Performance Marketing Lead — VerifyLocal
Location: New Haven / Milford, CT area. Hybrid, with periodic visits to merchant locations. Job type: Contract, approximately 25 hours per week, with a path to full-time Rate: $80 per hour, plus equity participation [see note below — confirm structure with counsel before posting]
The problem we're working on
A bubble tea shop in Milford spends $543 on a TikTok campaign. Two creators, three ZIP codes, nine days. The campaign reaches 134,000 unique people. Delivery holds steady the entire time — fourteen to nineteen thousand people a day, right through to the end. The platform's cost-per-thousand actually improves.
The register moves 3%, with a confidence band that crosses zero.
We know that because we connected the point-of-sale and measured it against the store's own baseline. Nobody else does this. Google reports clicks, Meta reports impressions, TikTok reports views — and none of them can tell a shop owner whether anyone walked in.
We built the instrument that can. We hold ten US provisional patents on the measurement and settlement methods, we have a live pilot in Connecticut with signed merchants, and our platform fee steps down when the result is weak.
Now we need someone who can make the campaigns actually work.
What you'd do
We pay local businesses to join the program, so you are not cold-selling. Merchants arrive already signed up and already instrumented. Your job starts there.
- Design the campaign strategy for each merchant — offer, audience, geography, daypart, budget shape. Different for a taqueria than for a nail salon, and figuring out how differs is the work.
- Direct the creative with our creator lead and the creators who film on site. You decide what a video needs to do; they make it.
- Run delivery across TikTok and Instagram. Set it up, watch it daily, and know the difference between a slow start and a campaign that has stopped working.
- Call the halt. When the register isn't moving, your job is to say so and stop the spend. Our fee falls when we do. That is the point.
- Turn every campaign into something the system can learn from. Each measured campaign is a labeled example — this creative, this offer, this neighborhood, this outcome. You are producing the training data for the product we are actually building.
- Use AI as a working tool, at expert level. You should already be building campaign strategy, creative direction, audience research, and analysis with AI as part of your daily practice — not experimenting with it. We are building an agent that will eventually propose campaigns for businesses that have no measurement of their own. You are the person it learns from, the person who catches it when it is confidently wrong, and the person who tells us what it still cannot do.
What we need you to have
Required:
- You have run paid social campaigns yourself — TikTok and/or Instagram — and can talk through audiences, budgets, dayparting, frequency, and how you read delivery data.
- You can tell a real signal from noise. You will look at transaction data against a baseline every day. If a 4% move on a Wednesday doesn't make you ask how many Wednesdays are in the comparison, this is the wrong role.
- You have worked across multiple clients or categories, not one brand.
- Expert-level, hands-on use of AI tools in real marketing work. Not "familiar with ChatGPT." We mean you have built prompts and workflows you rely on, you know where the output is reliable and where it quietly invents things, and you can explain what you changed after AI got it wrong. This is the one requirement we will test in the interview.
- You are within reach of the New Haven / Milford area and can visit merchant locations when a campaign needs it.
Helpful, not required:
- Local or small-business marketing, as opposed to national brand or enterprise demand gen
- Experience with creators, influencers, or freelance production
- Comfort with spreadsheets and data beyond an ad platform dashboard
- Experience building AI-assisted workflows, automations, or agents that other people then used
What this role is not: brand marketing, content calendars, or SEO. Not an agency account role. Not a job where success is measured in engagement.
On the contract structure: this is a genuine contractor engagement. You set your own hours and methods, you may keep other clients, and you invoice us. We are buying your judgment on a defined scope of campaigns, not your attendance.
Honest notes about the stage
We would rather tell you now than have you find out in month two.
We are pre-Series A. The company is a Delaware entity converting to a C-corporation, and a seed round is in progress but not closed. There are five of us. The product ships weekly and some of it breaks.
Our measurement protocol has been rewritten twice this month because we found problems with it — including one adjustment we published, then discovered was applied incorrectly, then withdrew. Finding those problems is the job working correctly. If that sounds alarming rather than reassuring, we are probably not a fit.
Terms and what you get
$80 per hour, contract, roughly 20 hours per week. We would rather pay a strong marketer well for focused time than stretch a full-time budget across someone less experienced. If the work goes well and the round closes, this converts to a full-time role.
Equity participation on top of the hourly rate. We are a Delaware entity converting to a C-corporation. The grant and its vesting are set out in writing at the point of engagement and issue on conversion — we will show you the terms before you commit, not after.
You own campaign strategy across every merchant we run, reporting directly to the founder. Nobody sits between you and the decisions.
Your work gets measured honestly. Nobody here will ask you to dress up a flat result, because our own fee falls when the number is weak. If you have spent your career defending engagement metrics you didn't believe in, this will be a relief.
To apply
Send a CV and a short answer to this:
We spent $543 across three ZIP codes, reached 134,000 people over nine days, and the register stopped moving after day four — while delivery stayed steady the whole time. What would you have done differently, and how would you have known whether it worked?
And tell us briefly how you would use AI to work on that problem — including where you would not trust it.
There is no single right answer to either. We are interested in how you think, and in what you ask before you answer.
[[email protected] or Indeed apply — confirm]
VerifyLocal is an equal opportunity employer.
Pay: $80.00 per hour
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Milford, CT 06461
