Head of Growth and Audience in Manchester

Location: Mill Media HQ, Manchester City Centre

Basis: Full-time

Office/Remote: Four days per week in our Manchester office; work from home on Wednesdays

Start Date: May 2026

Reporting to: Mill Media’s founder, Joshi Herrmann

About Us

Since being founded in June 2020, Mill Media has become a new force in British journalism, publishing high-quality local journalism in six UK cities, including Manchester, London, Glasgow, and Birmingham. The company has been described as “one of the most interesting and impressive media startups of the last decade,” by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch, and as “very, very impressive” by the Wall Street Journal’s editor Emma Tucker. We have developed a sustainable funding model, with our titles all being profitable or well on the way there, without any grant or state funding.

Our financial backers include Sir Mark Thompson, the chief executive of CNN and former boss of the New York Times and BBC, who said he was investing because of the “exceptional quality” of our work. In the past year, our stories have led to political resignations, questions in parliament, and have even prompted a police investigation into fraud at a university.

Mill Media has gone from a single journalist writing long-form stories during the pandemic to 25 full-time journalists operating across the country. Almost 200,000 people have signed up to get our journalism in their inboxes and our teams are sustained by more than 14,000 paying members. But in the next few years, we want to grow even faster, bringing high-quality journalism to millions more readers and growing our subscriber base several times over.

The Role

We are hiring our first-ever Head of Growth: a senior, strategic position designed for a commercial leader who wants to be a partner in building a national institution. You will be responsible for the entire subscriber lifecycle — from the first time someone sees a social post to the moment they become a lifelong paying member. This is a data-led leadership position, rather than a pure marketing role, that sits at the intersection of our business and our journalism. You will work directly with the founder to pull the levers that scale our community while guarding the prestige of our brands.

Key Responsibilities

• Growth Architecture: Own the “Full-Funnel” journey. You will optimise every touchpoint — from registration walls and signup flows to referral programmes — ensuring a frictionless path from anonymous reader to paying member.
• Offer Strategy: Design and execute our promotional calendar. You will decide when to deploy introductory offers or seasonal discounts and, crucially, measure their effectiveness. This involves tracking “cohort health” — ensuring that members who join on an offer stay for the long term and don’t just churn after the discount ends.
• Performance Marketing & Paid Ads: Oversee and execute our paid acquisition strategy (Meta, Google, etc.). You will move beyond raw clicks to focus on high-quality audience segments and sustainable CAC.
• Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): Relentlessly track conversion metrics across our site and newsletter platforms. You will lead the testing of landing pages, calls-to-action, and creative variations to find what truly resonates with our audience.
• Editorial Insight Bridge: Spot patterns in subscription and growth data to provide the editorial team with high-level insights into what our readers value most, helping to inform (but never dictate) our coverage.
• Social-to-Subscriber Strategy: Guide our social media presence with a major focus on conversion. You will work with the team to ensure our social output isn’t just “engaging,” but is actively driving new free and paying subscribers.
• Retention & Churn Engineering: You will own the churn number. This involves identifying data patterns, refining our re-engagement sequences, and building the automated systems that keep our members for the long term.
• Revenue Diversification: Identify and pull new growth levers every week, including launching B2B “Group Subscription” models for local institutions and building partnerships with local businesses.

Who You Are

• A Strategic Partner: You aren’t just looking for a job – you want to run a company. You can think 12 months ahead while executing 12 hours ahead. And you’ll have the ability to grow a team around you in future after establishing the role.
• Proactive: You get stuff done rather than waiting around, and you’re more interested in execution than making strategy documents.
• Data-Led but Brand-Literate: You live in spreadsheets and dashboards and you love hitting targets, but you have the “gut feel” to know when a marketing tactic feels too “cheap” for a high-end journalism brand.
• Experienced: You likely have 5–10 years of experience in a growth, commercial, or startup leadership role. You ideally have a proven track record of scaling a subscription or community-based product, or you have comparable experience.
• Commercial Pragmatist: You enjoy the “grind” of continual experimentation and iteration. You are motivated by what works and are comfortable being a “team of one” who can scale a department as we grow.
• Mission-Aligned: You understand our mission and the value of high-quality journalism and you are incredibly ambitious about what we can achieve. You want to prove that local news can be a thriving, sustainable business.

How to Apply

Please apply to hiring@millmediaco.uk by Monday, 20 April 2026 (do not apply via LinkedIn) with the following:

• Your CV, with a focus on your experience in scaling revenue, signups, or conversions.
• A cover letter explaining why you are the right person to be Joshi’s strategic partner in growing Mill Media. Tell us about what you have grown in your career so far.
• The “Growth Audit”: Tell us two things you think we are currently doing well in our growth funnel, and two specific “levers” you would pull in your first month to increase our free subscriber and paying member counts.