I agree with the sentiment that $5000 is not enough. The problem with have a low salary cap is that people expect wage growth over the course of ~45-year career. Even if $5k was a good starting place you'd have huge turnover in your company. One interesting idea may be to pay everyone the absolute max you could afford. Say that ends up being $15k/month, for example. That way you'd attract top talent, retain them longer as they would have a hard time getting a higher offer elsewhere, and you could quite reasonably expect a lot from them. My experience of working in a tech company where there is large pay disparity everywhere is that people tend to perform up unto the level they think they're expected to perform at, based on title and salary. I think highly paid people would work harder and they would be easier to weed out if they're not living up to their high salary expectations. Your can decide to reinvest additional revenues into the salary too, were the business to be a runaway success which would only further boost morale.