A Head of Content who you can hand the whole thing to, and the SEO/AEO, insights and engineering writers beneath them. Headhunted from people whose companies won because of their writing, tested on the page before you see them, and run in parallel so you are reviewing candidates inside two weeks. We don't think in quarters either.
Your call, played back. If anything here is off, say so on Slack Connect and we fix the brief before the first approach goes out.
Hercules is where businesses build their own software: CRMs, ERPs, HR and payroll, inventory and transportation management, hyper-custom to the company that builds it. A company-wide operating system instead of a stack of SaaS. You have gone from $1M to $20M in revenue in eight months, almost entirely through paid, and just closed a big Series A.
Paid cannot carry the next leg on its own. Your philosophy is to hire the best person in the world for one specific strategy, give them three to six months, then scale or kill it. Content is the exception: it is not a test. It has to work, and because of research, creation and Google and ChatGPT indexing, it has to start now to show up by December or January.
Today the marketing team is you plus one performance marketer, and there is zero content. You want four content roles and you are indifferent about whether the Head of Content or the SEO/AEO writer lands first. Three things matter above everything: real writing craft (not AI slop, and not "pretty good"), speed with a shipping mentality, and enough technical sense to explain a database to a plumbing business. You will overpay for the right people. The wrong people are a waste of your time.
"I want to hire the best person in the world for a specific strategy."
Brendan Falk, 5 October
"Someone who can report to me, who I fully trust, who can go and disappear and come back and all of these things are magically solved. Incredibly well."
Brendan Falk, on the Head of Content
"Show me 10 or 20 articles that you've written. If you can't, something's wrong. If you can and it's AI slop, something's wrong."
Brendan Falk, 5 October
You said you were indifferent between the Head of Content and the SEO/AEO writer. Our answer: run both at once. Neither waits for the other, and the first four weeks of SEO strategy sit with you, as you offered.
Head of Content and SEO/AEO writer start together. Calibration call with you, Slack Connect open, two scorecards agreed. First candidates targeted within 10 days.
Your 15-minute calls, portfolio reviews, the paid work trial on the writer. We keep both pipelines warm so the trial never stalls an offer.
Briefed with the new Head of Content so they inherit the editorial standard, not just a job description. Same terms, same board.
Your current growth lead keeps crushing Meta and Google while we find the data-driven, player-coach lead you described. More writers and programmatic SEO follow at 15%.
On your inbound. You will generate applicants from your job platform, your tweets and your investors. Send them all to us. We screen every one through the same scorecard and the same work-sample standard, so you have one pipeline and one board instead of two channels competing. Same terms whichever door a candidate came through.
One scorecard per seat, one shared board. Here is who we are looking for and how we test each one before they reach you.
Your editorial and strategy leader. Reports to you, owns the content roadmap across SEO/AEO, insights and engineering, does the reviews so you don't, and hires and develops the writers. A player-coach who is arguably the best writer in the room and knows the only way to scale is through people.
A portfolio that spans content types, with the outcomes each piece drove. A live editorial exercise: we hand them a mediocre draft of a Hercules article and 45 minutes, and watch how they edit, what they cut and how they explain why. Strategy interview on building a content engine from zero in a technical product with non-technical buyers. Evidence of having hired and managed writers. Recorded, scored, on your board.
Owns the pages that capture demand and get cited by AI: "what is a CRM", "build your own ERP", the comparisons and the long tail. Writes for humans, structures for search and for answer engines, and ships 10 to 20 pieces a week once the machine is built. Ideally has come through a HubSpot, Semrush or Ahrefs calibre content programme.
Ten to twenty published articles with traffic or rankings attached, exactly as you asked. A live brief: one Hercules use-case page, 60 minutes, AI tools allowed, judged on judgement, structure and voice. Strategy questions on keyword and topic selection for a brand new domain. Scored across 10 to 12 SEO and AEO sub-topics.
Millions of users and millions of applications is a dataset nobody else has. This writer turns it into reports and insight pieces that rank, get shared and get Hercules into the conversation. Part analyst, part editor. The Peter Walker shape, built from the data you already have.
A small anonymised dataset and 60 minutes: find the story, write the opening 400 words and the headline chart caption. Portfolio of published insight pieces with reach. Interview on rigour, sourcing and what they do with a weak dataset.
Shares how a very strong technical team solves hard problems, on the product side and deep in the engineering. Technical enough to earn the respect of your engineers, clear enough that a non-technical founder follows it. Has shipped technical writing for a developer or platform company before.
A live exercise: take a technical concept your team cares about and write the first 500 words of the post for two audiences, engineers and founders. Portfolio review of technical posts and docs. We check they can talk to your CTO without flinching.
