🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade hiring briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.

RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem. ⬇️ SEE EXAMPLE ⬇️

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HARRY’S TEARDOWN: Cents is a New York-based vertical SaaS company that, in March 2026, closed a $140M Series C led by Sumeru Equity Partners ($110M primary plus a $30M secondary tender offer). Camber Creek, who led the Series B, came back in. The CEO has previously told Axios that the company is EBITDA positive, was in the mid-eight-figure revenue range as of August 2024, and growing at triple-digit annual rates.

Public penetration data from the Series C release says Cents now powers about 1 in 6 U.S. laundromats — roughly 4,500 retail locations plus over 7,000 shared laundry rooms in multifamily and university properties — and processes roughly $1B in payments annually. Customer retention is above 99%.

The firm’s CEO has cited Toast as the analog in interviews.

The model is the same: Take a fragmented, technologically-stranded SMB vertical, ship one operating system that combines POS + on-machine payments + pickup-and-delivery + AI receptionist + marketing automation + memberships + proprietary hardware, and own the operator’s entire technology relationship.

Cents is the only player in laundry that bundles all of that — and the Laundroworks acquisition (August 2024) put their hardware on more than 250,000 devices, which creates a physical switching cost no SaaS-only competitor can replicate.

Now — about the category size: The “coin laundry” line item in the standard industry tables is about $6.8B with a sleepy ~1.6% CAGR. That’s the number that scares people off.

But it’s the wrong number.

The total U.S. garment care services market is roughly $9.8B (2024), growing at ~6.6% CAGR through 2030, and the CEO’s own TAM count is ~90,000 retail garment care rooftops before you even touch the shared-laundry-room market in multifamily, hotels, and universities (where he’s said the addressable population is in the hundreds of thousands).

Cents is on roughly 15% of the laundromat-only addressable market today. The Series C is the war chest to take that to 30–40%. The job exists because the math says they can.

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Here’s the customer in plain language.

Cents does not sell to the consumer doing laundry. They sell to the operator — the SMB owner running anywhere from one to fifty laundromats.

There are three buyer profiles, and a marketer has to be fluent in all of them: the independent owner-operator (often immigrant-owned, single location, deeply community-referred); the multi-unit builder (2–15 locations, ROI-driven, peer-influenced, wants dashboards); and the PE-backed multi-store operator (10+ locations, enterprise procurement, RFP-driven, longer cycle).

Then there’s a fourth buyer that almost no candidate sees on first read of the JD — the multifamily property manager who runs shared laundry rooms across REIT portfolios. That’s a completely different sales motion (enterprise B2B, not SMB inbound), and it’s already 7,000+ rooms on the platform. Building two parallel GTM motions on one brand is part of the role.

Why a great Marketer should really want this gig:

The economics are extraordinary by any vertical-SaaS standard. At 99%+ retention and the modular cross-sell architecture (Transact → Connect → Dispatch → Assist → Accelerate → Memberships), the lifetime gross profit per location is structurally enormous.

The reason Sumeru wrote a $140M check is that the math works — and the marketing team has barely begun to exploit the proprietary data asset behind it.

Cents processes $1B in annual payments and sits on the richest behavioral dataset in laundry. No competitor can replicate that. The next VP gets to build the content engine, the partner-enablement program, and the category narrative that turns “Cents” into the way operators think about their own industry — the way “Toast” became the way restaurants think about restaurant tech.

Here’s the leadership credibility.

The CEO is a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder who built and sold a campus-marketplace startup (Modo Labs acquired it in 2019) before starting Cents. The CPO has been with him since the first feature shipped. The Sr. VP of Sales (the VP of Marketing’s peer, both report to the SVP of Sales and Marketing) has built the inside sales engine that took Cents from a few hundred locations to ~4,500.

The hiring manager — the SVP of Sales and Marketing — is the unified GTM owner the board hired ahead of Series C; they are running marketing as a pipeline-and-brand function inside a sales-led revenue org, not as a stand-alone CMO seat.

Read that carefully: This VP role is a pipeline-and-brand role, not a vanity-brand role. The candidate who walks in expecting a peer-of-CEO seat over product, pricing, and category strategy will collide with the org chart on day one.

The candidate who walks in ready to ship a quantifiable pipeline lift in the first 90 days, and earn the room for category-design work in the second half of year one, will own this company’s marketing for the next decade.

There’s a lot more I won’t put in a public posting — the unit-economics ratios that explain why the Series C cleared at the valuation it did, the math behind the 60% revenue-lift product claim and what an incoming VP should do about it on day one, and a brand-narrative-drift problem I found across three official Cents press releases inside a 12-month window that the new VP is going to need to lock down before doing anything else.

Hit me up if you’d like to buy my research on this teardown.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig.com™

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ABOUT THE ROLE:

You will lead all marketing for a vertical SaaS company that runs on roughly 4,500 laundromat locations, 7,000+ shared laundry rooms, $1B in annual payments processed, and 99%+ retention — with $140M of fresh Series C capital from Sumeru Equity Partners to deploy against an estimated 90,000-rooftop garment care TAM.

