Performance Marketing Lead (NYC- Area Only- Hybrid)
Performance Marketing Lead @ Trove — Collectibles
Target Comp: $165,000 - $200,000 (+ equity)
NYC Area Only: 3 days a week in office (Union Square)
No Visa/Sponsorship
Relo available for the RIGHT candidate
Trove is a trading card collectibles app where users rip packs online and get the real graded cards shipped to their door (or sell back to inventory through a transparent, time-decaying buyback flow: 100% FMV for the first 2 minutes, 90% for the next 24 hours, then 80% indefinitely). Live on iOS and web since late March 2026. All major sports, Pokémon, One Piece. PSA-verified, transparent odds, provably fair — no hidden fees, no forced sellbacks. Partnerships in motion with the World Cup, Wrexham Soccer Club, and the Chicago Cubs. Founded by the Katz brothers — Michael Katz (CEO) and Andrew Katz (CTO) — and Micah Gantman. This is the Katz brothers' third company together. Michael founded Interclick, took it public in 2009, and sold it to Yahoo for $270M in 2011. He and Andrew then co-founded mParticle (customer data platform, raised $120M+ from Greylock, Google Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Social Capital, and Eniac; customers include Airbnb, Spotify, Postmates).
Michael's investor network is unusually deep, including operator-investors like Nas. The team that built the first two companies is reunited at Trove. The company hired its first employee in December 2025 and launched its product in late March 2026. Distribution so far has been entirely organic plus a small set of influencer placements in the card-breaking space — no paid acquisition. The company is targeting a 30-person ceiling: low dilution, deliberate scarcity, and seed-stage equity at a team with a track record of nine-figure outcomes.
About this role:
Trove is hiring its Head of Paid Ads — the company's first dedicated performance marketing / user acquisition hire. Note that "Head of" here is a slice-of-the-business framing, not a manager-of-a-team framing. This person owns paid acquisition end-to-end and reports directly to the CEO; they will have the Growth Engineer hire as a direct counterpart for tooling and instrumentation.
The mandate is clean: build the acquisition engine that brings Trove its next 100,000+ collectors, at a CAC and payback the business can fund and repeat. Trove has done zero paid acquisition so far — all growth has been organic + influencer placements in the card-breaking community. This role builds the entire paid engine from zero: channels, creative testing machine, attribution, UA dashboards, and the experimentation cadence.
The bar is hands-on operator, not strategist-who-briefs-agency. A moderate amount of agency time is fine if it's earlier-career; too much agency time is a hard concern for the CEO. The person here lives inside the ad accounts.
What You'll Own
Build the acquisition engine from zero — paid Meta and Google as the foundation, plus fluency across additional channels (TikTok, YouTube, programmatic, influencer-paid amplification)
Own CAC, ROAS, LTV, and payback math — defend every number, dig into the data autonomously (SQL or equivalent), and tie spend to dollars in
Build the creative testing engine — velocity, volume, and quality of creative variations is the lever Trove will compete on. Ship variations, kill or scale based on data
Stand up clean attribution and UA dashboards the rest of the team trusts Make paid a predictable, compounding acquisition channel — the goal is a machine, not heroics
Partner directly with the Growth Engineer on tooling, automations, and instrumentation
Core Principles
Spend is a hypothesis. Every dollar carries a number and a question attached
Creative is the lever. Win on volume, velocity, and quality of creative
Measure honestly. If we can't trust the number, we don't scale on it
Automate the busywork. Build the machine, then spend time on things only a human can do
Experimentation never ends. The team that learns fastest wins
Requirements
7+ years of hands-on performance UA for a B2C product
Owns the CAC / ROAS / LTV math and can defend every number
Deep in Meta or Google, fluent across several channels
SQL or equivalent — dives into data autonomously, doesn't wait for a BI team
AI-native daily workflow — Trove has a company-wide expectation that every hire is using Claude, Cursor, and modern AI tooling to 10x themselves. Performance marketers must show how they're using AI for creative production, audience research, copy testing, and reporting
Profile
A builder from zero — has stood up a paid engine inside a company that didn't have one. No existing growth machine to plug into, no agency to hide behind
Has scaled paid acquisition for an early-stage consumer product (not enterprise SaaS, not B2B) — the work, the metrics, and the buyer psychology all transfer
Has worked at an early-stage company (seed through Series C) — Lori was explicit that pure FAANG / pure big-enterprise backgrounds don't translate to the environment
Direct, transparent communication style
High agency, no hand-holding
Location and Visa
In person 3 days/week at the Union Square office (no rigid days; expected to be accessible and present)
US-based — relocation up to $20K offered for the right candidate
No visa sponsorship at this stage
Nice-to-Have
Personal collection — cards, sneakers, watches, comics, or any high-emotion collectibles category
Heavy sports fan (NFL / NBA / MLB / Premier League / soccer)
Experience with influencer-paid campaigns or content-driven UA (TikTok / YouTube creator amplification)
Has owned UA for a marketplace or pack-based / limited-drops product
Has worked alongside a Growth Engineer or built tight engineering-marketing collaboration in the past
Has built an attribution stack from scratch (Singular, Adjust, Appsflyer, in-house attribution)
Public writing, talks, or playbooks on consumer UA at scale
Who Will Thrive Here
Genuinely loves the collectibles / sports / gaming space and wants to bring it 100K+ new collectors
Has been waiting for a founding-team-style UA seat at a consumer company
Cracked with AI tooling — has been using Claude / Cursor / GPT-class tools to 10x themselves on creative production and reporting
Energized by direct, in-person, fast-cadence culture. Comfortable with transparent feedback in the open
Wants to own the entire paid engine — channels, creative, attribution, instrumentation — without an agency or a manager between them and the work