Lead of Growth and Analytics (Mobile apps)

Applause is a profitable, well-capitalized operator of consumer subscription apps across privacy, security, health, productivity, and accessibility. The model is simple: acquire high-retention, category-leading apps and scale them. 

The apps already have top 1% retention, strong brands, and high organic traffic, so paid growth compounds on proven products instead of propping up weak ones. There is real budget behind growth that works.

Area of influence

• You set up the growth function from scratch and own it end-to-end — the campaign infrastructure, the measurement layer, the reporting, and the playbooks that make paid growth repeatable across many apps. This is a builder-operator role: you're expected to build the systems, not just run the accounts.
• Stand up the measurement and reporting backbone yourself: pipelines from network and MMP APIs, internal dashboards, and budget/creative automations. Comfort in SQL and Python (or equivalent) to build this rather than wait on a data team is a core part of the job.
• Build and own trustworthy attribution across a multi-app portfolio: layered MMP-based setup with S2S/CAPI and event deduplication, probabilistic and network-native models (Meta AEM, TikTok Attribution Flex), with SKAN as one input among several — reconciled against your own backend numbers so the payback math holds up.
• Plan, launch, and optimize paid UA hands-on across Apple Search Ads, Google, Meta, TikTok, and paid web — owning budgets, bids, audiences, and creative testing against payback and CAC targets per app.
• Build and pressure-test your own cohorted LTV and payback models rather than trusting platform-reported ROAS — and use that predicted-LTV number as the gauge for budget and profitability decisions across every app.
• Drive organic acquisition in parallel with paid — ASO, store-listing conversion, and web-to-app / web-to-web flows — so the top of the funnel grows through every lever, not just paid spend.
• Generate the experiment roadmap independently: bring your own ideas for new channels, creative angles, and tests, size them by expected payback, and run them without waiting for a task list.
• Own secondary paywall and funnel optimization, and coordinate lifecycle (email/push) support — partnering with the lifecycle and analytics hires so monetization and retention keep pace with the traffic you drive.
• Report results, learnings, and forecasts to the CEO weekly, and brief app GMs on what's working, what isn't, and what you need from them to scale. Flat structure, direct communication, fast decisions.

Who are we looking for

• Has personally deployed meaningful paid spend at a consumer subscription company (on the order of $10M+/year, or smaller budgets run with real rigor), with direct ownership of the numbers and outcomes.
• Genuinely technical: builds their own reporting, attribution, and automation in SQL/Python — not just an operator of dashboards someone else maintains. Has stood up API pipelines and rules-based ad-management automations before.
• Deep, hands-on fluency with the modern app-growth stack — an MMP (AppsFlyer, Adjust, or Singular), a product-analytics tool (Amplitude/Mixpanel), paywall/funnel tooling, and lifecycle (Customer.io or similar) — or has built the equivalent in-house, with strong, specific opinions on which tools to use and why.
• Modern about measurement: comfortable with probabilistic and network-native attribution, SKAN-aware, and runs real incrementality checks. Builds and pressure-tests LTV and payback models rather than taking platform ROAS at face value.
• Has operated across multiple apps or product lines at once and can context-switch across a broad portfolio (three to seven-plus apps) without letting performance slip.
• Thinks in unit economics and profitability thresholds, works well in a flat, communicative team, and is proactive — brings the roadmap rather than waiting for one.

Team & Background

A genuine player-coach: expected to execute campaigns directly today, with a clear path to hire and lead a small growth team as the portfolio scales.

Knows exactly what to keep in-house versus outsource, and can name the first few hires and vendors they would line up for each function.

Background skews scrappy and operator-heavy rather than corporate: founders, early-stage operators, and people who have built a growth function from zero