Founding Community Growth & Insights Intern

Founding Community Growth & Customer Insights Intern
Settlyfe Inc. 

ABOUT SETTLYFE
Settlyfe is building an AI-powered, end-to-end housing marketplace connecting renters, landlords, agents, and trusted service providers across the full housing journey—from search and leasing to moving, furniture, maintenance, and home services. We are preparing for launch and looking for creative, analytical community builders who want measurable ownership, direct founder access, and the chance to shape an early marketplace.

THE OPPORTUNITY
You will work directly with the founding team to build trust with renters and local communities, discover real housing needs, and convert useful conversations into qualified customer requests and product insights. This role blends community growth, customer discovery, content, field research, and early-stage marketing.

“Founding” reflects the level of ownership: you will help create the community growth playbook, customer interview process, and launch experiments future teams will use.

WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Identify relevant renter, neighborhood, university, relocation, housing, and local community groups.
- Participate transparently and respectfully in online and local communities; follow every group’s rules and never use spam or deceptive outreach.
- Create helpful posts, guides, questions, and conversations tailored to each audience.
- Speak with renters and customers to understand pain points, timing, location, budget, move-in needs, and service needs.
- Turn real demand into qualified customer requests with clear intent, category, geography, timing, and contact permission.
- Conduct structured customer interviews and synthesize recurring problems, objections, language, and desired features.
- Test acquisition channels, messaging, landing pages, referral ideas, partnerships, and community campaigns.
- Support early matching between customers and relevant providers, documenting friction and outcomes.
- Track weekly experiments and results in a simple growth dashboard.
- Share evidence-based recommendations with the founders, product, design, engineering, and marketplace teams.
- Help build repeatable scripts, interview guides, FAQs, community standards, and a customer-growth playbook.

HOW SUCCESS IS MEASURED
We measure genuine marketplace progress, not vanity metrics. Core weekly KPIs include:
- Community Posts: useful, audience-specific posts or contributions that follow community rules.
- Qualified Customer Requests: real customer needs with enough detail and permission for follow-up.
- Customer Conversations: substantive interviews or discovery conversations.
- Conversion from conversation to qualified request.
- Quality of customer insights, experiment documentation, and product recommendations.
- Contribution to marketplace Match Rate and Completed Services as launch volume grows.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- Student or early-career candidate interested in startups, community, growth marketing, customer research, consumer behavior, marketplaces, real estate, or local services.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with an empathetic, curious approach.
- Comfortable starting conversations, asking thoughtful questions, and following up professionally.
- Able to write naturally for different audiences without sounding promotional or scripted.
- Organized enough to manage multiple communities, interviews, experiments, and next steps.
- Resourceful, ethical, analytical, and comfortable learning through experimentation.
- Familiarity with social platforms, spreadsheets, Notion, Airtable, analytics, surveys, or content tools is helpful but not required.
- Spanish or other additional language skills are a plus.

WHAT YOU’LL GAIN
- Direct experience launching and measuring a two-sided AI marketplace.
- Portfolio-ready work in community strategy, customer discovery, content, and growth experiments.
- Close collaboration with the founding, product, engineering, and marketplace teams.
- Ownership of systems and insights that can influence the product roadmap.
- Consideration for expanded responsibility, paid continuation, or longer-term opportunities based on company needs, performance, and applicable law. No future opportunity is guaranteed.

TIME AND COMPENSATION
Approximately 20 hours per week with flexible scheduling based on deliverables. The position is initially unpaid. Remote candidates are welcome; candidates in San Diego may also participate in local community research, partnerships, and launch activities.

HOW TO APPLY
Please submit your resume and a short note explaining why you want to help build Settlyfe. Include one example of a community, audience, customer, or project you helped understand, organize, or grow. We value initiative, empathy, ethical judgment, and evidence of follow-through more than a specific major or prior startup title.