: Director Growth

Company: STAGE OTT

Location: Noida, STAGE HQ

Employment Type: Full-Time

Reports To: CEO

Team: 2–3 performance marketing executors + creative production coordination

Position Summary

STAGE is hiring a Director – Growth to own why the growth engine compounds — not to run the media plan. This is not a media buyer who optimizes CPI/CPM and reports numbers up; it's a judgment role that decides which audiences are worth acquiring, how creative gets made, and how much of STAGE's growth should come from paid spend versus an owned, organic moat. Day-to-day campaign execution (ad ops, bid management, reporting) reports into or is governed by this role; the mandate is the architecture of the growth engine and the economics behind every rupee it spends.

Why This Role Exists Now

- STAGE has scaled to 20M+ users largely through paid acquisition, but CAC is rising and there's no one accountable for whether the business is buying quality subscribers or cheap installs.
- Creative has been treated as "the agency's job" rather than a core growth lever — production velocity and testing rigor haven't kept pace with what CAC discipline at this scale requires.
- Organic and owned-channel growth (SEO, ASO, YouTube) is underbuilt relative to paid dependency — STAGE has no long-term moat that reduces reliance on media spend.
- Attribution and growth analytics are fragmented enough that budget reallocation decisions are made on partial data, not a trustworthy single source of truth.
- STAGE's plans to go global mean the growth model needs to be provable and repeatable now, before it's copy-pasted into new markets under time pressure.

Mandate This role owns five strategic questions for STAGE:

1. What does "quality" acquisition actually mean for STAGE, and how should the multi-crore monthly budget be allocated across channels to acquire subscribers who retain and pay — not just install?
2. How does STAGE build a defensible, compounding organic and owned-channel moat, so growth stops being a function that's permanently dependent on paid media?
3. How does creative become a growth lever STAGE owns and drives directly, rather than a deliverable it waits on from an agency?
4. How does STAGE's growth stack and attribution stay trustworthy and self-serve as the org scales across 15+ languages and, soon, into new geographies?
5. How does growth strategy directly extend STAGE's subscriber, revenue, and global expansion targets — never a spend function that reports numbers after the fact, but one that changes what Content and Product prioritize before the numbers move.

Key Responsibilities 1. Paid Acquisition & Unit Economics Architecture

- Own the entire paid acquisition funnel (Meta, Google, and emerging channels) and the multi-crore monthly budget against install, mandate, and subscription targets — with CAC discipline as a non-negotiable constraint, not an afterthought.
- Build and defend cohort-level CAC, LTV, and payback models by channel, region, and language; use them to reallocate budget away from cohorts that install cheap but never convert to paying, retained subscribers.
- Run a live "quality audience" definition — engagement, retention, recurring-payment behavior — and hold every channel and creative to it, not just CPI/CPM.
- Identify margin leaks (rising CAC, saturation, invalid traffic, attribution gaps) and act on them before they're visible in the monthly numbers.

2. Creative Strategy & Production Pipeline (Owned, Not Outsourced)





- Personally drive ad creative strategy and the promo production team's priorities — creative is the single biggest lever on CAC at STAGE's scale, and this role treats it that way.
- Build a high-velocity creative testing pipeline: structured hypotheses, statistically sound read-outs, fast kill/scale decisions — not "we tried a few variants and picked the winner."
- Use AI tools to accelerate ideation, variant generation, and performance prediction, and set the bar for how fast the creative pipeline should be able to move.
- Flag and fix the single point of failure in creative production (e.g., one person or one agency relationship the entire pipeline depends on) before it becomes a bottleneck.

3. Organic & Owned-Channel Growth Moat

- Build the long-term acquisition engine STAGE doesn't have yet: App Store, Play Store, YouTube, SEO, and content-led inbound — engineered to systematically reduce paid dependency over time, not run as a side project.
- Set and track organic share of total acquisition as an explicit target, and treat any quarter where it doesn't move as a problem to diagnose, not a footnote.
- Partner with Content to identify which regional trends and formats translate into inbound acquisition opportunities — this is a two-way feedback loop, not a one-off ask.

4. Growth Analytics & Attribution Infrastructure

- Own the growth measurement stack end-to-end (AppsFlyer, Metabase, GA4, Ads Manager) and be personally accountable for attribution being clean and trustworthy — no black-box spend that leadership has to take on faith.
- Build self-serve dashboards so Content, Product, and Leadership can see acquisition and retention performance without waiting on Growth to pull a report.
- Treat attribution and measurement gaps as a governance issue, not a technical inconvenience — a growth engine leadership can't audit is a growth engine leadership can't trust with more budget.

