Ask HN: What is a fair pay for a bootstrapped startup to hire marketing intern?

3 points by rush-tea 11 years ago | 5 comments

I am currently running a bootstrapped startup, and i need an intern to help me with marketing and sales. since i am bootstrapping and i am very low in fund, i am thinking of hiring an intern and pay with profit sharing based on the intern performance.

Another reason is that it can be served as a trial. if it goes well and things pick up, it can be converted to full time, and i can also pay an hourly rate.

i am thinking of 10% share from net profit generated from the intern marketing performance.

what do you think? Would it be fair? Or a larger profit sharing like 15%, 20%?

Thanks.

foolishdream 11 years ago |

Do you already have sales / customers? It's usually a terrible idea to outsource customer development early because you don't get that critical feedback for your product until you figure out the real reasons why customers aren't buying / renewing / using.

It might be too early to hire an intern or sales rep, but definitely read up on Jason Lemkin's sales stuff. It'll give you good benchmarks and rules of thumb that will save tons of time figuring out on your own. http://saastr.com/2013/01/11/when-you-hire-your-first-sales-...

dangrossman 11 years ago |

You may want to have a quick chat with an employment lawyer in your country before you make your first hire. Employees in the US are owed minimum wage by law, along with FICA taxes, unemployment insurance, etc. Interns are not a special case. There is not a legal way to have an unpaid intern who does marketing work for your business, nor to pay them less than minimum wage if their "profit sharing" happens to add up to less than that.

Have you considered running an affiliate program?

notahacker 11 years ago |

Whether 10% is fair really depends on whether you're hoping the intern helps generate a few dollars or a few hundred dollars net profit per day worked, and whether you're expecting recurring revenue from those clients (if you are then 10% is very low, period)

There are a lot of salespeople on comfortable base salaries that get more than 10% of revenue they generate. Some of them have no real experience or qualifications.

Then again, there's also a depressing number of startups boasting about their funding and great new office location in adverts offering the opportunity to do a month or two of full time telesales for them with compensation only for top performance

lacus 11 years ago |

Depends on how much the intern would be getting out of the experience besides pay. If you're actually teaching/mentoring them, then you don't necessarily need to pay them anything. If you don't have marketing/sales expertise yourselves and therefore "intern" is just a way of saying you don't want to be bound by traditional employment practices, then that's something different altogether, and you're probably not going about this the right way. Why the term "intern"?

1123581321 11 years ago |

Assume an intern would get $10 an hour or $400 a week. If you think a typical competent intern would generate $2,000 a week in revenue, then you'd want to set commission at 20%, or ideally 25% to compensate the intern for the risk they're taking.

The thing is, though, that your losing your time and focus is a big opportunity cost of hiring an intern, so you shouldn't hire someone you doubt can do what you want. Hire carefully, pay a normal salary and you'll be happier and also attract better candidates.