Insanely data-driven: CAC, CAC payback, ROAS, predictive LTV, and can model the trade-offs out loud. Structured experimentation, not spaghetti at the wall, because the budget is heading to tens of millions. Strongest on demand gen (Meta, YouTube, Reddit) and strong on search. Builds a creative machine with AI and third parties. Has led performance at a Canva or HubSpot scale software company and managed five or more people. Agency background welcome if the software experience is real.
A case walk-through of a spend scale-up they led, with the numbers. A live trade-off exercise: two channels, a budget and a payback target, talk us through the decision. Creative review of work they shipped. References on the leadership side.
Craft. They can tell you why a sentence works, name the passive voice when they see it, and choose the imperative mood on purpose. Not "pretty good". Really, really good, and able to write to a structure they didn't invent.
Speed and shipping. They use AI to accelerate, not to replace the thinking. They launch, talk to the people reading it, learn what worked, iterate, and move on. 10 to 20 pieces a week for the SEO/AEO seat once the system is built.
Technical sense. Enough to explain what a database is to a plumbing business owner with an analogy that lands. Deep for the engineering writer, working-level for everyone else.
Where we look. Person over company, as you said. We go after people whose companies won because of their content, not despite it: the Monday.com shape, not the Anthropic shape. For SEO/AEO specifically, alumni of HubSpot, Semrush and Ahrefs grade programmes. For the Head of Content, people who built an engine from nothing in a technical product with a non-technical buyer.
You asked for specific hires, not client logos. These are the ones closest to your seats. Names and profiles on Slack Connect or on the call, where we can share them without breaching anyone's privacy.
We placed Semrush's organic growth lead, in effect the head of organic content, who was promoted to Head of Growth almost immediately and ran content across both Semrush and Backlinko. The closest thing we have to your Head of Content, inside one of the best SEO content programmes ever built.
Repeat placements of senior content strategists into Foundation, the content marketing agency serving enterprise B2B software brands. Strategists who build editorial engines for other people's products for a living.
A specialist SEO content writing company (owned by a former business partner of Josh's) produced content for brands including Semrush and Adobe. We placed a large share of its in-house writers. Writers who had to clear that bar every day.
For Chris Dreyer's legal SEO and paid agency. On the record: "They have transformed our hiring process, allowing us to find and recruit the top 1% of talent."
257 candidates assessed, top 10 submitted, 3 to final, 70% of submissions reached interview against an industry average of 20 to 30%. They came back, and so did their PE portfolio.
Hard technical hires, Python on the whiteboard, for one of the sharpest minds in search. Proof we can vet technical depth, which your engineering writer will need.
The candidates stood out and we quickly interviewed people who felt a level above.
Kevin Gibbons, Founder, RE:signalFirstly, they do NOT spray and pray. They take a super methodical approach to first aligning on what the role needs.
Chirag Kulkarni, Founder, TACOSearch For Hire combined the rigor of great search firms with access to an exceptional talent pool in our target vertical. This is a very rare combination.
Matt Larson, Head of Operations, HerringboneHeadhunters, not a recruitment agency. Nothing gets posted. Slack Connect from day one, structured updates, and only people who have cleared your bar reach your calendar.
You, Josh and Daris. We agree the scorecards, the writing exercises and the voice references you want us to judge against, plus the structure you believe is right so we can test for it. 45 minutes, then we disappear.
52,000 search and content marketers in our private network plus targeted lists: HubSpot, Semrush and Ahrefs alumni for SEO/AEO, content leaders who built engines at hustling tier-two software companies, data-led publishers and research teams for insights, developer platforms for the engineering seat. Your inbound flows into the same funnel.
$1M to $20M in eight months, a fresh Series A, content treated as a first-class priority and paid like it, a CEO who reads the work. We build that into an employer value proposition that gets passive A-players onto a call.
Portfolio with results, live writing exercise, recorded interview, 60/40 scorecard. Nobody reaches you without clearing the bar you set on the calibration call.
Your 15-minute call that becomes 30 when it's going well. Portfolio review. Paid work trial, three articles, reviewed together. Offer. We schedule, chase and keep candidates warm so the trial never stalls the hire.
Structured daily or weekly reports on Slack Connect: calls held, who passed, who didn't and why. If a week goes by with nobody good enough, you hear that too, with the reasons, so we recalibrate rather than drift.
Exactly as agreed on the call. Silver on every role, with the rate stepping down once you pass five roles with us.
Gold is 25% of first-year salary with a 12-month replacement guarantee. You said the work trial makes it unnecessary and we agree for the writer seats. It is there on any single role if you want it, the Head of Content for example.
On your ROI framing. If content is what gets you from $20M to $50M before the next round, the fee on a Head of Content is a rounding error against a slower raise. We priced for speed and volume rather than squeezing each role, which is what you asked for.
Full terms follow in the agreement.
You wanted to finish your other agency conversations today and tomorrow and see specific hires. The hires are above and we'll walk you through the people on Slack Connect. When you're ready, the terms follow the same day and two searches start the moment the activations land.