By Ryan Wightman, Generalist and Marketing Stream Lead at Jumpstart. Updated September 2026.Performance marketers at agencies tell me the same thing in different words: I run the campaigns, someone else owns the outcome. You optimise CPA on a client account, the client's head of growth takes the number to the board, and next quarter the budget goes to a different agency anyway.
Startups flip that. At seed or Series A you are the growth team. You pick the channels, you own the budget, and when CAC drops it's your win in the Monday update. This page is about those roles: what they look like at London startups, what they pay, and what founders are looking for when they hire their first performance marketer.
What the job looks like at a startup
The title might be growth manager, performance marketing manager, growth marketing lead or, at the earliest stage, founder's associate with a growth remit. The work is consistent:
- You own paid acquisition end to end. Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, whatever the audience actually lives on. Budget, creative brief, landing pages, tracking, reporting.
- You run experiments and kill the ones that don't work. At Memrise the brief was explicit: own growth experiments across acquisition and retention, work with product on onboarding and lifecycle, and report on what moves the numbers.
- You build the measurement. There's rarely a data team. You set up the attribution, decide what counts as a conversion, and defend the numbers when the founder asks why CAC went up.
- You work across brand and performance. At CO2YOU the senior marketing manager owns marketing end to end across DTC and B2B, in a profitable bootstrapped team of eight.
Roles like this we've filled
What it pays
Growth and performance roles through my stream pay £35k to £65k. Where you land in that range comes down to whether you've owned a meaningful budget or a growth number, and the stage of the company. The bootstrapped and later-stage companies (Memrise at Series B, CO2YOU profitable) tend to pay at the top of the range. Pre-seed pays less and gives more scope.
Founders will ask what budget you've managed. Have the number ready and be honest about how much of it you controlled versus executed.
What founders actually want
I've sat in on enough of these hires to know what gets someone through. In rough order of importance:
- You can read a cohort chart without help. Memrise put that line in the brief and every growth founder I've spoken to since has nodded at it.
- You've owned a number, even a small one. "Grew paid signups 40% on a £15k monthly budget" beats "managed campaigns for six clients".
- You can make creative happen without an agency. You don't have to be a designer, but you need to brief one well, or be comfortable shooting a rough TikTok yourself. Adamo's brief for their content creator said "can shoot and edit video solo" for a reason.
- You're fluent in CAC, LTV and payback. Not the definitions, the trade-offs.
- You're comfortable being the whole marketing function for a while.
Want to see which growth roles are live this month? Book a 15-minute call. If the Marketing stream fits, you're on the platform within 24 hours.
Book a marketing call →How to position yourself
Lead your CV with outcomes and budgets, not platforms. Founders don't care that you're Google Ads certified; they care that you took a channel from nothing to profitable. If you're at an agency, pick the two client accounts where you had the most control and write those up as case studies.
Then think about which startup stage suits you. Seed means you'll set up everything from the pixel to the reporting, and you'll do brand and content too. Series A and B means there's a growth budget already and a founder who wants it spent better. If you've never built tracking from scratch, Series A is the safer first move.
On Jumpstart you record a 60-second video pitch within 24 hours of joining. For a marketer this is your audition: it's a creative brief with a deadline, an audience and a single message. Make it good. Founders watch these before they read anything else.
How the process works
Book a 15-minute call with me. If the Marketing stream fits, you're on the platform with a profile and a video pitch within 24 hours. Founders pitch their roles to you on video, you apply to the ones you like, and 80% of candidates who hit the 24-hour window land a role in four to six weeks. Free for candidates. Jumpstart can't support visa sponsorship or candidates in full-time study.