Company: SonicCritic, Inc. Location: Remote (US) · New Orleans preferred / hybrid Type: Part-time · Founding team · Equity-significant Reports to: Founder & CEO
About SonicCritic
SonicCritic is a direct-to-fan music streaming platform. Artists who own 100% of their masters and compositions upload their work, and we pay them 88% of net subscription revenue - routed directly, per listener, through a user-centric attribution model. No pro-rata pooling, no middlemen taking the lion's share.
We're privacy-first: we don't harvest or sell listener data. We're not Web3 and not crypto. We're a real product, live today on iOS and the web, built to give independent artists a fair economic relationship with the people who actually listen to them.
We're early. The MVP is built and shipping, the first artists are on the platform, and we're assembling the founding team now. This is a chance to shape a company from close to the ground floor.
The Role
You own demand.
Today the team is strong on the supply side - getting great, fully-owned music onto the platform, and strong on building it. What we need now is the person whose entire focus is the other half of the marketplace: getting listeners in the door, converting them into paying subscribers at $10.99/month, and building a community that makes both fans and artists want to stay.
This is the highest-leverage seat we have open. On a direct-to-fan platform, subscriber growth is the artist value proposition. Every subscriber you bring in is money in an independent artist's pocket.
You're not running a generic SaaS funnel; you're growing an economy.
Early on, this is a hands-on operator role, not a management role. You'll be writing the copy, running the experiments, DMing the artists, and watching the funnel daily.
What You'll Own
- Subscriber acquisition & conversion - top-of-funnel through to paid, and the whole path in between.
- Community - the culture and connective tissue around artists and fans: listening culture, superfan mechanics, events, and the spaces (Discord, in-app, IRL) where it lives.
- Artist-led growth loops - helping artists activate and expand their own audiences on the platform, so every artist we sign compounds our reach.
- Retention & lifecycle - keeping subscribers engaged and reducing churn once they're in.
- The story - top-of-funnel content and social presence that make people understand, in five seconds, why SonicCritic is different.
The Interesting Constraint
We're privacy-first, and we intend to stay that way. That means the standard retargeting / ad-tech growth playbook is largely off the table - by design.
So this role is built for someone strong on earned and community-led growth: creator partnerships, referral loops, artist-audience activation, organic content, and word-of-mouth. If your instinct for "how do I grow this" starts and ends with buying Meta ads, this isn't the right seat. If it starts with "who are the people who already love this kind of music and how do we reach them where they are", keep reading.
What We're Looking For
- Real consumer or creator-economy growth experience - music, podcasting, fan communities, or platforms like Substack / Patreon / Bandcamp.
- A track record of moving real numbers (signups, conversion, retention), not just running campaigns.
- Fluency in community-led and organic growth, not just paid acquisition.
- Genuine understanding of, and respect for, independent-artist culture. You should get why fair artist economics matter, not treat it as a marketing angle.
- Scrappy, self-directed, and comfortable being early: ambiguity, small budgets, and doing the work yourself.
Nice to Have
- You make music, work in it, or have lived close to the independent scene.
- Experience growing a two-sided marketplace.
- Design or content chops (copy, social creative) you can deploy without waiting on anyone.
What We Offer
- A founding-team role with meaningful equity and real ownership of a core function.
- A product that's already live, with early artists and a clear, differentiated thesis.
- Direct work with the founder and a small, high-trust team. Your work ships and matters immediately.
- Cash compensation: early-stage, equity-weighted.
We're open to structuring this as a founding hire or a fractional / advisory engagement for the right experienced operator. If you've done this before and want to plug in without going all-in day one, let's talk about that too.
How to Apply
Email andrew@soniccritic.ai with:
- A few sentences on why SonicCritic specifically interests you.
- One thing you grew, and how (numbers welcome).
- Anything you've made or shipped that we can look at.
No formal cover letter needed. Show us how you think.
SonicCritic, Inc. is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds.
