Founding Growth - Permanent

We are looking for an exceptional growth operator to join as a founding member of the team: a true partner who is deeply excited about our mission and will take ownership of how the world discovers Upstream.

Our product is loved and paid for today by users who found us almost entirely through word of mouth. Working in tandem with our CEO, you'll take us far beyond that: shipping experiments every week, testing acquisition motions to clear verdicts, and finding the first repeatable channel to drive the next phase of our growth.

👋 About us

Hey, we’re Upstream 👋

We went through YC and raised a $3 million pre-seed round from amazing investors. We’re based in Paris and have strong ties to the US. We have extensive experience building products and scaling teams, and we’re obsessed with building incredible, user-centric experiences.

We like working in person, with kind people. We work from our own beautiful office in the heart of Paris, between Opéra and the Louvre. And we’re looking for an exceptional growth operator to build an amazing company with us.

💭 The Upstream Team

🏗️ What we’re building

Upstream is the inbox that handles itself. Our agents organize your inbox, cut the noise, follow up at the right time, and draft replies in your exact voice: you just tweak, hit send, and get back to work.

It's built for people who live in email: founders, execs, investors, operators. They tell us Upstream gives them hours back every week, and it shows: our users pay for it, rave about it, and spend their whole day in it. The product already delights everyone who finds it. Your job is to make the world find it.

🧢 What the job involves

As the founding growth hire at Upstream, you'll play a fundamental role in shaping the company and how it reaches the world. This role is primarily hands-on experimentation. You're walking into a company with great foundations (amazing investors, and a product that already converts and retains) and a go-to-market that's yours to invent. We have an ambitious growth plan for the next 12 months, and you'll be the one driving it.

🎯 Your Mission: Find Upstream's first repeatable acquisition channel
Working in tandem with the CEO, run high-tempo weekly experiments on positioning, messaging, and channels to discover what reliably produces activated Upstream users, and turn what works into playbooks and agents the company can run.

In practice, expect to:

• Ship several growth experiments every week, each with a hypothesis and a clear verdict

• Test acquisition motions (a channel worked a specific way) to a documented decision: invest more, or move on

• Test message angles against real segments, and roll the winning one out across all surfaces (site, onboarding, product, and every asset)

• Run a full-scale launch every couple of months: a story worth announcing, every surface hit at once, amplification organized in advance

• Make everything yourself: the copy, the landing pages, the short videos, the outreach lists

• Turn what works into playbooks and agents, so winning motions scale without headcount

💡 Some topics you’ll think about:

• Finding the channel: which motion reliably turns strangers into activated users?

• Sharpening the positioning: why Upstream and why now, when everyone claims AI email?

• Nailing the message: what makes a founder drowning in email stop scrolling?

• Going off-playbook: what's the growth experiment nobody else would dare run?

• Scaling with agents: how much of a go-to-market can run on agents?