Salary Academy makes working materials for salary negotiation — a book, a workbook, scripts for specific moments, and calculators for the math. Built for white-collar professionals who work hard, get decent reviews, and still watch their pay barely keep pace with inflation. Sold as PDFs; no course, no coaching, no subscription.
"In a 2025 study of more than 3,100 U.S. tech job seekers, people who simply asked for more averaged $27,000 above their starting offer. The 46% who didn't ask left that money on the table."
— Cullen, Perez-Truglia & Pakzad-Hurson (2025)
Most years of my career, I worked harder than the year before. I stayed late. I took on more. I said yes to projects nobody else wanted, the kind that earned good reviews and added responsibility without adding much else. Every spring, my raise would land somewhere between 2% and 4%. That's enough to keep up with rent. It's not enough to feel like you're getting paid for what you've done.
I'd talk to friends in similar jobs. Same story. Long hours, real sacrifices for the career, the kind of work that in any reasonable accounting should translate to compensation that grew faster than inflation. It didn't. We were running on a treadmill that kept speeding up, and the only thing it gave us back was being slightly more tired.
For a while I assumed this was just how compensation worked. Base raises were small by design, the thinking went, and real money came from getting promoted or switching companies. Both of those are partly true. Neither explains why two people at the same level with similar performance can end up tens of thousands of dollars apart by year five.
The turn
The turn happened when I started reading the research instead of the advice.
I went deep on what the academic literature actually says about salary negotiation. The Cullen, Perez-Truglia, and Pakzad-Hurson field experiment was the one that cracked it open for me: in a 2025 study of more than 3,100 U.S. tech job seekers, the people who simply asked for more averaged $27,000 above their starting offer. The 46% who didn't ask, who took the first number, left that money on the table without realizing they could have moved it.
I kept reading. Galinsky on anchoring. Babcock and Laschever on who asks and who doesn't. Malhotra and Bazerman on the moves that work and the ones that don't. Books, papers, interviews with people who negotiate for a living. Then I started applying what I learned to my own conversations.
The first negotiation after I changed my approach was the most uncomfortable thing I'd ever done at work. I prepared in writing. I knew my floor, my ceiling, the exact words I'd say if they came in low. I felt sick for the half hour before the call. I asked for $18,000 above what I would have asked the year before, with a clean justification I'd written out and read aloud to myself twice. They said yes.
Why this site exists
I taught the framework to several friends after that. It kept working. Different industries, different roles, different career stages, all variations of the same outcome: people who used to accept the first number started moving it, often by amounts that would compound into hundreds of thousands of dollars over a career.
The difference between people who get paid well and people who don't is rarely talent. It's preparation. The frameworks are knowable. The scripts are practiceable. The math is not that hard once you have the spreadsheet someone else has already built.
Salary Academy is the materials I wish I'd had a decade earlier. The book is the foundation. The workbook is the prep an executive coach would walk you through, except it's a PDF you can fill out on a Sunday. The scripts are the words for the specific moments most people freeze in. The calculators handle the math your head isn't going to do well at four in the afternoon on a Friday.
If you've been working hard and watching your pay barely keep up with rent, this is for you.
— B. Big, founder