Customer Success Lead

Instant is hiring a Customer Success Lead to own and scale the entire post-sale customer experience. Instants needs a leader who has seen this movie before - someone who has personally built and scaled a Customer Success org in a very fast growing startup.

This is not a pure people-management role. It’s a builder-operator role. You will be personally in the data, personally designing playbooks, personally making hiring and firing decisions, and personally accountable for retention and expansion. You will own the entire post-sale motion and replace firefighting with systems, standards, and a team that runs.

Instant is the world’s first AI-powered marketing manager built for ecommerce. Today, we’re quickly becoming the most important piece of technology to help the fastest growing brands on the planet to significantly scale their revenue — on autopilot. We're reinventing how brands bring their lost shoppers back to purchase through AI-powered email and SMS retention marketing. Our ambition is to be just as important and essential as Meta when it comes to helping an ecommerce brand scale.

This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. Today, we service over 1,000 of the worlds fastest growing brands like ThirdLove, David Protein, July Luggage and Meshki, with Instant’s products generating over 30% of our customers annualised revenue. We have strong product-market fit, adding more than $1M in ARR every month, 100M’s of shoppers interacting with Instant everyday, and the backing of world-class investors with over $35M raised from Blackbird, Hummingbird and Hubspot. We’re scaling fast.

The work is ambitious, the talent bar is high, and the opportunity for growth - personal, professional, and financial - is unmatched. Instant would be the fastest moving company you’d ever be apart of in your career. So, if you consider yourself ambitious, we invite you to join us!

Own CS Performance End-to-End

• Define what “success” looks like for every CSM: clear, simple, measurable targets they can see and act on daily (customer engagement, upsell/expansion, product adoption, retention).
• Build dashboards and operating rhythms so leadership can see performance at a glance and CSMs know exactly what they need to do each month to win.
• Own NRR, expansion revenue, churn reduction, and adoption metrics. Know the math of the business cold.

Design and Scale the CS Operating System

• Architect the book-of-business strategy so new CSMs get set up for success (smaller, focused books of ~60 accounts) rather than being thrown into 150 accounts and set on fire.
• Create repeatable playbooks for onboarding, adoption, expansion, churn prevention, and renewal.
• Build triage and resolution systems so problems get solved at the right level, fast, without unnecessary escalation.
• Design a CS org that can scale with the revenue and headcount growth ahead.

Live in the Data

• Be personally comfortable inside data tools (HubSpot for example), slicing churn by segment, cohort, and motion (self-serve vs. sales-led), validating or killing hypotheses with data, not gut feel.
• Define and track leading indicators: engagement, feature adoption, time-to-value.
• Translate analysis into clear narratives for the executive team: what’s happening, why, and what you’re doing about it.

Build and Lead the Team

• Hire, coach, and when necessary, fire. Raise the talent bar relentlessly.
• Hold your team accountable to clear standards. Be loud about what’s working and what’s not.
• Be opinionated about who should be on the team, what the team should focus on, and what resources you need. Then go execute.
• Turn your team into product experts.
• Partner cross-functionally with the CEO, COO, Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering on go-to-market, onboarding, and product issues.

Experience

• You’ve held a CS leadership role at a B2B SaaS company with ~$30K-$1M ACV and a volume motion (not 5 mega-enterprise accounts).
• You’ve personally scaled a CS org through the “10-to-100” journey, from low-double-digit ARR to high-double/low-triple-digit ARR. You’ve built or significantly upgraded CS processes, not just maintained a mature machine someone else built.
• You know the math: NRR, logo retention, expansion rate, time-to-value, cost-to-serve. You don’t just track these numbers. You build the systems that move them.

Operating Style

• You’re obsessed with the problem, not the solution. You dig in, diagnose, and then design, not the other way around.
• You’re an operator first. You’re in HubSpot pulling your own data, not waiting for someone to send you a report. You identify the problem, frame it, and drive the fix before anyone asks you to.
• You come with a plan, not just a problem. When something breaks at 7am, you’ve diagnosed it, pulled in the right person, and have a fix in motion by 9am. Your update to leadership is “here’s the problem and here’s the solution,” not “what do we do?”
• You’re direct, candid, coachable, and comfortable being challenged. You also challenge up. You own the problem and the plan. Your posture is: “I know how to get us from 10 to 100. This is the math, this is the playbook, these are the resources I need.” Then you go execute.
• You work hard and move fast. You thrive in high-pressure, high-accountability environments with aggressive targets and limited resources.

The expected On-Target Earnings (OTE) range for this role is $200K - $230K USD (70/30 base and variable split) equity. Actual compensation will depend on experience and skills. 

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including employee equity, competitive compensation, generous PTO, Medical, Vision, Dental coverage, $1K annual wellness stipend and daily team lunch. This role is hybrid, based in our New York office on W 21ST, 3 days per week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday).