a profitable, bootstrapped commerce-tech company.
Equity: Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at $0 strike price. Actual ownership from day one. Capital Gains tax treatment. 1.5-2.0% range based on calibration.
Profit sharing: Annual pro-rata share of free cash flow. Real cash every year, not a promise tied to an exit.
Liquidity: Annual tender offer - the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO.
Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family. Unlimited PTO that we actually use.
This is a partnership structure. When the company wins, you win - in real, liquid dollars, every year.
Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid, with strong preference for in-person. Brand work compounds when the architect is in the room.
Applyproduct.ai/join/director-of-brand-and-content
Include your strongest published piece OR brand memo with your application. One piece, not a portfolio. In three sentences, tell me why this is the piece you sent and what it taught you about how brand actually compounds.
We're building the truth engine for shopping. Every AI tool summarizes polluted data and calls it an answer. We verify.
I'm hiring a Director of Brand & Content - a peer, not an apprentice. Someone who arrived having already owned brand at a real company, who brings opinionated craft into the room, and who has explicit permission to push back on me. The brand we have to build is bigger than I can hold alone. I need a co-author, not a ghostwriter.
Why I Need This PersonProduct.ai is at the inflection where the mission needs a brand architecture that survives beyond me. Right now the brand IS me - my voice, my LinkedIn, my publishing rhythm. That doesn't scale to where we're going.
I need someone who has done this before. Built a brand function from scratch, or owned one through a major reposition. Someone who brings their own taste, their own track record of saying no to the CEO and being right. Not a voice competitor - I'll still write the canonical mid-form pieces. But the brand system, the institutional voice, the recruiting brand, the dual-brand architecture between Product.ai and SimplyCodes - those need a co-architect with peer authority.
If you're the operator who owned brand at a fast-growing company through a category-creation moment, who's tired of being the senior IC who can't get the decisions made, who wants direct CEO access and the authority to build the brand the way it should be built - that's who I'm looking for.
The System You'll Need to Model
- A dual-brand architecture. Product.ai (truth engine, intelligence-led) and SimplyCodes (coupon engine, revenue base). Different audiences, shared intelligence, one company. The decision tree for any co-brand call lives in your head, then on the wall.
- A founder voice that has to remain mine. I write the canonical thinking. You build the institutional voice that lives around it - the company-page voice, the recruiting voice, the partnership voice. You define the boundary cleanly so neither voice cannibalizes the other.
- An AI-era citation landscape. 85% of the citations that matter now happen off our domain - Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, GitHub, G2, Trustpilot. AEO is mostly a mislabeled PR + community function. You bring the strategic frame for how a brand earns citations in this landscape, then orchestrate the surface coverage.
- A recruiting brand that has to magnetize 10x operators. We've built the substrate - the Frontier Operator Codex, 49 trial projects, six discipline pages at product.ai/join/. You own the editorial layer: JD voice, candidate-page narrative, the magnet content stream that pulls the operators we can't find through job boards.
- A 16-person company that has to execute like 160. The brand has to do load-bearing work for talent, partnerships, press, customers, and AI agents simultaneously. Centralization is the rule; sprawl is the failure mode.
What You Will OwnBrand architecture. The brand operating system that the next 30 hires inherit. Verbal identity, narrative architecture, the dual-brand decision tree. Sole authority - you don't reconcile across three other VPs, you decide.
The institutional voice. Product.ai company-page, SimplyCodes company-page, the recruiting-brand voice, the partnership voice. Distinct from my personal voice and explicitly designed not to compete with it. You build the system that lets us speak as a company without diluting how we speak as me.
Editorial direction. Final say on what we publish, where, when, in what voice. Pushback authority on me when my draft is wrong for the surface. This is the partnership posture - not apprentice, not deferential.
The recruiting magnet. The Frontier Operator Codex, the 49 trial projects, the discipline pages. These need editorial leadership that turns them into operators applying. You own that conversion arc.
The team you grow into. First hire under you is a Founding Voice & Distribution Lead (or you absorb that scope yourself, depending on what shape you arrive in). Second hire is a visual / video producer. You design the org as you go.
Who You AreHow you think. You think in systems and ship in artifacts. Brand is architecture, not decoration - every visual choice and verbal choice is load-bearing or it's noise. You reason from first principles about how trust compounds, and you've earned the right to push back on founders without being defensive about it.
How you work. You operate at strategy altitude and execution altitude in the same day. You can write the brand brief and the LinkedIn post and the JD with the same voice signature. You've rebuilt your own production process around AI in the last 18 months - not as a story to tell investors, but because it's how you now ship 3x what you used to.
What you've probably built. A brand function at a company you joined as the first or second brand hire - through a reposition, through a category creation, through a Series A-to-C arc. The proof is the artifacts: brand systems still in use, narrative architectures still cited, hires still attributing their decision to your content. Your track record includes saying no to a CEO and being right about it. We care about what you built, not which logo was on the door.
Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if you want to manage a team of 12 before you ship a piece - we're 16 people total, you'll be hands-on for at least 18 months. It's wrong if you mainly optimize for working at a logo brand - we're a 16-year-old company most people in your network haven't heard of. It's wrong if you don't actually want to write - half the job is writing, in your voice and in the institutional voice. You'll be happiest here if you've been waiting for the role where you get sole brand authority, direct CEO access, real economic upside, and the chance to build something whose verbal identity outlives you.
How We EvaluateWe don't run traditional marketing interviews.
- Written artifact. Send your strongest piece - one published essay, brand memo, positioning doc, or launch narrative. Whatever you'd want me to read first if you only had one shot.
- Video screen. Short, async. How you think about brand architecture, the dual-brand problem, and what makes institutional voice earn trust in the AI era.
- Conversation with me. Chemistry. Peer fit. Can I see you pushing back on me? Can I see us co-authoring the brand?
- Paid trial - pick one project, ~2-3 weeks at $4-6K/week. Three options, your call:
- Brand Operating System for Verified-Truth Commerce. Build the OS a stranger could pick up and predict 8 of 10 of my brand calls cold.
- Founder × Institution Brand Integration Architecture. Define the boundary; build the Founder-Voice Citation Rate measurement protocol.
- Two-Domain Brand Architecture (SimplyCodes ↔ Product.ai). The decision tree the team uses for any co-brand call.
Compensation & OwnershipTotal first-year comp: $350,000 - $450,000 (base + equity + profit sharing).
Base: $185,000 - $225,000. Top of market for Director-tier brand in a profitable, bootstrapped commerce-tech company.
Equity: Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at $0 strike price. Actual ownership from day one. Capital Gains tax treatment. 1.5-2.0% range based on calibration.
Profit sharing: Annual pro-rata share of free cash flow. Real cash every year, not a promise tied to an exit.
Liquidity: Annual tender offer - the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO.
Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family. Unlimited PTO that we actually use.
This is a partnership structure. When the company wins, you win - in real, liquid dollars, every year.
Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid, with strong preference for in-person. Brand work compounds when the architect is in the room.
Applyproduct.ai/join/director-of-brand-and-content
Include your strongest published piece OR brand memo with your application. One piece, not a portfolio. In three sentences, tell me why this is the piece you sent and what it taught you about how brand actually compounds.
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