Chief Executive Officer, Huddle - Palm Venture Studios

This is a very particular role scope. Please read it carefully, and only apply if you fully understand the role and are excited about the opportunity exactly as outlined.

About Palm Venture Studios

Palm Venture Studios (Palm) is a single-family-office-backed venture studio with a national footprint, headquartered in Greenwich CT. As a venture studio we both acquire early stage distressed companies or assets and seed new startup companies that will be both good businesses and create positive impact for society. We are a team of entrepreneurs and operators that partner with mission-driven founders to give their companies rescue capital and expertise, and build new companies from scratch.

About Huddle

Palm recently acquired Huddle. Since its founding, Huddle has been a curated marketplace for fractional design, software development, and brand and marketing talent for startups with a focus on UX/UI and brand design.  While Huddle has achieved a solid level of scale and high satisfaction for around 150 clients, the Huddle offering solves only a part of the marketing challenge faced by startups, it faces stiff competition from many small consulting firms and other marketplaces, and overall Huddle’s currently narrow work for customers is episodic and does not easily generate repeat long term revenues from a given client.  In its current format, Huddle does not become “embedded” as a mission critical partner long term for clients.  

Palm’s “super power” is helping early stage companies pivot and evolve to solve a bigger problem with a larger total addressable market.  PVS intends to evolve the Huddle offering to become a “full-stack” go-to-market (GTM) solution for early and growth stage companies and SMBs. Huddle’s primary asset is a highly curated network of 1,500 top designers, marketers, growth experts, brand designers, product managers, and software engineers with portfolios from notable technology companies and agencies. This, plus a marketplace platform which rapidly allows the Huddle sales team to build teams for customers. 

Rather than simply connecting customers to teams, we aim to pivot the business model to offer customers the entire go-to-market function in a box: an expert Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), tools to help customers understand and plan their go-to-market strategy, and an expert network of professionals to execute the work and help businesses achieve objectives. We will transform Huddle from a talent solution for startups to a partner and essential service for growing businesses. By using Huddle as their GTM partner, founders and leaders are freed up to focus on delivering an exceptional product/service, at an attractive price and speed.

The “tip of the spear” for Huddle will be offering startups a high-performance strategic go-to-market plan which is template-driven, actionable, and highly valuable. Over time, our strategy templates and GTM tools will become increasingly intelligent and automated for customers. We, also, will offer fractional workers on Huddle the best possible place to build their enterprise: easy payments and invoicing, attractive compensation, a brand, community of like-minded workers, and potentially other perks and benefits long-term.

Huddle will refine its GTM offering by working first with most of the 25 early stage companies in the venture studio portfolio (18 companies now, expected to be 25 by the end of this year). In its current state, Huddle is a somewhat confusing hybrid between a talent marketplace and a digital agency backed by a community of builders. Our goal is to reposition Huddle as a SaaS-enabled marketplace that appears more like a full-service offering. Some examples in different industries include Pilot.com and A.Team.

To execute this transition, Huddle will need to:

1. Develop frameworks for marketing strategy and product-market-fit support services that can be broadly applied to startups and SMBs across industries and verticals 

• Services include:

1. Market research, market mapping
2. Competitive research / SWOT
3. Customer research (quant/qual)
4. Ideal Customer Profile creation & validation
5. Brand design & development 
6. Positioning, messaging & voice
7. Copywriting & content creation
8. A/B testing of messaging
9. Collateral & graphic design 
10. Channel testing (paid acquisition)
11. SEO optimization

Role Overview

The plan for this role is to develop items 1, 2 & 3 on the list above, starting by implementing these initiatives with the 25 Palm Venture Studios portfolio companies, which represent a diverse range of industries.  These companies will serve as beta customers for this new service offering and are in real need of landscape analysis, marketing strategy, product-market-fit finding, and go-to-market legwork.

Therefore, while we are hiring a CEO for Huddle, the initial era of this work will functionally make you Head of Go To Market for Palm Venture Studios, and your performance will be evaluated based on your ability to drive progress in these areas across the Palm portfolio, enhancing their product market fit & contributing to accelerating revenue growth. 

Once you have done that, you will proceed to item 4 and begin scaling the business.

Accountabilities

Your work will be to accomplish steps 1-4 from the Overview section. In doing these stages of the work, you will be accountable for:

• Developing the frameworks behind the new GTM service offering.
• Pivoting the Huddle software & talent pool to deliver under the new frameworks.
• Get to know the Palm portfolio companies well enough to deliver value.
• Deliver that value.
• Make a growth plan for Huddle based on everything you have learned during the Palm “beta” period.
• Build and grow the Huddle team as you scale Huddle revenues via external clients.

Requirements

You are a great fit for this role if you have:

• Marketing Expertise: Strong background in marketing strategy and execution, including for “zero to one” products, product lines, or brands. This includes quantitative and qualitative skills and experience to form a complete picture of how to effectively bring products to target markets.
• Leadership Skills: Leading teams, fostering a collaborative environment, and driving company vision.
• Business Model Acumen: Deep understanding of various business models and revenue generation.
• Demonstrated Start-Up Experience: Demonstrated success in launching and scaling start-ups, and understanding of how to systematically find product market fit.
• Sales Proficiency: Experience in developing and driving sales strategies in an early stage or marketing business.

Benefits

The compensation package for this role includes competitive base salary, performance bonuses, equity, and benefits.