Job description

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: maximize the potential of every child, everywhere. We're building the world's first AI teacher to close that gap: one that listens, speaks, adapts, and inspires, just like the best human educators. Our first product, Read with Ello, is already helping tens of thousands of kids each week learn to read. It listens as they read aloud, offers support when they stumble, and generates magical, personalized stories. It works, and kids love it. Now, we're scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher that can help children learn far beyond reading. Our new app combines language, speech, and memory to deliver interactive learning for kids worldwide; check it out here ello.com. We're moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids, and push the boundaries of what's possible with AI in education. With the resources of the world's top investors and the heart of a public benefit corporation, we're here to revolutionize how children learn globally. Featured on TIME's Best Inventions and Fortune's Change the World, Ello is a small, mission-driven team taking on one of the most important challenges of our time: to democratize education. ABOUT THE ROLE Kids love Ello and parents trust it. The next thing to build is the business that carries it to every child who needs it; this role is for that challenge. You'll own everything to do with how Ello makes money: what's free and what's paid, how we price and package, the paywall, trial conversion, renewals, dunning, cancellation, and winback. You'll build the monetization plan with our Head of Growth and CEO. Two things make this different from monetizing a typical consumer app. We're a public benefit corporation, and we've committed publicly to a free, excellent experience for every family. That's a promise we intend to keep, so the teaching itself will never sit behind a paywall. You're also selling to two people at once: the child who does the lesson, and the parent who watches them do it and decides whether to pay. Both have to feel the value, at different moments and for different reasons. The best version of this business feeds the mission directly. The more families choose to pay, the more children we can teach for free, including every child using Ello in Kenya today. That's what we want you to build. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own pricing and packaging: what sits in the free experience, what a subscription includes, and what it costs - Own the paywall and checkout, from placement and timing through design and copy, and run the experiment program that improves them - Own everything after the first payment: trial conversion, renewals, failed payments and dunning, cancellation saves, and winback - Build the monetization model that feeds our revenue forecast - Build the monetization reporting we don't have yet, with our data team. Cohorted LTV, ARPU, payback, and retention curves good enough to make decisions on. - Work with lifecycle marketing on the emails and messages that drive conversion and retention, and with engineering and design on what ships in the app - Use AI to do the work of a much bigger team, and grow into hiring and leading the monetization team that follows KEY REQUIREMENTS - You've owned consumer subscription revenue on mobile, on both iOS and Android. For most people that means six or more years as a product manager, though we care about what you've done more than the years. - You've run paywall and pricing experiments yourself, and can give us the before and after numbers on a few of them, along with what you got wrong - You can build the subscription model yourself and know what moves it: LTV, ARPU, trial-to-paid, involuntary churn, payback period - You pull your own data. SQL or equivalent, well enough to define a metric, build a funnel and check a result without waiting for anyone. - You know your way around app store billing well enough to write the spec, including StoreKit and Play Billing, receipt validation, and subscription state - You use AI seriously in your own work, hands-on rather than overseeing other people doing it, and can be specific about what's changed in the last six months - You've built agreement across departments before. Pricing touches product, marketing, finance and support, and everyone will have a strong opinion. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with kids' or family products, or another category where the person paying isn't the person using it - Experience monetizing something people have to trust, whether that's a children's product under privacy rules, health, or finance, where a pushy paywall costs you more than it earns - Experience with a product where most users never pay, and that's by design - Experience with in-product growth mechanics: nudges, rewards, cross-sell, referral, and lifecycle automation - You've built at our stage and can see past it. We're planning to grow very fast from here, so the ideal person has worked somewhere between roughly $1M and $10M in revenue where nothing was settled yet, and has also seen what breaks at ten times that. - You've run a small team, or you're ready to WE LOOK FOR CANDIDATES WHO - Want this to be the most important thing they've worked on. We're trying to give every child a teacher of their own, and the rest of this job only matters because of that. - Get inside the user's head. That's a child learning to read and a parent hoping it's working, and we want someone who talks to them often, including the parents who didn't subscribe and the ones who cancelled. - Are rigorous. They design tests that actually settle a question, and change their mind when the result says they were wrong, without mistaking endless analysis for progress. - Have real product design sense. They're not designers, but they can sketch a paywall flow themselves and give a designer feedback more useful than "this doesn't feel right." - Want to move fast. We ship weekly, and the people who like it here would rather put something in front of a real parent this week than get it perfect next month. REASONS TO JOIN US - Shape the business model while it's still being decided, working directly with the founders. This is new ground at Ello, so you won't be picking up someone else's decisions. - Work at the front of what AI can currently do. The technology underneath Ello is hard: we built and patented our own speech recognition because nothing off the shelf could understand a six-year-old, and the teaching agent works out what a particular child needs next in under a second. We're AI-native in how we run the company too, so how you work here will keep changing as fast as what we ship. - Ello is free across the developing world, and it's fully funded. It isn't a pilot or a line in a press release, and it's a big part of why people here joined. Very few companies get to build a real business and give the same product away to the children who need it most. ABOUT ELLO Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. We're currently around ~50 people, headquartered in San Francisco with a second office in Nairobi, Kenya. Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, K-12 education, and child development across institutions such as Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, and more. We were part of Y Combinator's W20 batch and are funded by world-class investors including Goodwater Capital, Homebrew, Reed Hastings, Common Sense Growth, Ravensburger, Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, WndrCo, Visible Ventures, and K9 Ventures. We're a small, collaborative team that takes each other's voices very seriously. Because our mission is to support all children, it is critical that our team is representative of the communities we work in; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture. If you have questions about immigration, reach out to us at recruiting@ello.com. We feel enormously privileged to be building at this moment. Advances in AI have made it possible, for the first time, to imagine giving every child a truly personalized teacher. We don't take that opportunity for granted. We work with urgency because millions of children can't wait. We care deeply about craftsmanship because learning experiences should feel magical. And we believe it's possible to build ambitious technology while building a company where people do the best work of their careers. If that excites you, we'd love to meet you. At Ello, diversity is a moral imperative and a competitive advantage. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, skin color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to assess skills and experience directly. If you need accommodations throughout the interview process, please contact recruiting@ello.com.

