Humbly Confident App Store Optimization Specialist

You Need A Budget (YNAB)

About Us and Why We’re Hiring

We build “You Need a Budget,” the best budgeting software around. (But people in the know call us YNAB, which is pronounced “why-nab.”) For more than a decade, people have been buying YNAB and then telling their friends what a difference it has made in their lives. Google us, or read some of our reviews on the app store, and you’ll see what we mean. We love building something that literally changes people’s lives.
We are looking for a full-time App Store Optimization Specialist to join our used-to-be-punk-rock-but-now-we’re-playing-festivals Marketing Team. You know who you are. You’re so obsessed with ASO, SEO, CRO, LDX, and keywords that you’re furious that you just spent hours Googling “LDX,” which is one we just made up to make sure you were paying attention. But you were paying attention, and you always are!
You’re so comfortable with the inner workings of the App Store and Play Store that you feel like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix when you see a rock solid app listing. You don’t see videos, images and descriptions. You see Apple and Google’s underlying search algorithm loving or hating each phrase or visual choice on a listing. You know AppStore-Fu?
And you’ve got a knack for strategies on how to get more plentiful, high-quality reviews. We don’t know a ton about mobile stores (that’s why we need your help) but we know that high-quality reviews are a powerful currency when it comes to trust with potential users…and we have great reviews…we just don’t know what to do with them. Help!
Also, you love the numbers. You’re an optimizer’s optimizer. Seeing the App Store rankings and conversions increasing is your love language. When your A/B test reaches significance, you compose sonnets for your new, winning, baby variant. And speaking of variants, you’re creative! You’re always coming up with new, meaningful test ideas.

Requirements (these are real, actual requirements):

  • We care more about a high proficiency level than years of experience, but we expect that at least 2 years of experience in the following areas of App Store Optimization will best set you up for success here. You should be totally (and humbly) confident in your ability to:
  • Perform ongoing keyword research including discovery and expansion of keyword opportunities
  • Set up an ASO strategy to optimize and improve app discoverability in Google Play and the App Store and improve land-to-install conversion rates
  • Use your knowledge of mobile stores, ranking factors, and search engine algorithms to devise quality testing hypotheses
  • Lead members of the Product and Marketing teams to improve our review strategies to instill consumer confidence (on the mobile stores and elsewhere)
That’s a brief intro to what you’ll be working on. But first, you need to know if you’ll even like working with us. Let’s talk a bit about life at YNAB, and then we’ll go into more detail about what we’re looking for. 
We’re profitable, bootstrapped, and growing. YNAB started in 2004 and we haven’t taken any outside funding—we’re in it for the long haul. We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our original Core Values Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading it, you’ll probably really like it here, and we can’t wait to hear from you!
We live our Core Values every day at YNAB, and we mean it when we say we are an equal opportunity employer. We believe that a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, beliefs, and experiences are critical to our success, and we are passionate about creating a welcoming, supportive, and collaborative environment for all employees. All are encouraged to apply as we continue to grow a smart, hard-working, and diverse team who loves working together to build something that matters.
We also work really hard, together, to make working at YNAB an amazing experience, and we were (humbly) proud to be named Fortune’s #1 Best Small Company to Work For for the last two years. We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. We’d love to introduce you to a few of them!

Who you’d be working with:

Barry, our Lifecycle Marketing Manager, is affectionately known as “the Braze guy.” He gets excited about solving email deliverability issues or building out a new user journey, and he manages our cross-channel communication strategy with ease. He’ll gladly geek out with you about the newest funk band he discovered and the sprinter van he just bought. Oh, and he has great curly hair. (3c/4a, if you know you know.)
Ryan is our Lead of Growth Marketing, which sounds like kind of an intimidating title, but don’t worry: he was voted “World’s Most Middle Child” by Teen Vogue and has purchased all of his jeans at Costco. You’ll be able to bounce numbers and strategy ideas off of him like he’s a sentient racquetball court and he’ll gladly dork out with you about conversion rates and statistical significance.
Kelly is our Product Marketing Manager, which basically means that she knows everything about what’s going on with YNAB, the product, at any given moment. Are we about to ship an AI feature that will let your budget categories send little love notes to you? Probably not, but if we were, Kelly would know all of the messaging, timelines and details down to how many love notes your grocery category would be sending you on Android.
Jason, our Digital Marketing Specialist, is actually our de facto Data Scientist on the Marketing team. And by “de facto,” we really mean that he’s our data North Star. He’s the captain of our boat cruising through our data lake. He’s also an ex-soccer star turned a capella singer turned Digital Marketing wunderkind and one of the most thoughtful, pleasant humans you’ll ever meet. We have a type here at the ol’ YNAB.
Arturo is our tri-lingual Marketing Developer/wizard. Not only is Arturo one of the most talented developers you’ll ever get to work with (in a company full of talented developers), he’s also hilarious and he has an uncanny ability to teach and explain exactly what is happening behind-the-scenes, so you can be confident that, if something breaks, it’s probably not our fault.
Believe it or not, as our App Store Optimization Specialist, you’ll be working regularly with the rest of the YNAB Marketing team (and Product team) as well. You’ll get to get all artsy fartsy and help make magic with our Motion Designer, Tristan and our amazing Visual Designers, Lauren, Marian, and Casey. And if that isn’t awesome enough, you’ll get to work with our Product Managers like Elena who was (and probably still is) real big in the NYC cheese scene before shipping life-changing product features here at YNAB. You’ll be living in a constant state of “whoa, [name of person] is pretty much the most amazing human I’ve ever met” after every call.

