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Tortuga is seeking a Marketing Director to make traveling easier in the post-pandemic travel boom.

At the beginning of the pandemic, our sales were down 80% as travel ground to a halt. We shrunk from twelve people to three.

Now, people are traveling again, and airlines are scrambling to meet demand. We are growing again. Next year, we’ll launch an updated line of products (V4) and expand into new product categories.

Tortuga launched in 2010 but is evolving into a whole new business in 2023. We hope you'll join us.

Is This Role for You?

1. You will work with and for your fellow travelers to make travel easier.
2. You will have more autonomy than in your last job but with higher expectations.
3. You will have the space and time to do your best deep work.

As Marketing Director, you will be the first full-time marketing hire for the company's next iteration and will work directly with the co-founder and CEO, Fred Perrotta. You will be joining an established company with a working marketing machine. You will also have uncapped room to grow in your role and, later, to build a team around yourself.

Who You Are

You are a marketing generalist with a T-shaped skill set, including content marketing and SEO expertise.

Unlike most direct-to-consumer brands, we do not depend on Instagram or TikTok ads for our traffic and sales. (Though we’re always open to testing new channels.) Your job isn’t to reallocate money from VCs to Facebook. Your job is to help your fellow travelers while increasing profitability.

What You'll Do

You will grow the marketing channels that are already working for us—content, SEO, affiliates, and email—and expand to new ones with a focus on owned and operated channels.

You will write in the Tortuga style and voice, teach that style to others, and ensure that our copy and messaging are consistent across mediums and vendors.

The Tortuga blog has 12 years of content for you to build on and an existing team of freelance writers and photographers. In this role, you will work with full-time teammates as well as freelancers and agencies.

Tortuga is a small, bootstrapped company. We are lean and scrappy. So is our marketing. We must spend money as if it’s our own (because it is).

If that appeals to you, join us to help get people traveling again.

Mission

Refine and expand the Tortuga marketing machine to grow the business.

Objectives

• Grow revenue from low seven figures to $10M+ over the next 3-5 years with a focus on steady, sustainable growth.
• Increase sales via content marketing and SEO across the blog and store. Analyze current performance, build a content calendar and SEO plan to increase sales, and iterate based on results.
• Build up our affiliate marketing and influencer program to increase sales and improve our “coverage” in SERPs.

Strengths

• Building Systems: Your responsibility is to build a marketing machine, not to run one-off campaigns. Our best blog posts and affiliate partners have been generating sales for years. Our marketing should be repeatable, scalable, and built upon our previous work.
• Thinking in Bets: You create and test hypotheses. You evaluate results with a focus on ROI. Then you cut what doesn’t work, scale what does work, and run another test. You log the results so that we always add to our total knowledge. Business author Jim Collins calls this “firing bullets then cannonballs.”
• Taking Initiative: Every company says that it wants to hire self-starters. Remote companies have no choice. You must take initiative and hold yourself accountable to a high standard of work. No one is looking over your shoulder or tracking every minute of your day. You will have more autonomy at Tortuga than at your previous jobs. You must be able to turn this freedom into results to be successful on a remote team.
• The Right Ambition: The right ambition is ambition for the company, not for yourself. If Tortuga does well, you will do well. The opposite is not necessarily true. Most of your projects will overlap with one or more teammates. You should be able to work together towards a common, company-wide goal even when you disagree with the strategy.
• Written Communication: Everyone on a remote team must be a strong writer. We have video calls and team retreats but communicate far more often in writing (Asana, email, Slack, Google Docs, and Notion). You must be able to communicate clearly and concisely in writing.

Do Not Apply...

• If you aren’t excited about travel. Our team is passionate about the problems we work on every day and our mission of making travel easier.
• If you need the structure of working at a big company. We are a small, remote team. We depend on policies and culture, not a large HR department of bureaucrats. If you need something done, do it.
• If you need the credit. We’ve built a humble, "no ego" team and only intend to hire people who fit that mold.
• Without a proven track record and existing portfolio. We want to see and discuss the machines you’ve built and your work. We want to get to know you through your writing.

Read Before Applying

The following articles are supplementary reading. The first link will help you get an interview. The rest are meant to give you insight into why and how we work.

• How to Get an Interview
• Why We Work Remotely
• The Tortuga Marketing Machine

Location

This role is remote, but a 4+ hour overlap with US Pacific time is preferred as our team is on Pacific and Mountain time.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary: The base salary starts at $105,000. At Tortuga, we calculate salaries by formula, not by negotiation. The formula includes base pay (based on Payscale and Glassdoor data) with multipliers for job level and tenure at Tortuga.
• Remote Work: Tortuga is—and always has been—100% remote. We are not remote temporarily or out of necessity. We’ve worked remotely for over a decade and have designed our team and systems to work this way. Remote is who we are.
• Insurance: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance. Tortuga pays 100% of your premiums and 50% of your dependents' premiums.
• Retirement: Tortuga matches 100% of your 401k retirement contributions up to 4% of your salary.
• Parental Leave: Take up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited Vacation: You decide how much of a break you need and when. Just promise to tell us about your trip when you get back.
• Team Retreats: We meet in person to spend time together and plan the company's future. Past retreats include Prague, Austin, Lisbon, New Orleans, and Montreal.
• Free Gear: All the bags and accessories you need for your future travels.

Learn more about working at Tortuga.