Don't Work Here - Bad Founders - Anonymous employee InkSoft Employee Review

This is entirely a reflection on the two co-founders as everyone else I met in my short time was pleasant, professional, and frankly just trying to do the best they could given the circumstances. One in particular, the one who handles the marketing, is the one you need to be careful about. For reference, as I looked through the Slack, I noticed there were five separate employees who were part of the marketing dept. during 2020. None were there when I was hired in November. We hired a Social Media Manager on Jan 1, 2021. She was transferred out (and resigned immediately) in March. I was subsequently fired in April. That's 7 people in and out in just over a year. After I got my job, I joined a B2B SaaS marketing community and it was repeated over and over "Don't work for a CEO who doesn't understand marketing." This was a worst situation given that not only did the head of marketing not understand marketing at all (he constantly would rebuke basic things like SEO and didn't know how to set up a proper Hubspot campaign), but he thought was an absolute genius at it. He consistently gaslighted both me an our social media manager and was completely disorganized always masking his lack of organization or ability to execute on as "We're a small team so we need to be flexible and nimble." We would routinely come up with 2-4 weeks of marketing plans (because anything longer would stress him out) only for the moment to arise and it be thrown away. Then we'd be criticized for a lack of quality even though we were asked to do it in usually 24-48 hours sometimes. Everyday I had to tell my direct report "Just stick with me and we'll get through this," assuming that the longer we were there, the more he would trust us, especially since I had doubled the number of leads than their 2020 monthly average. In general, he's someone who worked in the industry for an extremely long period of time who ultimately just fell into this opportunity. He cares neither about his employees or frankly his customers. The other cofounder is a nice enough person, but his business "acumen" is merely a facade for his unethical hiring practices. His methodology is to ask you what you made at your most recent job, and then give you a slight bump - even if that pay is not an accurate reflection of the work you do. Many customer success team members make less than $30K/year even after they had received their first raise. For context, most customer success jobs for any tech company/startup is over $40K. They discourage discussions around salary (which is illegal) and while I don't have any data, the anecdotal evidence would suggest that their unethical hiring practices borderline on something worse. If you do end up getting an interview, and are asked what you made at your previous job, just lie and increase it by $10K. They hyped up their culture in order to sell me on joining the company. While it's nice that they have taco Tuesdays and an annual holiday party, their culture should be anything but hyped. They might say they're planning on creating a hybrid office, but more than likely it will revert to 5 days a week. Their PTO policy is absolutely garbage relative to other tech companies (a strict 10 days that don't get rolled over). Their maternity policy might be even only 1 week paid (I might be mistaken, but it's certainly not what it should be). They also don't have an HR professional on staff (and given some of the comments they made, I'm sure this is deliberate). Overall, if you're looking for an entry level position, and you're 1-2 managers separated from the cofounders, you're probably going to end up fine for a couple of years. However, if you plan on working directly with the cofounders, especially in marketing or sales (areas they think they're experts in), you will most likely end up where the rest of us have, which is gone in a short period of time. Also, they're an LLC, not a C Corp and have never taken venture money. They have never, and have no intention to, created an employee option pool. So if or when they sell, you won't receive anything. There are hundreds of other tech companies out there. Work for one of them.