| One strategy I've used is to bake a raise into the negotiation. This raise should automatically kick in when the company reaches some measurable goal (MRR, ARR, MAU, whatever...not profit, not VC funding) or a certain amount of time has elapsed. The 'or' is important here as the time component should reflect your worst-case expectation for getting the raise. There are a couple important things to keep in mind here: 1. You have to trust the other party to some extent. You have to be willing to believe they'll be up-front about the metrics and willing to execute the raise. 2. You have to be willing to work at the lower rate at least until your time component kicks in. Despite any growth projections, do not count on meeting the first criterion before the time component. Let's use your situation as an example. You'd like to get to $35/hr, but you're willing to work at $30/hr. You've already anchored $40/hr so negotiating a follow-up raise to $35 should be doable. Let's assume the company has 500k MAU. You might suggest a raise to $38/hr when the company reaches 1MM MAU or after six months of FTE. If they're not willing to engage in this level of negotiation, that's fine. You've lost very little in terms of leverage and you can still take a more traditional approach. If they are will to engage, then you have a few more knobs to turn in the negotiation process. Of course the main risk is they'll renege on the contract, but that's always a risk (I'm assuming this is an at-will contract). You should be prepared for that. But, if they're an ethical employer and you do a good job, I bet they'll be willing to pay a bit more per hour to keep someone who now has a decent amount of domain knowledge and proven themselves to be competent and reliable. |