marketing, sales, growth, compensation, profit-sharingI have a solo side project running an online voting website called OpaVote. I don’t do any marketing or sales other than sporadic social media posts. Profits are small but doubling every year (on track for $8k this year).
I’d like to accelerate growth with more sales/marketing. I clearly can’t afford to hire someone so I’d need to have alternative compensation. I don’t see ever having stock so a percent ownership and/or percent of profits seems to make more sense.
I’m looking for guidance as to what would be fair compensation for a part-time sales/marketing person. I don’t know how to come up with something fair, but I’ll throw this out as a starting point:
Immediate income would be low (looking to be $1600 for the first year). Is this enough incentive to get a person involved?
In my opinion it’s way too low if helping you requires a non-trivial amount of work. You can think of it this way: $1,600/year won’t buy you more than a few hours per month of most people’s time.
Try to determine the amount of work that is needed to induce more growth. Reward as needed. And be generous with equity: marketers who accept to work for hypothetical funny money are not common. Better a good biz guy who owns half than a sloppy one who is happy with a tenth.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.