ABOUT NOTO
Noto is the AI-native operating system for after-school businesses: tutoring centers, music schools, sports academies, and dance studios. About 360,000 of these businesses operate in the U.S., and millions of kids pass through them every week.
They’re run by people who are passionate about teaching but spend their evenings managing schedules, payroll, and parent emails, often in software built in 2011, or in spreadsheets and sticky notes.
Noto replaces the entire stack with a modern platform for scheduling, billing, payroll, marketing, CRM, communications, classroom management, and student and parent portals. We bring the whole back office into one place, with AI agents that automate manual work instead of simply tracking it.
A school that spends less time on paperwork can teach more kids, hire another teacher, and grow its business. Come help us build the best operating system for these small-business owners!
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TEAM
We’re a team of 20 in New York City. We value working with other smart, collaborative, ambitious, and kind people.
AJ Ding (CEO) — second-time founder who previously built an AI recruiting company. ML engineer and data scientist at Quora, Lyft, and Meta. Studied statistics at Yale and grew up in a family of small-business owners.
Steve Wang (CTO) — former Head of Engineering at Nitra, an a16z-backed vertical SaaS company for doctors. Previously worked in data science and engineering at Lyft. Studied math at Harvard.
We’ve raised $4M from Base10 Partners and South Park Commons, and are raising our Series A soon.
The CS Team
Today, five Customer Success Managers each own their customers end to end. They run kickoff, migrate data, configure the account, train staff, take go-live calls, answer support tickets and manage the account after launch. That model got us to 400+ customers, but it won't get us to 10,000. You will be the first leader of the entire post-sales process, and own this function end to end.
THE ROLE
As the Head of Customer Success, you'll design and build the team, and turn onboarding, success and support into three functions that each run well on their own and hand off cleanly to each other. You own how many customers go live, how fast they get there, whether they stay, and how well we support them along the way.
Building the team
- Grow the team from 5 to 10 people after the Series A. Design how Onboarding, Customer Success and Support are organized: the roles, the customer segments, how many accounts each person can carry, and the order in which we split things up.
- Evolve the team from generalist coverage into specialized roles without dropping any customer who is mid-onboarding.
- Hire, onboard and coach the team. Set clear expectations and give each function a real career path.
- Define the handoffs from Sales to Onboarding to Customer Success to Support, so a customer never has to explain their business twice.
Onboarding
- Tighten the path from signed contract to go-live: kickoff, data migration, configuration, training and launch.
- Shorten time to go-live with repeatable playbooks, migration templates and better import tooling for the systems customers are leaving.
- Decide what a successful go-live looks like.
Customer Success
- Stand up account management after launch, including segmentation, health scores, adoption plays and early warning on renewal risk.
- Own retention. Run save plays on at-risk accounts and work with Sales on expansion.
- Turn happy customers into references and case studies.
Support
- Build a dedicated support team with ticket triage, SLAs, a clear escalation path to Engineering, and coverage during the afternoons and evenings when our customers are busiest.
- Use AI and automation to take repetitive work off the team so people can spend their time on the conversations that matter.
Across the company
- Bring the customer's voice to Product and Engineering, with organized feedback and clear priorities.
- Build CS reporting and run the team on data.
- Be the final escalation point when a customer issue goes sideways.
YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS
For your first 90 days, you'll also carry a book of customers of your own so you learn the product and how our customers and the work firsthand.
1. First two weeks: Learn the product inside and out, and shadow customer calls. Start onboarding your own book of customers.
2. By day 30: Present your target org design and hiring plan and kick off recruiting.
3. By day 60: Finish onboarding your initial book of customers, and transition to a full-time management role.
4. By day 90: Run retention and upsell plays from health data, report on each function's metrics, and have your first hires signed.
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
- 6+ years in customer success, onboarding/implementation or support at a B2B SaaS company, including at least 3 years managing a team.
- You've built or rebuilt a CS function at a Seed to Series B startup.
- A track record of improving retention and time-to-value for SMB customers at high account volume.
- Hands-on comfort with technical onboarding: data migrations, product configuration and customer training.
- You build things that keep working as the team grows, like playbooks, dashboards and processes, and you still get on calls with customers.
- Clear, warm communication with small business owners who aren't technical.
- You already use AI and automation tools (Claude, Zapier and the like) to help a small team do more.
Nice to have
- Vertical SaaS experience, especially in education, enrichment, fitness or other appointment- and lesson-based businesses.
