VP Brand & Marketing

VP Brand & Marketing at SimplyCodes and Product.ai. This letter explains why the seat exists and what it owns.

I run Product.ai and SimplyCodes. We spent three years building something our industry does not have: a verification engine that actually tests coupon codes, at scale, before you ever see them. On the open web, roughly one in four codes works. In an independent test of 500 stores, we had working codes for more than 65 percent of them; our competitors, under 30. And we publish our misses. So our brand claim is four words and fully testable: codes that actually work.

Here is the opportunity. The proof layer exists. The engine runs, the numbers are real, the receipts pile up daily. What nobody owns yet is putting that proof in front of the people the world already trusts: the deal creators, the reviewers, the personal-finance voices, the TV segments. Today I carry the claim in public myself. I am one person, and this claim deserves a machine. And the claim is bigger than coupons: SimplyCodes is the first working proof of the company thesis, verified truth for commerce, and the same seat carries that story into Product.ai as it launches. One thesis, two brands, one voice building both. Product.ai points the same verification engine at everything beyond coupons: verified product truth for people and for AI agents.

The system you would need to model. A verification engine that tests codes and publishes its success rate, misses included. An open-web baseline it beats by a wide, measurable margin. Three trust networks that turn proof into demand: AI answers that cite us, trusted human voices that test us on camera, and the product itself proving the claim in the first session. A glass-house policy: we publish how we rank and how we make money, because a verification brand's only fatal failure is getting caught concealing. And behind all of it, Cortex, our shared AI brain: the same governed system runs the company and is the product family we sell; every operator works through it, and it answers its own questions from more than 8,600 documents. If you cannot hold that whole system in your head and see where it is going, this is not your seat.

What you would own. The Witness Engine, end to end: the Open Checkout Test run by trusted voices at scale, pre-registered store lists, tester-run, filmed, unsupervised, misses welcomed. Brand demand for both brands: SimplyCodes today, where the receipts exist, and the Product.ai story as it launches. And the claim itself, carried in public, so proof moments ship monthly without me in the frame. What the brands stand for stays with me for now; earn the receipts and the pen conversation is real. In your first quarter we put that in writing: a co-signed charter for the seat, one number that proves it works, and a written line between what you decide alone and what you bring to me first. That is the model we run here. You would land on a seated team: distribution channels have an owner, content production runs, community runs. You are the brand and marketing leader those lanes plug into, and the claim's second public voice.

Who you are. You do not believe marketing claims, including ours. You test them, and when they hold, you cannot shut up about it. You have built or run a growth machine somewhere in this world before (coupons, cashback, deals), or you have built a real audience by proving things on camera. You work as a player-coach: one person plus AI leverage plus a seated team, not a headcount empire. And you write clearly, because writing is thinking.

Who this is not for: if your instinct is to buy awareness before proving the claim, this seat will frustrate you. If you would soften "codes that actually work" into safer words, the forty-eight-hour prove-or-break will catch it. If you talk belief but will not spend two weeks shopping with the product on your own receipts, do not apply. And if you need a large team to feel like a leader, this is the wrong company: we are fewer than twenty operators, founder-owned and profitable since 2009 with no investors and no board, out-shipping organizations ten times our size.

How we evaluate. Four gates, and the process is the job: an async video screen, about fifteen minutes on your own time; a call with me; two weeks shopping with SimplyCodes, after which you present your own receipts and the campaign you would build; then a forty-eight hour challenge to prove or break our claim, followed by a paid two-week trial where you run one real witnessed test end to end. No gate can be charmed. That is the point. If this reads like your work but your resume does not look the part, send it anyway. I hire on the work and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation and ownership. Total target compensation: $400,000 to $500,000. Base salary $220,000 to $260,000. The base is a real salary, not an equity IOU. On top of it, the ownership units are Profits Interest Units: real ownership from day one, a zero-dollar strike, and capital-gains treatment when they pay out. You share in the profits each year, paid from real free cash flow, and once a year you can sell a slice back to the company for cash. We cover family health premiums in full, and this structure is built to mint partners. We pay for outcomes, and the ownership is legally real. Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles - in person, five days a week. The rooms are real rooms.

Apply. Apply at the link. No cover letter.

Michael Quoc, founder, SimplyCodes and Product.ai