The Role
The product works. The developer base does not exist yet. Your job is to drive developers to Gents in volume: the first 100 who install it, the first 1,000 who arrive because another developer showed them, and the loop that makes the next 10,000 cheaper to reach than the first 1,000.
This is a growth hacking role, not a marketing role and not developer relations. You run experiments, you engineer launches, you build viral mechanics into the product, and you are measured on developers through the door. Community, advocacy, and relationships are the next hire, and that hire only makes sense after you've packed the room. You report directly to Source's leadership, and your tactics ship after one fast weekly review.
What You Will Do
- Run twenty experiments a month. Channels, hooks, formats, communities, stunts. Most will fail. You kill them fast, keep the receipts, and double down on the two that work.
- Engineer the launches. Show HN, Product Hunt, launch weeks, integration announcements. The post that hits the front page and the three before it that didn't. A launch is a build, with a deadline.
- Build the viral loop into the product. Gents' growth mechanic is native: the invite is the product demonstrating itself. Design the moment of "wait, my agent already knows this," and the shortest path from witnessing it to installing it.
- Own the multiplayer moment. Find the moment a developer truly gets why Gents is different. Our hypothesis: it's the first time their agent benefits from context another developer's agent created. Turn that moment into activation, and turn activation into invitations.
- Ship the on-ramp. One-command install, quickstarts that convert, example repos, migration paths from existing harnesses. Friction between click and activation is your problem, and fixing it is often your highest-leverage experiment.
- Make things that travel. Benchmarks people argue about, demos people share, comparisons people search for. SEO and AEO for the queries developers actually type.
- Instrument everything. Define the funnel from first touch to install to first useful agent action to multiplayer activation to invitation sent. Measure it from adoption and account metadata, never customer data (the architecture makes that impossible), and report the numbers weekly.
- Feed product. You see where the funnel leaks before anyone else. Turn leaks into issues, PRs, onboarding changes, and roadmap arguments.
Who You Are
- You have manufactured attention from nothing at least once: a repo you got to the front page of Hacker News, a tool that went viral, a newsletter, a launch you engineered, an account with real reach. It can be small. It has to be yours, and you have to show the numbers.
- You are technical enough to be dangerous. You can write the script, build the demo, ship the landing page, and read the runtime's source well enough to describe it without an engineer rewriting it.
- You live in the distribution culture of the internet: you know why things travel on HN versus X versus Reddit versus Discord, and you know which tactics developer communities punish. Clever, never smelly. One spammy stunt costs more than ten failed experiments.
- You think in loops, not campaigns. Time-to-value, activation, invitation rate, and cohort retention interest you more than impressions.
- You are early in your career and hungry, or you have a few years in and you're done executing someone else's playbook. Either way, nobody has grown a multiplayer harness before, and you find that exciting rather than terrifying.
This Is Not for You If
- Your first answer to an acquisition problem is paid spend.
- You need a playbook, a known brand, or a team to lean on.
- You want to build community and relationships. Different job, next hire.
- You optimize for GitHub stars instead of developers who install, activate, and invite.
- You are uncomfortable having a number with your name next to it every week.
What Success Looks Like
Early on, you answer three questions. Which channel produces Gents' first 100 developers? What is the shortest path from first touch to experiencing multiplayer agentic coding? What causes one developer using Gents to create another developer using Gents? Then you turn the answers into a machine.
Gents