- Experience with payments or billing products.
- Familiarity with HubSpot, Pylon, Intercom or Linear.
HOW WE'LL MEASURE SUCCESS
- Onboarding: Time from signed to live, % of accounts live on schedule, onboarding CSAT
- Customer Success: Gross and net revenue retention, logo churn, product adoption, health score coverage
- Support: First response time, time to resolution, CSAT, % of tickets solved through self-serve
- Team: Accounts per specialist, hiring plan delivered, team retention
COMPENSATION AND LOGISTICS
- Base salary: $170,000–$210,000, depending on experience
- Bonus: annual target of 15–20% of base, tied to retention, go-live and support goals
- Equity: a meaningful stock option grant with 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff
- Location: our New York City office, in person 4 days a week
- Reports to: our CEO and co-founder
COMPANY CULTURE
- Serve the customer. Our users run small businesses. We sit in their schools, attend their industry conferences, and take support calls ourselves. We get ideas by listening to our customers’ problems.
- Low ego. We make decisions collaboratively. Nobody wins an argument through seniority, including the founders. Good ideas come from whoever is closest to the problem.
- Ownership. You’ll own a large, mission-critical part of the business. It’s intense, but rewarding. Customers will send thank-you gifts and sing your praises when save their week, and call for help on a Saturday if something goes wrong.
- Work ethic. Team members work 50–60-hour weeks. Some late nights and occasional weekends are expected. The role is about growth and impact. If you want to build something meaningful and grow quickly, let’s talk.
- Growth mindset. We attend industry conferences to connect with our users, learn, network, and push the boundaries of our craft.
INTERVIEW PROCESS
1. Intro call with the hiring manager.
2. A deep dive on a CS org you built or rebuilt.
3. Case exercise: given our current team structure, show us how you'd structure Onboarding, CS and Support over your first 30, 60 and 90 days.
4. Customer role-play: run part of an onboarding kickoff or a save call.
5. Meet the founders and the people you'll work with across the company.
WHY WORK WITH US
Our product makes a huge positive impact on business owners, educators, and their local communities. Watch our customer testimonial video at the bottom of our home page withnoto.com and see it for yourself.
If you’re passionate about helping small-business owners succeed and want to build a customer success organization that scales while delivering exceptional experiences, we’d love to meet you.
[app.ashbyhq.com]
Customer Success team builder event at The Great Big Game Show NYC
Requirements
Must-haves
We’re a team of 20 in New York City. We value working with other smart, collaborative, ambitious, and kind people.
AJ Ding (CEO) — second-time founder who previously built an AI recruiting company. ML engineer and data scientist at Quora, Lyft, and Meta. Studied statistics at Yale and grew up in a family of small-business owners.
Steve Wang (CTO) — former Head of Engineering at Nitra, an a16z-backed vertical SaaS company for doctors. Previously worked in data science and engineering at Lyft. Studied math at Harvard.
We’ve raised $4M from Base10 Partners and South Park Commons, and are raising our Series A soon.
Building the team
Evolve the team from generalist coverage into specialized roles without dropping any customer who is mid-onboarding.
Hire, onboard and coach the team. Set clear expectations and give each function a real career path.
Define the handoffs from Sales to Onboarding to Customer Success to Support, so a customer never has to explain their business twice.
Tighten the path from signed contract to go-live: kickoff, data migration, configuration, training and launch.
Shorten time to go-live with repeatable playbooks, migration templates and better import tooling for the systems customers are leaving.
Decide what a successful go-live looks like.
Customer Success
Stand up account management after launch, including segmentation, health scores, adoption plays and early warning on renewal risk.
Own retention. Run save plays on at-risk accounts and work with Sales on expansion.
Turn happy customers into references and case studies.
Build a dedicated support team with ticket triage, SLAs, a clear escalation path to Engineering, and coverage during the afternoons and evenings when our customers are busiest.
Use AI and automation to take repetitive work off the team so people can spend their time on the conversations that matter.
Across the company
Bring the customer's voice to Product and Engineering, with organized feedback and clear priorities.
Build CS reporting and run the team on data.
Nice-to-haves
Vertical SaaS experience, especially in education, enrichment, fitness or other appointment- and lesson-based businesses.
Experience with payments or billing products.
Familiarity with HubSpot, Pylon, Intercom or Linear.
Bonus: annual target of 15–20% of base, tied to retention, go-live and support goals
Application prep
Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.