Your mission will be to:

1. institutionalize what’s already working into a documented, repeatable GTM system,
2. build the brand and category narrative that makes Cents the default answer to “how do I run a modern laundry business,” and
3. reliably contribute to pipeline growth and deal velocity in a sales-led revenue function. You will report to the SVP of Sales and Marketing.

THIS IS NOT a turnaround. Cents is profitable, growing, and sits on category-defining data.

Marketing reports into the SVP of Sales and Marketing. The role is a pipeline-and-brand role, not a vanity-brand role. Real things are working. The mandate is to make them legible, repeatable, and scalable — without breaking what got Cents here.

AREAS OF OVERSIGHT:

Institutionalize the GTM Motion

• Audit and document the campaigns, channels, hooks, offers, and lifecycle triggers that are currently driving operator acquisition. Codify them into a campaign-brief library and a sales enablement library that the rest of the organization will actually use — replacing person-dependent heroics with system-dependent process.
• Stand up a single hypothesis-driven testing protocol in HubSpot and Salesforce: stated hypothesis, sample-size requirement, pre-committed kill criterion, logged result. Make it the standard for every campaign brief inside your team and every paid-media test inside agency partners.
• Own the marketing operating rhythm: weekly creative + pipeline reviews, monthly channel reviews, quarterly business reviews to the SVP and CEO with leading and lagging KPIs that tie to ARR — not vanity metrics.

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Define and Defend the Category Narrative

• Lock a CEO-approved Brand Narrative Document in your first 30 days: one descriptor for what Cents is, three approved proof points cleared for public use, one Big Domino sentence the entire company can recite, and one approved description per product module. Every press release, sales deck, distributor kit, podcast appearance, and LinkedIn post clears this document before publication.
• Frame, name, and claim “the all-in-one laundry business platform” the way Toast claimed “restaurant tech.” Coin and propagate operator-vocabulary terms — laundry stack, machine intelligence, garment care platform, contactless laundry — across PR, conference panels, content, and reference assets until competitors are forced to respond in your language.
• Pull the CEO and Co-Founder onto a deliberate thought-leadership cadence (LinkedIn, podcasts, trade press, Clean Show keynotes) that signals category leadership at the founder level. Build the supporting “State of U.S. Laundry” benchmark report on top of Cents’ proprietary $1B-per-year payments dataset — an asset no competitor can replicate.

Drive Pipeline With Sales

• Lead full-funnel marketing across paid search, paid social, organic SEO/AEO, content, email and SMS lifecycle, webinars, trade events, and partner channels. Calibrate creative against Schwartz awareness levels — unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, most-aware — and stop running product-aware demo CTAs at audiences that have never thought about laundry SaaS.
• Partner with Sales and RevOps to write the formal ICP records for the indie owner-operator, the multi-unit builder, the PE-backed multi-store operator, and the multifamily property manager. Each ICP gets a hook matrix, an offer stack, a channel mix, an objection-handling guide, and a tagged segment in HubSpot and Salesforce.
• Build the first-touch attribution view that the SVP and CFO can actually defend: lead source by channel, MQL-to-opportunity conversion by ICP, pipeline contribution by campaign, and ACV by product module. Manage marketing spend with discipline: scale what compounds, kill what doesn’t, and report payback period and LTGP-to-CAC by acquisition motion (self-serve vs. inside-sales-assisted vs. enterprise) at every QBR.

Elevate Partner & Distributor Marketing

• Build a Partner Brand Portal that turns commercial laundry equipment dealers into Cents sellers at near-zero CAC. Locked one-pagers per module, a co-branded “New Laundromat Investor Guide,” ROI calculators calibrated to a typical 15-machine new-build, and partner-specific hook libraries that meet the operator at the buying stage the partner sees them.
• Run co-marketing motions with the Laundroworks (hardware), Card Concepts (payments), and LaundroBOOST (marketing services) partner programs — and any new partners signed under the Accelerate Partner Program — with a single locked messaging framework so that every partner tells the same Cents story to the same operators.
• Stand up a structured distributor enablement cadence: quarterly co-branded webinars, monthly one-pagers on what’s new, an exclusive Cents Partner channel for early-access content. Make marketing a reason partners choose Cents over the alternative — and a reason they stay.

Professionalize Product Marketing

• Own GTM strategy for every module launch and every cross-sell campaign across Transact, Dispatch, Connect, Assist, Accelerate, Memberships, Kiosk, and Pro Site. Translate features into operator-facing outcomes via battle cards, pitch decks, competitive positioning, and pricing-and-packaging input that goes to the CPO with the data behind it.
• Solve the front-door friction at trycents.com/pricing. Seven discrete modules at seven different price points creates Hick’s Law decision paralysis on the operator’s first visit. Work with the CPO and CEO to design and A/B test a simplified entry-path architecture (Starter / Growth / Full-Stack) without touching individual module pricing — and measure the conversion lift at the 30-day mark.
• Own lifecycle messaging end-to-end. Build the trigger-based nurture architecture in HubSpot — module-activation triggers, equipment-refresh triggers, second-location-opening triggers, abandoned-demo triggers — that turns the dominant SMB SaaS objection (“not right now”) into a re-engagement system instead of an aged-out lead pool.