5. AI-Driven Growth Systems

- Build a clear point of view on where AI genuinely changes growth economics at STAGE (creative generation, targeting, spend optimization, predictive testing) versus where it's a distraction, and act on that distinction rather than adopting tools reflexively.
- Set the standard for an AI-first growth team — automation embraced as leverage, not resisted as a threat to headcount.

6. Team & Growth Culture

- Build and lead a team of performance marketing leads and creative/growth collaborators who think like owners of outcomes, not channel operators executing a playbook.
- Create a culture of rapid experimentation and intellectual honesty about what's actually working — including the discipline to kill a channel or creative direction that isn't, even if it's comfortable.
- Map key-person risk within the growth function (who holds the attribution logic, the agency relationships, the channel playbooks) and build documentation so growth strategy survives beyond any single hire.

7. Executive Partnership & Cross-Functional Influence

- Act as a strategic thought partner to the CEO, not just a budget executor — bring scenario models to decisions before they're made, not performance reports after.
- Challenge assumptions with data: rising Tier 2 CAC, a creative winning on CTR but losing on retention,



a language expansion that will break payback unless onboarding is fixed first.
- Drive alignment with Content, Product, and Engineering on growth priorities without direct authority over those teams — through data and credibility, not escalation.

First 60/90 Days Days 1–30: Diagnose current channel mix, CAC/LTV by cohort, creative production velocity, organic funnel share, and attribution health. Share a blunt growth health memo with the CEO covering where spend is inefficient and where the biggest quick wins sit.

Days 31–60: Propose a budget reallocation model grounded in quality-audience economics; redesign the creative production pipeline for testing velocity; identify the top 2–3 organic bets worth committing resources to.

Days 61–90: Lock a 12-month growth roadmap tied to subscriber and revenue targets, including scenario models for planned market/language expansion; establish a recurring growth review cadence with the CEO and leadership.

Requirements

Experience: 5–7+ years in performance marketing and digital growth, with a proven track record scaling consumer tech, content, or D2C brands.

Must have:

- A track record of owning multi-crore Meta/Google budgets with demonstrable CAC/LTV discipline — not just spend management
- Demonstrated ownership of ad creative strategy and production velocity, not briefing an agency and waiting for output
- Experience building organic/inbound channels (SEO, ASO, YouTube) as a real, funded priority — paid-only backgrounds won't fit
- Hands-on fluency with a modern growth stack (AppsFlyer, Metabase, GA4, Ads Manager or equivalents)
- Experience building and mentoring a performance marketing team, not just managing agency relationships

Preferred:

- OTT, D2C, content, or subscription consumer-tech background with unit-economics fluency
- Demonstrated use of AI tools for creative testing, targeting, or spend optimization
- Genuine interest in regional India; fluency in Haryanvi, Rajasthani, or Bhojpuri is a plus, not required

Not a Fit If You

- Optimize for CPI/CPM without connecting acquisition quality to retention and LTV
- See creative as the agency's job rather than a lever you personally drive
- Have never owned organic channels (SEO/ASO/YouTube) — paid-only experience isn't sufficient here
- Chase install volume over subscriber quality
- Want a steady-state channel to manage rather than a growth engine to build from the ground up

Success Looks Like (Year 1)

- A live CAC/LTV cohort model that directly drives budget reallocation decisions, not a static report
- Organic/owned-channel share of total acquisition measurably increased, with a repeatable playbook behind it
- Creative testing velocity and win-rate both improved, with attribution clean enough that leadership trusts the numbers without caveats
- A growth scenario model in place and used ahead of at least one major decision (market launch, pricing change, or language expansion)
- A performance marketing team that operates with less hands-on management, because the systems and standards are in place

Why STAGE?

- Shape Culture: Building more than an OTT — preserving and celebrating India's cultural identities through entertainment in regional context.
- Build a Legacy: A career-defining prospect to build STAGE's retention engine from the ground up and prove regional-language subscribers can be among the most loyal in the country.
- Extreme Ownership: Own your function end-to-end, with the autonomy to succeed.
- Unmatched Growth: Ground floor of a high-growth startup, scaling with the company.

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