Head of Audience

About Puma In A Tank

Puma In A Tank is an audience-first production company. We develop new entertainment IP (film and series) by building audiences alongside the stories themselves, learning what resonates with real audiences and scaling what works. We're an early-stage startup with a small, agile team that is willing to test new ways of operating. That means real ownership from day one, and processes that you'll often be the first person to build.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Define and own the audience metrics

You'll work directly with our leadership team and data analyst to build the KPI hierarchy that drives every greenlight decision. What does "audience-native" mean operationally? How much should audience validation weigh against creative judgment when deciding what gets made? You'll own the weekly dashboard the whole company watches — follow-to-owned conversion rates, retention cohorts, LTV per IP.

2. Design and oversee owned-channel infrastructure

You decide which platforms we build on — newsletter, Discord, Patreon, or others — and how they connect. You'll hire and manage a small community ops team (1–2 people) handling daily execution: Discord moderation, email logistics, customer support. You set strategy and standards; they execute against it. You make sure we're tracking what actually matters — open rates, churn, conversion, retention.

3. Own the follow-to-owned conversion funnel

This is the core of the role: understanding how audiences move from discovery (TikTok, YouTube) into owned channels (Discord, newsletter) and eventually into paying members. You'll track conversion per IP per month — views to clicks to joins to paid conversions — and run experiments to improve it: testing Discord invites, pricing, timing of the ask. When an IP validates in testing but fails to convert post-launch, you're the one diagnosing why. You'll also help decide when a validated idea is ready to bring in known creators to elevate it toward a premium TV/film production.

4. Build monetization strategy and unit economics

You'll design paid tiers per IP — what we sell and at what price — and run pricing experiments. Working with the data analyst, you'll identify which cohorts carry the highest lifetime value and what it costs to acquire them, feeding directly into production budgets and our Series B narrative. By Month 18, we want clear financial projections showing the path from current audience size to sustainable revenue.

5. Track portfolio effects and build the playbook

As we launch multiple IPs in parallel, you'll spot the patterns: which IP types convert best to owned audiences, when's the right time to introduce paid tiers, what community events actually drive retention. This becomes our internal playbook.

What you need to bring:

Non-negotiable: you've personally built an owned audience from zero to meaningful scale. Plus at least two of the following:

• Newsletter at scale — grown a newsletter to significant subscriber numbers with strong open rates; you know email strategy, cadence, list hygiene, segmentation, and have A/B tested for conversion impact
• Community at scale — built or managed a Discord, Slack, or forum community with genuinely active members; you understand moderation, retention mechanics, and event-driven engagement
• Creator economy infrastructure — worked at Substack, Patreon, Mighty Networks, or similar; you understand paid-tier conversion mechanics, creator economics, and churn modeling
• Independent media property — built or scaled a podcast, blog, YouTube channel, or Substack to meaningful audience and revenue, owning content, community, monetization, and analytics end to end
• Creator-economy fund or consultancy — advised creators on audience-building and monetization, and can translate those patterns to an IP studio context.

Nice to have:

Experience with content validation or audience research (surveys, Discord polls, analytics interpretation); product management or paid-tier pricing background; exposure to film/TV/IP or creator-economy companies; experience scaling a team from 1 to 10+; comfort with financial modeling; familiarity with the European creator/media landscape and regulatory environment.

If you've built a real, owned audience from the ground up and want to bring that craft to premium IP development — we'd love to hear from you!