Marketing Lead

Remote (Must Work ET Hours)  •  Full-Time  •  Reports to CEO  •  $100,000–$150,000

The Situation

I’m Imu, the CEO of Aleph Beta. We’re a nonprofit Torah education organization built around the scholarship of Rabbi David Fohrman. We serve tens of thousands of members through animated videos, podcasts, books, and courses. We operate on a subscription model—think SaaS, but mission-driven—where our revenue comes from thousands of individuals who care deeply about what we do and choose to support it with their subscriptions and donations.

Here’s my problem: I’ve been trying to hire a strong marketing leader for years, and it hasn’t worked. I’ve hired good people. Smart people. Experienced people. And it still hasn’t worked. I’ve done a lot of soul-searching about why, and I think I finally understand what’s been going wrong—which means I might finally be ready to get this right.

I'll be honest about what keeps happening. I bring someone in with real marketing credentials. They produce work. The work looks professional. And the numbers don't move. Social posts go up, but followership doesn't grow. Emails go out, but conversions stay flat. Ads run, but the cost to acquire a subscriber stays stubbornly high. For a long time, I thought the problem was the people. Now I think the problem was me—or more precisely, what I was hiring for. I was screening for marketing skill, when I should have been looking for something rarer: a marketer who could deeply understand our content and our users, and let that understanding drive the creative. That combination is unusual, and I wasn't naming it clearly enough. This time, I am.

What We Actually Do (Please Don’t Skip This Section)

I know. Every company says “our product is special.” But I’m spending real estate on this section because understanding our content is not background information for this job—it is the job. The marketing people who didn’t work out? In almost every case, the root cause was that they didn’t deeply understand what makes Aleph Beta different, and so they marketed us like something we’re not.

Most people who encounter Torah—whether they grew up religious, secular, or somewhere in between—experience it as a book of laws and ancient stories. Sometimes inspiring, often confusing, frequently two-dimensional. We believe there is an entire hidden dimension of meaning in the Torah that most people have never accessed. Not because it requires secret knowledge, but because it requires a particular way of listening to the text—a methodology that, we believe, is encoded in the Torah itself.

When people learn Torah through this methodology, something happens that is genuinely hard to describe in a job posting. (Trust me, I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe it for 13 years.) They experience paradigm shifts. Passages they’ve read dozens of times suddenly reveal a depth they never imagined. What seemed disconnected forms a coherent whole. What seemed troubling reveals profound wisdom. Our subscribers write to us saying things like: “I’ve been learning Torah my whole life, and I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

Now, here’s the marketing challenge buried inside that: how do you communicate a paradigm shift to someone who hasn’t had one yet? That’s essentially the puzzle you’d be solving in this role, every day. And the people who’ve been most successful at it are the ones who’ve had that shift themselves.

One more thing: the people who subscribe to Aleph Beta aren’t just customers. Many of them see themselves as supporters of something they believe matters to the Jewish world. This is a mission-driven community, and the marketing that works here comes from someone who genuinely shares that sense of mission. You’re not just selling a product. You’re inviting people to be part of something.

The Job

Our growth model is pretty straightforward: bring new people into a free trial or free account, help them experience our content, and convert them into paying subscribers. We grow by a few hundred new subscribers every month. I’ll know this hire has been successful if that number starts going up.

Holiday seasons—High Holidays, Pesach, Tisha B’Av, Shavuot—are our biggest growth moments. Think of them the way retail thinks of Black Friday, except we have several of them a year, and each one speaks to different content and different user needs. The Marketing Lead owns this entire growth engine.

You’ll lead a small team of 3–4 people and report directly to me. Here’s what falls under your ownership:

Paid Acquisition

Currently our biggest growth lever. We run Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram). When we’ve gotten this right, we’ve been able to cut our customer acquisition cost by more than 50% compared to where it was historically. But we’ve also gotten it wrong plenty of times. The difference, every time, comes down to the creative. In the current landscape, success in paid social is almost entirely about what the ad says and how it says it—not the targeting, not the technical optimization. Can you identify a real pain point, articulate what Aleph Beta offers, and write something compelling enough to make someone stop scrolling? That’s the skill.

Organic Social

We need a real social strategy across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn. I want to be clear about what I mean by “real.” I’m not looking for someone who posts consistently and calls it a strategy. I’m looking for someone who forms hypotheses about what will grow an engaged audience, tests them, measures what happens, and adapts. Did the reels bring traffic? Did the engagement translate to leads? Why or why not? What are you trying next? Show me you’ve done this before. If you can point to a time you meaningfully grew a following and it actually drove results, I want to hear about it.

Email Marketing & Lead Nurture

We have a large email list and a history of strong email performance that has declined in recent years. We’re also about to pivot our model to include a freemium tier—free accounts with strategic moments where we invite users to upgrade. This means email and in-product messaging become critical. What do we say, where, and when, to move someone from a free experience to a paid commitment? This is part email marketing, part CRO, part product marketing.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Every stage of the user journey is your canvas. Ad click to landing page. Free account to trial. Trial to paid subscriber. This includes in-video CTAs, paywall messaging, pricing page copy, onboarding flows—basically, anywhere a user is making a decision about whether to go deeper with us, that’s your territory.

Campaign Strategy

Plan and execute seasonal campaigns around the Jewish calendar. These are our highest-leverage moments—coordinate across content, product, and marketing to make them land.

