Meet RUME
The product you'd be building around.
RUME is a consumer brand making café-quality instant lattes with the milk already built into the powder. Add water, shake or stir, and you have a latte in seconds — without an espresso machine, a coffee shop, or separate milk.
Because it's a physical product people can taste and understand immediately, there are a huge number of ways to introduce it to someone in the real world. The challenge is figuring out which of those interactions turn into repeatable online customer acquisition.
The Arc
What you'd be building, stage by stage.
The goal is to master each stage, then earn the right to build the next one on top of it. Below is how that could look starting with college campuses — a likely first proving ground.
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Get Customers
Personally get in front of students and start creating real online customers. Try sampling, events, referrals, organizations, flyers, direct outreach, or whatever else seems worth testing. The point is to get real reps and learn what actually moves people.
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Crack the Playbook
Keep testing until you understand a repeatable way to acquire students — not one lucky event, but something you can explain, repeat, measure, and keep improving.
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Scale One Market
Push the system across the campus until it's producing meaningful volume. Increase the number of activations, channels, partnerships, or touchpoints while keeping the economics and conversion strong.
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Build the Team
Recruit other students, teach them what works, and increase how much can happen without you personally executing every interaction. Stay close enough to the ground to keep improving the playbook while you multiply it through people.
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Launch New Markets
Take the full playbook into another campus or city. Set up the first meetings, run the first activations, establish what works locally, and recruit and train people who can keep it moving.
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Establish Local Ownership
Develop a strong local operator or lead who understands the system, owns the day-to-day execution, and can keep growing that market after you move on to launching or overseeing the next one.
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Run It Nationwide
The end-state is not "be a campus ambassador." It's potentially overseeing a nationwide network of campuses, local leaders, operators, and activations — something that could eventually be producing thousands of physical activations every week without requiring you to personally run each one.
How it works
You're being given a growth problem — not one tactic to execute.
The goal is always an online purchase. You might get there through sampling, events, referrals, flyers, partnerships, direct outreach, or something we haven't thought of yet. Every customer you drive enters an online funnel, and roughly 3–4 weeks after their first purchase, they'll have the opportunity to become a subscriber.
There are a lot of levers we can experiment with — the offer people receive, the landing page they hit, how we capture and follow up with leads, what emails customers receive after purchasing, how and when we introduce the subscription, the physical materials we use, where we show up, what we say, and how we turn an offline interaction into an online customer.
The working relationship is collaborative: you bring initiative, ideas, and what you're learning in the field; I help pressure-test those ideas, provide context, remove roadblocks, and put resources behind the things worth testing so we can learn and improve quickly.
How you get paid
Simple, aligned, uncapped.
It doesn't matter whether the customer came from a sample, a face-to-face sale, a flyer, a referral, a pop-up, a club partnership, or something else. Even if the physical interaction involves giving away or selling product, the commission is tied to the tracked online purchase — not a prescribed activity.
- No fixed hours. The starting arrangement is performance-based rather than schedule-based.
- Personal dashboard. You'll see the traffic, online purchases, subscriptions, and commissions attributed to you — exactly what your work is producing.
- Product and resources for experiments. RUME can provide product, materials, and reasonable resources for experiments we agree are worth running. These are execution tools, not recurring "free product" perks.
We'll regroup after the first week. There's no magic quota — I want to see that you attacked the problem, created some results, learned quickly, and have a point of view about what to try next.
Fit check
Am I the right kind of person for this?
I care much more about unusually high agency than experience. You do not need to arrive with a perfect résumé or a finished skill set. You do need to be the kind of person who naturally creates momentum.
You'll probably love this if…
- You have unusually high agency — your instinct is to act, not wait.
- Ambiguous problems energize you instead of paralyzing you.
- You naturally generate ideas, test them quickly, and change your mind when the results tell you to.
- You're comfortable talking to people, selling, and doing things that might feel uncomfortable at first.
- You want meaningful responsibility earlier than a normal internship is likely to give you.
- You care more about real reps and real results than having a prestigious logo on your résumé.
- The idea of treating part of a real company almost like your own entrepreneurial playground sounds exciting.
You'll probably hate this if…
- You want a clear checklist of tasks handed to you every week.
- You need someone else to create your momentum or constantly tell you what to do next.
- You mainly want a low-effort "campus ambassador" side gig or recurring free product.
- Commission-based uncertainty will make you avoid experimenting or taking action.
- You would rather spend weeks planning the perfect idea than go test an imperfect one.
- You mainly care about the prestige of the company or title rather than the amount of responsibility and learning you can get.
- You expect progression because time passed rather than because the previous stage actually works.
How fast can this grow?
As fast as we can actually make each stage work.
I'm not going to move someone forward just for the sake of giving them a bigger title. We need to actually crack each stage, understand it, make it repeatable, and keep improving it before we build the next stage on top.
But our incentives are completely aligned: I have nothing to gain by keeping a great person stuck at a smaller stage. The faster we create something that works and you become capable of owning more, the faster I want to expand your responsibility, role, and compensation.
My ideal outcome is that you quickly become too valuable for the original commission arrangement — because that means we found the person who can actually build and eventually lead this function.