VP of Marketing

VP of Marketing Location: Austin, TX - In Office Department: Marketing Reports To: CRO About inKind inKind is transforming the way restaurants access growth capital and build relationships with their guests. Sitting at the intersection of hospitality, fintech, consumer technology, and loyalty, our platform helps restaurant operators grow while giving consumers a better way to discover, experience, and engage with restaurants. We are entering our next stage of growth, and our ambition is significant: to establish inKind as the market-leading brand in dining and become one of the most recognized and relevant consumer brands in hospitality. We're looking for a VP of Marketing who has experienced hyper-scale before - someone who understands what it takes to take a rapidly growing company and turn it into a category-defining, nationally recognized brand. Role Summary The VP of Marketing will own the strategy, execution, and continuous optimization of inKind's marketing function across growth, brand, lifecycle, acquisition, retention, content, partnerships, and product marketing. This is a critical leadership role for the next stage of inKind's growth. We want someone who has seen and helped lead hyper-scale firsthand and understands how the marketing strategy, organization, channels, brand, technology, and operating model need to evolve as a company moves from high growth to true market leadership. Your mandate is bigger than generating leads or running campaigns. You will help turn inKind into a market-leading consumer brand, creating the awareness, affinity, customer growth, and engagement required to make inKind synonymous with discovering and experiencing great restaurants. This is not a role for someone who wants to operate purely at the strategy level. You will set the vision while remaining deeply involved in execution - understanding how channels perform, how consumers behave, where the funnel can improve, what the brand stands for, and where we should place our next bet. You will combine brand building with commercial performance, ensuring every marketing investment contributes to sustainable growth and long-term brand equity. What You'll Own Hyper-Scale Growth • Build the marketing strategy required to drive inKind through its next paradigm of rapid growth. • Bring firsthand experience of what changes when a business moves from growth into hyper-growth - from channels and organizational structure to processes, technology, measurement, and brand investment. • Identify the growth engines capable of taking inKind from today's scale to the next order of magnitude. • Build repeatable, scalable acquisition and engagement models rather than relying on isolated campaigns. • Anticipate the capabilities, talent, systems, and infrastructure Marketing will need before growth creates the requirement. • Balance aggressive growth with disciplined economics and sustainable customer value. Growth & Customer Acquisition • Own the overall strategy for consumer growth, acquisition, activation, engagement, and retention. • Build and continuously optimize a diversified acquisition strategy across paid, organic, referral, partnership, local, and emerging channels. • Establish clear performance expectations across the marketing funnel and identify opportunities to improve conversion at every stage. • Own key growth metrics including CAC, conversion, activation, retention, repeat behavior, frequency, and LTV. • Develop scalable growth loops that leverage inKind's restaurant network, consumers, partners, and product. • Test aggressively, learn quickly, and scale what works. Build a Market-Leading Brand • Own the ambition of transforming inKind from a rapidly growing company into a nationally recognized, market-leading consumer brand. • Define and evolve the inKind brand strategy, positioning, voice, and creative direction. • Establish a clear point of view on what inKind should stand for in the minds of consumers. • Build awareness, consideration, preference, and affinity at scale. • Develop breakthrough campaigns and brand moments capable of expanding inKind beyond its existing audience. • Build a brand that consumers actively recognize, trust, talk about, and want to engage with. • Ensure brand investment and growth marketing work together rather than operating as separate disciplines. • Identify opportunities for inKind to define and lead its category. • Establish consistent and distinctive brand experiences across product, digital, social, restaurant, partnership, experiential, and corporate touchpoints. Lifecycle, CRM & Retention • Own lifecycle marketing across the complete customer journey. • Develop sophisticated segmentation and personalization strategies based on customer behavior and data. • Improve onboarding, activation, engagement, frequency, reactivation, and retention. • Drive continuous experimentation across messaging, offers, timing, channels, and customer segments. • Partner with Product and Data to identify behavioral signals and turn them into actionable marketing programs. • Ensure lifecycle marketing becomes a meaningful driver of customer LTV and sustainable growth. Optimization & Analytics • Build a marketing organization where data drives decisions. • Establish clear dashboards and KPIs across channels, campaigns, customer segments, brand health, and the overall marketing funnel. • Regularly analyze performance and identify where resources should be increased, reduced, or redirected. • Develop a rigorous testing framework across creative, audience, channel, offer, landing page, and customer experience. • Understand not simply what happened, but why it happened and what we should do next. • Translate marketing performance and consumer behavior into clear recommendations for Executive Leadership. • Create the measurement frameworks necessary to understand both short-term performance marketing and long-term brand impact. Product & Partner Marketing • Partner closely with Product to ensure customer insights influence the product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. • Develop positioning and go-to-market plans for new products, capabilities, markets, and strategic partnerships. • Create programs that simultaneously drive value for consumers, restaurant partners, and inKind. • Ensure major launches have clear audiences, messaging, distribution strategies, and measurable success criteria. • Identify opportunities where product capabilities themselves can become powerful acquisition, engagement, and brand-building mechanisms. Marketing Leadership & Execution • Set the overall marketing strategy while remaining close to the work. • Build, lead, coach, and scale a high-performing marketing organization capable of operating in a hyper-growth environment. • Determine what the marketing organization needs to look like at 2x, 5x, and 10x today's scale. • Establish clear ownership, priorities, goals, and accountability across the team. • Evaluate the existing marketing organization, capabilities, agencies, technology, processes, and investment strategy and determine what needs to evolve. • Manage marketing investment with a strong focus on incremental impact, scalability, and ROI. • Move comfortably between executive-level strategy and detailed campaign, creative, channel, or performance discussions. • Create a culture of experimentation, urgency, creativity, accountability, and continuous improvement. Who You Are • You've seen hyper-scale: You have operated inside a company during a period of exceptional growth and understand what needs to change as the organization scales. • You've built brands, not just campaigns: You understand how a growing company becomes a recognizable, differentiated, market-leading brand. • Strategic and hands-on: You can build a multi-year marketing strategy and dive into campaign performance the same day. • Commercially minded: You think about marketing through the lens of revenue, growth, customer behavior, market share, and enterprise value. • Brand + Growth: You believe exceptional brand building and measurable performance should reinforce each other. • Data-driven: You're comfortable interrogating dashboards, funnels, cohorts, CAC, LTV, retention, conversion, and channel performance. • Customer obsessed: You have a deep curiosity about why consumers behave the way they do and what creates genuine brand affinity. • Highly experimental: You naturally think in hypotheses, tests, results, and iteration. • Builder mentality: You're energized by building the organization and capabilities required for the next stage rather than simply managing what already exists. • High agency: When you identify an opportunity or problem, you take ownership and move quickly. Qualifications • 10+ years of progressive marketing experience, including significant senior leadership responsibility. • Firsthand experience operating through hyper-growth or hyper-scale, ideally within a business that achieved significant national consumer adoption. • Demonstrated experience helping transform a growing company into a market-leading or category-defining brand. • Experience within a high-growth consumer, marketplace, fintech, hospitality, loyalty, e-commerce, or technology business. • Demonstrated success scaling consumer acquisition and retention. • Strong experience across growth marketing, brand, lifecycle/CRM, customer segmentation, and performance optimization. • Proven ability to build and scale high-performing marketing organizations. • Strong analytical capabilities and experience using customer and performance data to drive decisions. • Experience managing significant marketing investments and evaluating channel-level ROI. • Strong executive communication and cross-functional leadership skills. What Success Looks Like Within your first year, you will have: • Established a clear strategy for taking inKind from high growth toward true market leadership. • Significantly increased awareness and consideration of the inKind brand. • Created a clear and differentiated position for inKind within the market. • Built scalable acquisition engines capable of supporting the company's next stage of growth. • Improved customer acquisition efficiency and funnel conversion. • Increased customer activation, engagement, frequency, retention, and LTV. • Strengthened lifecycle, personalization, and customer segmentation capabilities. • Established clear marketing and brand dashboards, experimentation frameworks, and performance accountability. • Built the team, systems, processes, and capabilities required to support hyper-scale. • Created stronger integration between Marketing, Product, Data, and commercial teams. • Put inKind firmly on the path to becoming the market-leading consumer brand in its category. Why inKind This is an opportunity to join inKind at an inflection point. The foundations have been built. The business is scaling rapidly. The opportunity now is to take that momentum and build a brand with national awareness, significant consumer relevance, and category leadership. We're looking for someone who has experienced that journey before and wants to help do it again—this time with the opportunity to shape the strategy, organization, brand, and growth engine behind it. You'll have the opportunity to build a marketing organization and brand capable of defining the next stage of inKind's growth - and ultimately help make inKind synonymous with how people discover and experience restaurants. Who we are: inKind connects passionate diners with exceptional restaurants across the country. inKind partners with thousands of restaurants and has millions of users who want to discover great places, dine confidently, and earn meaningful rewards. Through the inKind app, guests earn 20% back every time they dine, turning everyday meals into something more rewarding. From celebrated restaur…