Requirements

Must-haves

Kids love Ello and parents trust it. The next thing to build is the business that carries it to every child who needs it; this role is for that challenge.
The best version of this business feeds the mission directly. The more families choose to pay, the more children we can teach for free, including every child using Ello in Kenya today. That's what we want you to build.
Own pricing and packaging: what sits in the free experience, what a subscription includes, and what it costs
Own the paywall and checkout, from placement and timing through design and copy, and run the experiment program that improves them
Own everything after the first payment: trial conversion, renewals, failed payments and dunning, cancellation saves, and winback
Build the monetization model that feeds our revenue forecast
Build the monetization reporting we don't have yet, with our data team. Cohorted LTV, ARPU, payback, and retention curves good enough to make decisions on.
Work with lifecycle marketing on the emails and messages that drive conversion and retention, and with engineering and design on what ships in the app
Use AI to do the work of a much bigger team, and grow into hiring and leading the monetization team that follows
You've owned consumer subscription revenue on mobile, on both iOS and Android. For most people that means six or more years as a product manager, though we care about what you've done more than the years.
You've run paywall and pricing experiments yourself, and can give us the before and after numbers on a few of them, along with what you got wrong
You can build the subscription model yourself and know what moves it: LTV, ARPU, trial-to-paid, involuntary churn, payback period
You pull your own data. SQL or equivalent, well enough to define a metric, build a funnel and check a result without waiting for anyone.
You know your way around app store billing well enough to write the spec, including StoreKit and Play Billing, receipt validation, and subscription state
You use AI seriously in your own work, hands-on rather than overseeing other people doing it, and can be specific about what's changed in the last six months
You've built agreement across departments before. Pricing touches product, marketing, finance and support, and everyone will have a strong opinion.
Want this to be the most important thing they've worked on. We're trying to give every child a teacher of their own, and the rest of this job only matters because of that.
Get inside the user's head. That's a child learning to read and a parent hoping it's working, and we want someone who talks to them often, including the parents who didn't subscribe and the ones who cancelled.
Are rigorous. They design tests that actually settle a question, and change their mind when the result says they were wrong, without mistaking endless analysis for progress.

Nice-to-haves

Experience with kids' or family products, or another category where the person paying isn't the person using it
Experience monetizing something people have to trust, whether that's a children's product under privacy rules, health, or finance, where a pushy paywall costs you more than it earns
Experience with a product where most users never pay, and that's by design
Experience with in-product growth mechanics: nudges, rewards, cross-sell, referral, and lifecycle automation
You've run a small team, or you're ready to

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

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