Hiring for growth when you do not come from growth is tricky. Fluent talk can mask thin craft. At Series A, eight slow months is not a blip. It is runway.

This is a story from a founder who hired someone who sounded perfect, waited too long to make the call, then switched to a fractional approach and rebuilt how she evaluates growth talent.

I am an engineer. With developers I know how to test the work. Hand them a problem, watch them build, you see it. With growth, I let language convince me.

In the interview he said full funnel and activation loops and incrementality and LTV to CAC and experimentation velocity. He had big logos. When I asked about results he told stories about partnering with brand and laying foundations. I should have pressed for numbers. I did not, and I also failed to define the one metric he would own. That part is on me.

The first month looked busy. Tool audits. Analytics plans. Two agency intros. A content calendar. More meetings, more dashboards, more ideas. No single owner for a single number.

By day sixty ad spend tripled and trials were flat. The weekly update had charts that looked important but did not connect to new paying teams. When I asked for a clear target, I heard we need more time and tracking is not ready and the site is off brand. He wanted a quarter to lay groundwork. I gave it to him.

Months three through five were motion. New tools. New segments. A video shoot. Agency retainers. A long list of experiments, few visible changes in front of customers. When I tried to write one clean line about what actually moved, I came up short.

My gut was loud by month six. I still waited. I let him go at month eight. We burned salary, agencies, and media north of one hundred eighty thousand, and the self serve funnel looked the same. Those months were the window where we needed to learn how to grow.

Because I did not have a way to evaluate growth, and because I did not set the scoreboard. I accepted frameworks in place of receipts. I never wrote the one line outcome the role owned, so there was nothing to anchor decisions. Hope and sunk cost stretched a call I should have made sooner.

Eight months in, on a Friday review, I asked for the single metric he owned and the lift so far. He opened a deck on market context. I stopped him.

Please, just the number.

There was no number. There was a story.

I closed the call, wrote three lines on a blank page, and owned my part

On Monday I let him go and started over.

I rebuilt the hire around results I could see and work I could understand, even without a growth background.

Start with trusted introductions

I asked founders I trust who they would hire again. I also used Intros.cc, which personally matched me to proven growth freelancers and agencies in about seventy two hours. It is a small and highly vetted network run by a twice exited operator, so I trusted it and the results did not disappoint.

Require receipts before frameworks

I required candidates to bring two before and after stories with numbers. What changed, what they stopped, how long it took, and how they would adapt it here. If the conversation drifted to brand theory, we pulled it back to outcomes.

Define the job in one line

Own weekly new paying teams from first visit to first value. That means you are responsible for acquisition and activation together. Report trial quality, activation rate, and CAC payback in one screen every Friday. Your work is the changes that move those numbers.

A working session instead of a show

For finalists I set a live one hour working session using sample funnel data. No slides. Build a simple model of how our product grows. Tell me what you will ship in the first two weeks and what you will stop. Write the copy you would test. I wanted to see thinking and craft, not stage presence.

Paid project, then fractional first

This time I ran a paid two week project with two finalists. Real data, real access, real shipping. One sent a long strategy and a beautiful Figma. The other pushed copy live on day three, removed friction in sign up, and killed two thin lead ad groups. I chose the second — and I did not go straight to full time. I started on a fractional basis for ninety days with clear goals. I now prefer freelancers and agencies at the start. It gives flexibility without the bloat and headaches of a full time hire. Only after the work moved the numbers did we talk about expanding scope.

Set guardrails for month one

One north star and three inputs that move it. A public experiment backlog and a changelog. A Friday scorecard that fits in a screenshot and shows what changed.

The difference was obvious within two weeks. Fewer meetings. More changes in front of customers. Language that sounded like our users because it came from calls, not from a deck.

Three months into the fractional engagement we shipped twelve changes across ads, landing, and onboarding. Weekly new paying teams rose twenty seven percent. Activation moved from twenty four to thirty three. Blended CAC fell eighteen percent because we stopped paying for thin leads and fixed leaky steps. The scorecard makes sense at a glance. I stay close, but the work is legible and the progress is real.

Keep it short and verifiable.

In growth, proof beats polish. Hire the person who ships changes you can measure.