How You’ll Work at YNAB

Now that you’ve met some of your potential future teammates, let’s talk more about YNAB as a company. Here’s how we operate:
Live Where You Want
We’re a fully remote team, so you can live and work wherever you want (with a reliable internet connection!). That said, you’ll be working predominantly with folks based in North America, so we expect that you’ll be willing and able to work North American hours for a significant portion of your time. This doesn’t mean a “North American 9-5” every day, but flexibility to overlap with those hours to attend meetings with your team. Proximity doesn’t influence productivity, but it sure does help with communication sometimes.
No Outrageous HoursWe want everyone to have a full life outside of YNAB, and we seldom work more than 40 hours per week. There have been a few occasions where things got busy and people had to put some extra time in. But then they took some extra time off, so it all balances out. We work hard and smart but we’re in this for the long haul.
Take Vacation (Seriously)We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Five weeks feels about right (plus two extra weeks for our company-wide December break). It’s important to get plenty of downtime and get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your adventures in our #office_wall Slack channel!
The YNAB RetreatWhen the pandemic isn’t keeping us from traveling, we get the teams together once a year to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. So far, we’ve done Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a beach house in the Outer Banks, a ranch in Montana, and most recently, Laguna Beach. We work together, play together, and reinforce the bonds we’ve made as a team and company. Every year, we leave refreshed, motivated, and excited for the year ahead together.
Up Your GameWe’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We budget for it (hey-o!). Think conferences, online courses and subscriptions, dedicated time away from work to learn something new… it’s really up to you and your manager. But we love to see our people growing.  
U.S. or International? Great!Our team is spread all over the world, including Switzerland, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, and all over the United States. We currently set up team members who live in the U.S. or U.K. as employees, and those who live in other countries as independent contractors. You’re an equal part of the team no matter where you live! 
BenefitsFor full-time W2 employees in the U.S., we offer fantastic health, dental, and vision insurance, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. No need to check your vision, you read that right—100%. Although if you did need to check your vision, NBD, we’ve got you covered!
We also have a Traditional and Roth 401(k) option. YNAB matches your contributions up to six percent, and matches vest immediately. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. You’re not a PF junkie? Trust us, it’s awesome.) For U.K. employees, we also contribute six percent to your pension.
Competitive CompensationThe starting salary range for this position is $67,000-$77,000 annually. We consider raises every year, and have a bi-annual profit-share bonus. YNAB wins, you win—that kind of thing.
Other Tidbits
  • Once you start, we DEMAND (in a friendly, ALL CAPS IS YELLING way) that you fill out your “Bucket List” spreadsheet with 50 items. (That’s harder than it sounds!) 
  • The bucket list really helps in deciding what we should give you for your birthday and the holidays.
  • We’re all adults. There’s no need to punch a clock, or ask for permission to take off early one afternoon to go see the doctor. We look at what you accomplish, not how long you’re in front of a computer.
  • We want you firing on all cylinders so we’ll set you up with a shiny new computer and replace it every three years.
  • Did we mention that YNAB makes a huge, positive difference in people’s lives? You may not think that matters much, but then a few months down the road you’ll realize it’s made your job really, really enjoyable. Don’t underestimate this one!
If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now we want to talk about you. You will play a big, big part in helping YNAB become a household name, which will help hundreds of thousands of people gain total control of their money. You will change lives. I’ll only say that six more times. 