What I Actually Need From You

I’ve thought a lot about why marketing hires haven’t worked here, and I think it comes down to three things. You need all three. I’ve never found all three in one person, which is part of why I keep failing at this. But I’m optimistic that person exists. Maybe it’s you. Let me describe what I’m looking for:

1. Real marketing skills. You need hands-on proficiency—PPC, email, social, CRO, copywriting. At our scale, you’re not managing agencies or overseeing from a distance. You're the ad manager. You’re writing the subject lines. You’re analyzing the funnel. This is the most straightforward requirement and, honestly, the least likely reason someone doesn’t work out here.

2. Strategic intuition. Here’s how I think about this: there’s strategy, which is the pursuit of an outcome. There’s a deliverable, which is the expression of that strategy. And then the question is: did it work? A lot of marketing people are really good at the middle step. They can produce things—social posts, email campaigns, landing pages. But the production isn’t connected to a clear hypothesis on one end, or measured against real outcomes on the other. I’ve had marketers who were genuine workhorses, producing at a steady clip, and none of it moved our numbers. I need someone who thinks in terms of build-measure-learn, who tracks what’s working and why, and who can tell me: “Here’s what I tried, here’s what happened, here’s what I’m doing next.”

3. A deep love of our Torah and our mission. This is the big one. This is where it has consistently broken down in the past, and it’s the reason I’m writing a weirdly long and personal job description instead of a normal one.

People who encounter Aleph Beta for the first time almost always misunderstand what we are. “Oh, so it’s a Torah learning website?” “Is it for kids?” “So it’s just Rabbi Fohrman’s website?” None of these are right. And every time a marketer builds a campaign on one of these misunderstandings, it falls flat. The copy doesn’t land. The ads bring in the wrong people. The value proposition feels generic.

Our value proposition is genuinely hard to articulate in a headline—not because it’s vague, but because it’s experiential. What we offer is a way of reading the Torah that makes the text come alive, that reveals hidden depth, that transforms how people relate to their faith and their tradition. That’s real. Our subscribers will tell you it’s real. But communicating it to someone who hasn’t experienced it yet? That requires you to have experienced it yourself.

I've hired talented marketers who approached this like any other product. It didn't work—not because of a lack of skill, but because our content resists being reduced to a tagline by someone who hasn't experienced its power. That's not a knock on them. It's a genuinely unusual constraint, and I should have named it from the start instead of hoping people would figure it out on the job.

So I’m being direct: if you don’t already love Aleph Beta’s Torah, or if you’re not the kind of person who will fall in love with it quickly and deeply, this role will not work. The person who succeeds here will be someone who watches one of our courses and feels something shift inside them—and then can’t stop thinking about how to get other people to feel that too.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of marketing experience with demonstrable results in subscriber or user acquisition for a digital product, subscription business, or membership organization
• A proven track record of driving measurable growth—I’m going to ask for specific numbers and case studies
• Hands-on experience with paid social (Meta Ads Manager or equivalent)
• Strong copywriting ability—you’ll be writing and evaluating copy constantly
• Comfort with data: you can build a dashboard, read a funnel, and make decisions based on what you see
• Experience leading or managing a small team

Strongly preferred:

• You already know and love Aleph Beta’s content—you’re a subscriber, a podcast listener, or you’ve been to an event
• Experience with subscription/SaaS conversion, including free trial and freemium models
• Experience with email marketing platforms and automation
• Familiarity with the Jewish community and comfort engaging with Torah content

A Quick Gut Check

This role might be for you if:

• You read this JD and thought “finally, someone who understands why marketing this kind of product is different”
• You’ve been frustrated in past roles because the company didn’t care about the quality of their product as much as you did
• You’re the kind of marketer who actually uses the product they’re marketing—and it matters to you
• You want your work to mean something beyond hitting a quarterly number

This role is probably not for you if:

• Your approach is “marketing is marketing, I can sell anything”
• You’re more comfortable managing agencies than getting your hands dirty in the work
• You need a large team and a big budget to be effective
• You’re looking for a stepping-stone role—we need someone who wants to be here for the long haul

Compensation

$100,000–$150,000, based on experience. Performance bonus: We offer a bonus tied to sustainable net-new revenue growth versus a baseline (measured over time, not one-off spikes). Bonus is designed to be meaningful while staying financially responsible for a mission-driven organization.

We’re a nonprofit. We can’t match Big Tech or even most startups. But this is a real salary for a real leadership role, and you’d be joining an organization where your work directly contributes to something meaningful. You’d also have significant creative ownership and direct access to the CEO—the kind of agency that’s hard to find in larger organizations.

How to Apply

Send your resume and a cover letter to jobs@alephbeta.org with the subject line “Marketing Lead”

Please, not a generic one. I’d love to hear:

• A marketing result you drove that you’re genuinely proud of. Numbers are great.
• What’s your relationship with Aleph Beta’s content? If you’re not yet familiar, what draws you to this role?
• If you started tomorrow, what would you want to understand first?

We read every application carefully. If ten thoughtful people apply, that’s better than a hundred generic ones.

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One more thing: if you're a strong marketer reading this and thinking "this sounds like a CEO who won't let go"—I hear you, and I want to be direct about it. I don't want to be running campaigns forever. I want to hand this off completely to someone I trust. Trust here is built by demonstrating that you understand our brand and our users—and once you do, you'll have significant creative ownership and real decision-making authority. The goal isn't for me to hover over your shoulder. The goal is for me to stop worrying about marketing entirely because the right person has it.

Ultimately, this is a job where your work matters in a way that most marketing jobs can’t offer. You wouldn’t just be growing a business. You’d be helping transform people’s relationship with Torah, and with its Author. I promise you, that doesn't get old.

Let’s talk.

Learn more about Aleph Beta at alephbeta.org