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Build a Durable Marketing Organization

• Hire, develop, and lead a 5–15 person marketing team. The likely first hires: a Demand Gen lead (paid + lifecycle), a Product Marketing lead, a Content/PR lead, and a Partner Marketing lead. Use blind references and the “would you enthusiastically rehire this person?” question on every senior hire.
• Manage agencies and external partners (paid creative, PR, SEO/AEO, content production) to clear performance standards with documented kill criteria — not retainer drift.
• Run the operating rhythm: weekly stand-ups, monthly channel reviews, quarterly planning with clear campaign briefs and priorities, an annual plan that ties marketing investment directly to ARR contribution. Write the marketing organization’s playbook as you go — so that the next person who fills a seat on your team inherits a system, not a vibe.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig.com™

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QUALIFICATIONS:

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION:

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, communications, or a related field (or equivalent operating experience).

FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES — SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE:

• 10+ years of B2B marketing leadership experience in vertical SaaS, enterprise software, or SMB-targeted SaaS — with documented experience scaling marketing at expansion-stage / Series B-to-Series C companies through a similar order-of-magnitude growth jump.
• Proven success building and leading marketing teams of 5–15 people, across at least three of these functions: demand gen, product marketing, content, partner marketing, lifecycle / CRM, brand and PR, and marketing analytics.
• Deep product marketing experience across complex, multi-product SaaS platforms — battle cards, competitive positioning, pricing-and-packaging input, and lifecycle messaging across the customer journey. Bonus points for having owned the front-door pricing page and shipped a tier-simplification A/B test that lifted conversion.
• Demonstrated ability to translate positioning and messaging into measurable pipeline and revenue impact. You can show up with a one-pager that maps last-quarter’s campaign spend to first-touch pipeline by ICP, MQL-to-opportunity conversion by channel, ACV by product, and payback period by acquisition motion — and defend every number in the room with the CFO.
• Strong analytical mindset. You read unit economics through the LTGP-to-CAC lens (and you know whether your number is built on logo retention, gross revenue retention, or net revenue retention), you treat NRR as the most honest report card on lifecycle marketing, and you argue for more spend when the ratio supports it — not less.
• Experience marketing to both end customers and channel or distribution partners, including building a partner enablement program from scratch and proving that partner-sourced revenue moved on the back of it.
• Fluency in the modern B2B SaaS stack — Salesforce, HubSpot, Chilipiper, Gong, Looker — and in AI-powered marketing tools used to compress production time, sharpen ICP intelligence, and personalize lifecycle communication. Use AI to think faster and ship more, not as a research toy with no revenue tie-out.
• Equal parts systems thinker and storyteller: you can document the campaign-brief template the team will use for the next five years and write the one PEACE-style soundbite — Problem, Empathy, Answer, Change, End Result — that every sales rep and distributor partner can recite from memory.
• You are comfortable owning revenue outcomes — pipeline contribution, deal velocity, NRR, partner-sourced revenue — not just brand metrics.

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT / BEHAVIORAL COMPETENCIES:

• You can lead through influence in a sales-led revenue function. Reporting into a SVP of Sales and Marketing means winning trust by shipping pipeline before earning the room for category-design work.
• You can build the brand narrative document, get it CEO-approved, and govern its enforcement across press releases, sales decks, distributor kits, and LinkedIn — without becoming the brand police.
• You can collaborate cross-functionally with the CPO on packaging and the front-door pricing page, with the SVP of Sales on ICP definition and pipeline attribution, with RevOps on the data-quality audit your unit-economics math depends on, and with the VP of Self Serve on the PLG motion that runs in parallel with inside sales.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS:

• High integrity. Anything you publish will be quoted back to you by a prospect, a partner, a journalist, or a competitor.
• Self-directed. The SVP and the CEO will set the destination. You will architect the route.
• Strong communicator at three audiences: the board, the team, and the prospect. Each one needs different language.
• Hypothesis-driven and analytically biased. You don’t run campaigns by trade-show calendar. You run them by stated hypothesis with a pre-committed kill criterion.
• Resilient under noise. Cents is at the inflection point where everything goes faster, more things break, and the founder is on every channel at once. You can ship through that.
• Entrepreneurial orientation. The platform is profitable, the moat is real, and the playbook for category creation is in your hands. Treat the role like equity.
• Operator-vocabulary fluent — or willing to become so quickly. The community uses words like route, coin box, attendant, WDF, Speed Queen, Clean Show, CLA. Generic SaaS marketing language in the operator channels signals outsider status and destroys credibility instantly.

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🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade hiring briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.

RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem.