@SIM-DOT

Hi,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful question. I completely understand your concern—cost control and salary standards are important issues, and they play a key role in ensuring the Treasury's funds are used responsibly.

I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify a few points as openly and sincerely as possible.

While the data platforms you referenced do offer average salary benchmarks, they don’t always reflect the full context—such as years of experience, position level, performance-based incentives, or actual responsibility scope.

In our case, our team members (developers, product, and researcher roles) each have 5–7 years of experience. Our part-time UI designer has over 10 years of experience. Our team members could be compared to ByteDance 2-2 or Alibaba P7 standards. We’ve calculated hourly rates based on these real-world annual packages, and we’re happy for them to be cross-checked. That said, we’re still operating below top-tier salaries offered by firms like Huawei or Pinduoduo.

Reference links:

1. https://www.duibiao.info/company/IT/字节跳动
2. https://duibiao.info/company/IT/阿里
3. 
4. Rednote:

90 小红薯68254D3F发布了一篇小红书笔记，快来看吧！ 😆 IbOoKZeM1rmCh93 😆 http://xhslink.com/a/6Ews9MWtRlScb，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！(Copy all the word and open Rednote)

Beyond base salary, I also hope you’ll consider the following:

1. Cross-functional workload – In a start-up team, each member wears many hats. Our PM(Me), for example, also takes on operations, BD, and project management, and QA. Developers handle full-stack work. These additional efforts aren’t included in our funding request—they’re things we’ve taken on simply because they need to be done. Our researcher is also responsible for the security of multisig operations, which is a critical part of the product. This means our team members must possess a high level of professionalism and capability—qualities that we believe justify the corresponding compensation levels.
2. Resilience during uncertainty – We’re committed to maintaining Mimir’s service even during funding gaps. In fact, we personally covered around three months of development and infrastructure costs to keep the project running.
3. Cost awareness and adjustments – We understand the importance of staying lean. Compared to previous proposals, we’ve already reduced developer hourly rates (from $110 to $100), and we’ve significantly trimmed server costs—even though this proposal includes more complex work that directly improves the user experience.

I hope this gives you a clearer and more realistic picture of our situation, and helps you make a more informed judgment. We truly appreciate your time and consideration.

@polkaworld
Thank you to Polkaworld for the support!
We look forward to delivering even more user-friendly products for the community.