Now, back to you, our new App Store Optimization Specialist…

What Success Looks Like: 

We have a strong brand and a very loyal user base. We’ve also got a lot of competitors. Some are established brands with huge marketing teams and some are seemingly just weekend app developers putting out budgeting apps from their garages. Regardless, most of them rank above us in the App Store and Play Store, and if we’re being honest, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. This is where you come to save the day!
The good news is that we’ve built an incredibly solid mobile app with a powerful, effective budgeting method. And remember that loyal user base I mentioned? We have hundreds of thousands of YNABers that just gush about how YNAB has changed their lives and we have thousands of glowing reviews.
As our App Store Optimization Specialist, you’ll take our mobile store listings (armed with our stellar reviews) and optimize them to reflect the reality that we see in almost every other channel: YNAB is one of the most effective and beloved budgeting apps out there. And it’s much more likely to change future users' lives than the dozens of budgeting apps that Apple and Google’s algorithms think should be more discoverable on their mobile stores.
You’ll do in-depth keyword research to craft strategies for how to up our discoverability. You’ll work with our designers, video team and copywriters to create improved listings that speak to potential YNABers more deeply. You’ll work with our Product and Support teams to be more strategic about how and when we solicit reviews.
While you’re at it, we would love you to grow in your craft and possibly help out with CRO even further down the funnel. Maybe you’ll even help spearhead some strategies to build out our online reputation on 3rd-party review sites like TrustPilot. Who knows? We’re not trying to get ahead of ourselves. We’re just really excited about optimization, in general, but as you can see, we are REALLY excited about App Store Optimization.

You are our ideal candidate if:

  • You have substantial experience planning, implementing and executing tests and optimizations across all areas of App Store Optimization:
  • Keyword/competitor research
  • Mobile store SEO tactics
  • Reviews strategy
  • You can point to multiple mobile store listings you’ve worked on where you’ve increased their rankings and organic traffic.
  • You can effortlessly fly around in-app analytics platforms and testing suites to understand, analyze and optimize listings.
  • You’re not a data scientist, but you feel comfortable picking out trends and patterns to test out new hypotheses and measure your progress.
  • You’re not a developer, but you love working with developers to improve review strategies and implement analytics and optimization tooling.
  • You relentlessly pursue high-quality work and continuous improvement. At the same time. 
  • You have a deep appreciation for brand strength achieved only through uncompromising consistency. 
  • You are a stellar communicator. 
  • You are wildly productive and independent, but a team-player at heart. 
  • You love to test, optimize, test, optimize and then test again. 
  • You are willing to experiment even if it means chalking mistakes up to learning from time to time. 

In our heart of hearts, some nice-to-haves would be:

  • Experience with CRO in any or all parts of the customer lifecycle
  • Experience working with 3rd-party review sites (i.e. TrustPilot)
  • Experience in SEO for other search engines outside of the App Store and Play Store (i.e. Google, YouTube, etc.)
  • Ability to breakdance or, at least, do the worm…remember, we said “in our heart of hearts”

Some things you’ll be doing at YNAB:

  • Planning, implementing, and executing A/B tests on Google Play
  • Working with our designers, video team and copywriters to optimize both mobile stores based on your findings from your experiments/tests
  • Coordinating with the Product and Support teams along with our data people to determine proper moments in the lifecycle to solicit reviews
  • Doing independent keyword research for the mobile stores, while also coordinating with and assisting our content SEO team to share findings
  • Helping to implement any analytics platforms that will allow us to track mobile store ranking progress and analyze our (but also your) efforts in those channels
  • Participating in Soft Rock Friday with our Lifecycle team on Slack where we try to outdo each other by finding and sharing the softest rock imaginable

How to Apply

  • Apply directly on our site hereby 11:59PM PST on Sunday, January 9th, 2022. Firm. It’s a real deadline. 
  • Attach a PDF cover letter. In your cover letter:
    • Please introduce yourself and explain why this position interests you and why you would be a great fit. Cover letters are meant to sell, so sell us!
    • At the end of your cover letter, briefly tell us about trends you’ve noticed in your ASO career. Were there algorithm changes where you had to totally adjust? Or maybe there were different versions of iOS or App Store features that made you have to stretch. We’d love to hear about your growth!
  • Attach a PDF resume. If you don’t have a resume because you aren’t even sure you’re looking to change jobs, that’s fine! An informal list of your work and education history are all we’re looking for.
  • Please let us know if you would like to disclose a need for accommodation in connection with the recruitment and hiring process. If so, contact us at careers@youneedabudget.com and indicate in the subject line that you’re applying for the App Store Optimization Specialist role.
  • Note: though we know it is customary in some countries, we’d prefer if you didn’t share a headshot in your application materials. Thank you!
We’re excited to hear from you!
P.S. We'll send you a confirmation email once you apply. Please add that email to your safe sender list, to ensure that future emails come through. (If you don’t receive it, please check your Promotions inbox, junk folder, or any filters you may have set up.)
P.P.S. If you’re not interested in or available for this position, but know someone who is, we would really appreciate it if you passed this along!

Category Others

marketingseovisualgrowthandroiddigitaldeveloperdesignersupportcustomercontentios

Similar Jobs

Subscribe Now