Client context
The company had closed a $12M Series A nine months earlier and had crossed $4M ARR with a small but loyal mid-market customer base. NRR was sitting at 118%, which told us the product was sticky once people started using it. The problem was the top of the funnel. Inbound had carried them through the seed stage on the back of two founder-led content channels and a few well-placed Product Hunt launches, but those wells had run dry. The team had grown to 22 people, including three SDRs and a part-time agency running paid social, yet new logo acquisition had been flat for two consecutive quarters. The board had given the CEO a clear mandate at the last meeting: build a repeatable growth motion before the next raise, or the next raise gets harder. There was no dedicated growth leader on the team, and the VP of Marketing had left four months earlier.
The challenge
Two previous attempts to fill this role had not worked. The first was a senior growth marketer from a public B2B company who had run a 30-person team and a $4M monthly budget. He lasted seven months and never shipped a single test, because he kept waiting for headcount and tooling that a Series A company simply did not have. The second was a founder-turned-operator from a failed PLG startup who had the energy but no real evidence of moving a metric inside someone else's company. The CEO told us he was tired of resumes that read like a roadmap of brand names. He wanted someone who could open an analytics tool on day one, find the leak, and run the experiment themselves. The cost of getting this wrong a third time was not just six months of lost pipeline. It was a delayed Series B and a leadership team that would stop trusting the search process entirely.
Search strategy
We rebuilt the scorecard from the ground up using Topgrading principles. Instead of listing skills, we wrote five outcomes the hire needed to deliver in the first year, then defined the competencies and prior behaviors that would predict each one. Experimentation velocity was the headline competency, defined as the number of structured tests a candidate had personally designed and run inside the last 18 months. We mapped 84 companies in the B2B SaaS $5M to $50M ARR band, with a strong bias toward PLG and product-led sales hybrids where one growth leader had owned both acquisition and activation. From that map we approached 41 candidates directly. 18 took a first call, 11 went into a structured behavioural interview using the Topgrading career-history format, and 4 reached the final stage with the CEO and the lead investor. The shortlist of three landed eight days after kickoff. Every finalist had personally shipped at least 30 tests in the prior year and could speak to losing experiments as fluently as winning ones.
Result
The new Head of Growth started two weeks after offer. In the first 30 days she rebuilt the experimentation backlog, killed two paid channels that were burning money without producing pipeline, and rewrote the SDR sequence based on actual customer-call language she had pulled from Gong. By day 60 she had doubled the weekly test cadence from roughly two to five and brought a dormant content motion back online. By the end of her first full quarter, qualified pipeline was up 40% against the prior quarter and CAC payback had moved from 19 months to 14. The CEO told us the most useful thing she did was not any single tactic. It was forcing the founding team to stop guessing about the funnel and start reading it. She is still in the seat almost two years later and has since hired her own team of four.
“Valuable Recruitment understood exactly what we needed. They delivered a shortlist of candidates who had genuinely done it before, not just talked about it.”
Get a shortlist in under 10 days
Founder-led search. 3–6 scored and interviewed candidates. No junior recruiters, no handoffs.