PeerWyse: Salary Estimates for People You Know

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might be thinking that the theme of this post sounds vaguely familiar. “Wasn’t Amy building something to do with salaries last month? Something about guessing? What is she doing over there?!”.

And you would be correct. We (my amazing co-founder James and I) have re-branded and re-launched Guess My Pay as PeerWyse!

Why the name change?

Couple of reasons. First, the value proposition of what we are offering (a window into the secretive world of salaries) was at odds with the name “Guess My Pay”. It was too confusing to potential new users and confusion is never helpful when you’re asking people to try something new.

Second, “Guess My Pay” was pigeonholing us into a very small box where we were constrained by the implementation (crowdsourced salary guesses) rather than liberated by the immense opportunities within the jobs/employment market.

We decided that a name change would give us the freedom to explore and be nimble with our solutions as we continue to speak to users and learn more about the problems they face. We still continue to be inspired by the question:

What if you knew how much your colleagues got paid? 🤔

We think greater transparency is a win for the individual because it helps you understand what salaries are reasonable for different roles, companies, industries and regions. This is important because, as we have heard during our user feedback interviews, the most common concern in salary negotiations is not knowing how much money to ask for.

That’s where PeerWyse comes in. We allow you to see how much your connections get paid so that you can be more informed and more confident when setting your salary expectations.

We also want to shine a light on pay inequality. Are you being underpaid relative to people that have the same skills or responsibilities as you? Imagine the money you’re leaving on the table because you don’t know that you could be asking for X more a year.

(Brief aside: I plan on writing several blog posts about the many interesting themes that have come up in the dozens of user interviews that I have conducted. If you struggle with salary negotiations, you might be surprised – and probably comforted – to hear that not a single person I’ve spoken to has it completely figured out.)

⭐ Now onto our exciting news! We’ve launched a new iOS App!!

Last week we re-launched as PeerWyse, an iOS app! If you are feeling so inclined, you can Download PeerWyse for iOS, or keep reading to hear how it works.

(Side note: If you’ve downloaded the app — thank you!– and are wondering why you’re being asked to sign into LinkedIn…PeerWyse sits on top of LinkedIn and allows you to guess the salaries of your LinkedIn connections. We do some math to aggregate your guesses and calculate estimated salary ranges. We do not save your password and we do not share your guesses with your colleagues).

⭐ How Does PeerWyse Work?

Upon downloading the app and signing into LinkedIn, PeerWyse presents you with a list of your LinkedIn connections. Beneath each person is a box, in which you can enter your guess for that person’s salary. Hit submit and we will return our estimated salary range.

After guessing, you’ll also be able to see how many other people have submitted guesses. The more guesses we receive, the tighter our ranges tend to get – so please, invite a friend. 😉

But how is this different from insert salary website here?

Unlike those websites, we show you salaries for people you know — your friends, your colleagues, you boss — rather than arbitrary, all-encompassing or company-specific job titles. We think that humans are inherently better at comparing themselves to other humans. After all, no one knows your skills and experience better than you. So, we show you salary estimates for people you know and leave it to you to figure out what your target salary should be.

⭐ What’s Next?

Right now we’re focused on salary estimates for individuals, but in the next iteration of PeerWyse, we will allow you to create Peer groups. Imagine something along these lines: “Based on the 8 connections in your Data Science Peer Group, your salary ranks in the bottom 25%”.

Something we’ve heard from users is that Peers fall into two distinct categories: people you consider to have the same skills and people you consider to have the same responsibilities. We want to allow you to create either type of Peer group and compare yourself to group as a whole.

Ultimately, salary is the just the tip of the iceberg. We are also very excited by the idea of skills- and experience-based Peer comparisons. For example, “You have the most management experience of your Data Science Peer Group” or “You’re missing a skill that 90% of your Data Science Peer Group possesses”.

The possibilities are endless! 🤩

That’s it for now. Thank you for reading. Links below, if you’re interested:

👉Learn more @ PeerWyse.com
👉Download PeerWyse for iOS

P.S. Would you be willing to do a 15-min user feedback interview about your experiences with compensation? If so, please get in touch on Twitter @amypeniston or connect with me on LinkedIn. Your input will help to guide the future development of PeerWyse!