Director of Marketing

About Trala:

Trala is a tech-powered online music school for adults. Founded in 2017, our mission is to make life-changing music education accessible to every single person on Earth.

Almost everyone picks up an instrument at some point in their life, but accessible, affordable lessons are almost impossible to find, especially for adult learners and people who don’t live in big cities. Adults are actively kept from learning by teaching methods solely aimed at kids.

Our strategy is to:

1. Be the brand-name online music school that everyone knows.
2. Make it unbelievably easy to join music classes as an adult.
3. Teach in playful, non-judgmental ways that lead to personal transformation.

Trala has created a new type of music lesson. We nurture accessible, playful spaces where music learners can be artistic without judgment. Every interaction with Trala (including this job description) should be human, joyous, and truthful. Trala lessons are spaces where you can fully be yourself, and as a bonus, you learn how to play beautiful music.

On the back-end, Trala's daily operations are powered by AI. We build custom AI features to save teachers 15 hours/week of administrative work such as Trala TA, which writes custom lesson plans based on every lesson taught.

Trala has taught thousands of students in 50+ countries and received support from top musicians and investors such as the CEOs of Duolingo, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Figma.

We’re headquartered in Chicago and this is a hybrid or remote position.

The role:

You will join as the first full-time marketer and work directly with the CEO. You will be responsible for getting new prospective students to our Enrollment team, who will close them and get them to sign up for lessons. Right now we get 100 new students per month and we will scale that to 1000/month in the next 12 months. Our goal is to do this through organic channels, i.e. without spending a ton on ads.

This is a highly creative, iterative role. You’ll be experimenting with new channels and tracking data to figure out what to double down on. We’re looking for a doer who is creative, ambitious, and self-directed.

Note that we published both a Marketing Manager role and this Director of Marketing role. We are only hiring for one role but we publish two JDs to cast a wider net for diverse experience levels.

Requirements

Responsibilities

• Own the marketing funnel and manage all external touchpoints to attract prospective students.
• Experiment on marketing channels, iterate daily on new ideas, and work with ambition and playfulness to find a scalable marketing channel for Trala. 
• Track and analyze data in order to determine which channels are working.
• Build and iterate on marketing materials (for example, building and A/B testing landing pages).

• Work with marketing contractors to review data and provide recommendations on paid strategies.
• Work with external partners and influencers to get new students. 
• Report on and give recommendations on the marketing budget.

Requirements:

• Proven ability to take ownership of projects and execute tasks individually.
• Familiarity with marketing data (ie. segmentation, A/B testing, CAC, conversion funnels).
• Strong writing skills.
• Interest in new technologies.
• Demonstrated ambition and willingness to try new approaches that might fail.
• Previous startup experience is a plus.
• Musical background. Ability to speak authentically with musicians, both current and prospective.

Bonus Points:

This role will be tailored towards the existing skill set of the right person without applying an old playbook to our company. These are some areas of expertise that would interest us:

• Proven sense of brand aesthetics and taste.
• Willingness to create content, leveraging existing skills as a content creator.
• Experience in PR, social media or community engagement.

Benefits

Why Trala?

• This is a foundational role that scales directly with the success of the company.
• You will be the primary person at Trala responsible for connecting people with musical experiences they never knew were possible.
• Trala deeply impacts peoples’ lives all across the world. These are dreams you’ll be fulfilling, and you’ll have a front row seat to incredible student stories. Read up about our students at www.trala.com/student-stories. 
• Trala is funded by amazing people like the CEOs of LinkedIn and Duolingo. They’re betting on our team, a team we hope you help shape.
• Trala prioritizes diversity, inclusion, and righting economic and social wrongs. We strive to make our corner of the world a better place.
• We have competitive salary and benefits.

Some of the people you’ll be working with: 

• Sam: CEO. Violinist and engineer. Architect of Trala’s musical pedagogy. Uses words like ‘pedagogy’.
• Erik: VP of Operations. Avid traveler, aspiring drummer, and constantly in search of the perfect one-liner. Won Wheel of Fortune. Lowkey.
• Rachael: Head of Teaching. Professional Violinist. Played at that white-tie gala we weren’t invited to.
• Seina: Program Manager. Violinist, violist, dabbler of various other instruments. Headshot photographer for musicians & artists. Obsessed with her Golden Retriever, Cooper. Former gymnast turned outdoor enthusiast.
• Brian: Composer, Keyboardist, Conductor, and proud father. Loves to perform all styles of music and write music for documentary films. Avid movie buff and super-amateur chess player. Has an Emmy but won’t bring it up. On the freaking Academy for the GRAMMYs.
• Mary: Jigsaw puzzle devotee. Will organize your junk drawer. Dependable second violinist.

Learn more about the rest of our team here: www.trala.com/about.