228. Transparent Pay 💰
Here's how much I make. Plus, your help in making salary benchmarking the new normal
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. You can click the heart button 💙 above or below to share some love. And you can reach out to me anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Links that are worth your time:
I’ve been loving the content at TheOrg. Here is their list of the 100 most transparent companies
Fun idea: 100 books scratch-off poster
Hi there 👋
This week I’m preparing to take part in my first board meeting at Oyster (my first board meeting ever, tbh). We do things a little different: our board meetings are remote-first. I prepare a few slides, record a Loom overview, then we can spend our synchronous board meeting time in active discussion.
For those of you who’ve been in board meetings before, any tips for me? For those of you curious how it all works, anything you’d like me to report back?
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
How much do you make? 😅
Do you remember the #talkpay hashtag on Twitter?
I remember it like it was yesterday — which it was not. It was in 2015. Many, many people shared their salary publicly in hopes of fighting inequality, especially in the notoriously imbalanced tech world.
Hard to believe that was six years ago.
This week I’ve found myself craving more of that transparency with salary numbers. I am in the midst of hiring at Oyster (come check out our jobs if you’d like to work with me), and one of the critical pieces of building the hiring system is figuring out what to do with compensation.
In early-stage companies, I’ve found salary benchmarking to be fraught.
Fraught because I have too much say.
The best salary benchmarks are objective, built on a foundation of transparent salary data of a meaningful quantity. That data is extremely hard to come by. In the case of Polly (Series A) and Oyster (Series B), I have had access to salary benchmarking resources, but the datasets have been tiny:
Polly had access to a dataset from its investors. The data was robust for some roles (especially engineering), but there were far fewer datapoints for marketing.
Oyster uses Option Impact to benchmark its salaries. Similarly, there are few marketing benchmarks to choose from, and the roles do not always map 1:1 with the roles we’re hiring for.
(Buffer uses Radford for its salary benchmarking. Radford has more marketing roles to choose from, but even still, I found there were times when I had to cobble together a benchmark for a role I needed.)
The risk is either that …
I end up creating a salary benchmark based on intuition, budget, or educated guesses
I end up asking the candidate what their salary expectation is, which opens the door to bias, gender inequality, etc.
So I’m asking for a bit of help …
If you know of good salary resources, could you share them with me?
If you’re comfortable letting me know your salary for a marketing role, could you drop me a note?
I’ll go first:
I joined Buffer as a content writer in 2014, and my initial salary was $66,000 USD per year, plus equity. After my first 90 days, I had the choice of taking more equity or taking an additional $10,000 in salary. I chose the salary.
When I left Buffer and the VP of Marketing role, I was making $175,000 per year. In Buffer’s salary formula, this represented a base salary of $205,000 multiplied by a cost-of-living factor of 0.85. Polly matched my $175,000 Buffer salary. My salary at Oyster is closer to a 0.9 multiplier.
And in terms of salary resources …
All of Buffer’s transparent marketing salaries are in there.
As well as marketing salaries from Codacy’s online calculator and some other one-off data points that I’ve found. (For instance, a Creative Director at Sticker Mule makes $130,000, and a lifecycle marketer at AngelList makes between $130,000 and $100,000.)
Is it all correct? I’m not sure. I’d love your help there, too. For instance: Should a junior product marketing manager make $80k and a Head Of make $180k? Too high? Too low?
I plan on adding to this Airtable whenever I come across new salary info, and if possible, I’ll use these datapoints to inform salary benchmarks for Oyster.
Your help would be great!
Hopefully, we’ll get to a place where salaries aren’t an opaque aspect of the hiring process but a transparent, objective, equitable affair. More companies will use formulas and benchmarks. More job listings will show salary ranges. We’ll all help each other improve this process for all the hires who come after us.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
Not subscribed yet? No worries.
I send a free email every week or so. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Already subscribed? You’re in good company …
I’m lucky to count thousands of subscribers as part of this list, including folks from awesome tech companies like these:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️