Product Manager (Followers App)

About this role

Product Manager (Followers App)

$250,000 USD/year·NYC·On-site · Full-time (40 hrs/week)

You've studied how Justin Welsh built a one-person business on LinkedIn. You've taken apart the Ship 30 for 30 playbook from Nicholas Cole and Dickie Bush. You know David Perell's case for writing online better than most people who took his course. You know why one post takes off and another dies, and you have the product sense to turn that knowledge into software.

Founders School is a 4-year program where teenagers build real companies targeting $1M in profit by graduation. Every one of our students builds an audience, because an audience is the unfair advantage that makes everything else easier: customers, hires, investors, and opportunities. The Followers App is how they do it. Students post daily using proven templates and topics, and an in-app coach diagnoses their posts and helps them understand what's working, without ever writing for them.

We're hiring a Product Manager to own the Followers App end to end: the tools that help teenagers build massive audiences. You don't write PRDs and hand them off. You have the taste and experience to know how this kind of app should work, and the AI skills to build it.

The Role

You own the Followers App: its users, its roadmap, its quality, and whether it actually turns teenagers who've never posted into creators with real, growing audiences. You bring the playbooks of the best online writers and creators, and the product sense to package them into something a 15-year-old will use every single day.

You're with the students every week, watching them write, post, and react to their numbers, and seeing where they get stuck or give up. You're with the program team, turning how we teach audience building into what the app has to do. And you're with engineering, turning all of that into shipped features on a weekly cadence. You build alongside the engineers, not just direct them.

What you will be doing

• Sitting with students as they use the Followers App, watching real usage instead of reading survey results. You know why a student stopped posting before the analytics do.
• Building the daily posting loop: templates, topics, hooks, feedback, and the habits that keep a teenager shipping content every day.
• Making the in-app coach great. It should diagnose what's working and what isn't as well as the best writing coach would, while never writing for the student.
• Bringing in the best of the creator world (Ship 30-style daily writing, Justin Welsh-style content systems, David Perell-style writing online) and adapting it for teenagers.
• Prototyping features yourself. You build the first working version and bring it to engineering as a starting point, not a wishlist.
• Owning the roadmap and cadence, and keeping the Followers App's connections to the rest of our software clean, so a student's expertise feeds their content and their audience feeds their business.

What you will NOT be doing

• Writing PRDs and throwing them over the wall. You build.
• Building a scheduling tool. Buffer and Typefully already exist. This app has a job: teach teenagers to build an audience.
• Writing posts for students, or building features that do. Students write their own content. The app coaches; it doesn't ghostwrite.
• Running a Jira board as your primary output.
• Coaching students on their businesses. Guides own that.
• Sitting remote. This role is in the building with the students and the team.

What this looks like in practice

Monday in the student space. Three students posted every day last week and got almost no engagement. You read their posts, see that every hook is buried in the second sentence, and by Monday night you've prototyped a coach check that catches it. Thursday it's live.

Wednesday deep dive. One student's post blew up. You break down why, turn the pattern into a new template, and test it with five other students by Friday.

Friday shipping review. You know which of this week's changes students actually used, how posting streaks and follower growth moved, and which feature nobody touched. You cut two things that don't grow audiences and add one that does.

The three things that matter most

1. Students build real audiences. Followers, engagement, and inbound opportunities that grow month over month.
2. Students keep posting. Daily habits that stick, because the app makes writing feel doable and the feedback makes them better.
3. The app ships fast and plays well with the rest of our software. Weekly cadence, clean hand-offs, nothing breaking downstream.

What this becomes

At 6 months, the Followers App has a weekly shipping rhythm, students are posting daily, and you know exactly which templates and coach feedback move the numbers.

At 12 months, the first cohort has real audiences built on the app, and some of our students have followings bigger than most adults in their industry. The app is ready to scale to new campuses.

As Founders School grows to thousands of students, the Followers App becomes its own product line, and possibly a product creators outside the school want too. This seat grows into leading it.

Candidate requirements

• You are deeply immersed in the online writing and creator world. You know the work of Justin Welsh, Nicholas Cole, Dickie Bush, David Perell, and others like them, and you understand why their systems work.
• You have deep product sense and an AI-native builder's toolkit. You ship working software with AI as your leverage. This is non-negotiable.
• You have shipped real software that real people used, as a founder, an engineer, or a PM who genuinely built.
• You write working code. You don't need to be a career software engineer, but you can prototype independently and hold your own with engineers.
• You've built an audience yourself, or helped others build one, and you can show the results.
• You are willing to work on-site (relocation support provided) and are legally authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to have

• You've built a creator tool, writing tool, or content product that other people use.
• A personal audience on X, LinkedIn, or a newsletter.
• Experience building consumer software where usage data is unforgiving.
• Experience working with or building for young people.

What we explicitly don't need

• A career PM who has never built anything and manages through process.
• Someone who's never posted online. If you haven't felt what it's like to hit publish and watch the numbers, you can't build this for students.
• Growth hackers chasing vanity metrics. We want students with real audiences, not inflated follower counts.
• Anyone who needs to be remote. There is no remote version of this role.

If you've studied how the best creators built their audiences and want to build the tool that helps teenagers do the same, apply now.