From being underpaid to going viral on TikTok: This 25-year-old founder wants to know how much you make

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“What do you do? How much do you make?”?

Those are two questions Hannah Williams has asked countless times to strangers across the country. With her fiancé as the camera man, Williams is the face behind the popular TikTok account Salary Transparent Street, which has amassed over 848,000 followers since its start just four months ago.

What started out as Williams posting on her personal account about being underpaid throughout her early career has grown into a massive movement.

“I'm not even sure what my long-term thinking was when I first started it because I had no idea that it would get so big,” she said. “I really thought that it was going to help my small community that I had grown on my personal account. I was totally taken aback by how it helped millions of people.”

Although TikTok videos are how Williams and her fiancé gained their following, they always had a larger vision. So, they built a business, turning Salary Transparent Street into a media production company.?From a market research guide that encourages people to find out how much they should be earning to a weekly newsletter that covers the latest workplace trends and topics, Salary Transparent Street is arming others with insights they need to advocate for themselves.

“The goal is to empower people with information and resources that will help them negotiate their salaries and make strategic career decisions,” Williams said.

Williams’ path to where she is today has been anything but linear. For nearly three years after graduating from Georgetown University in 2019, Williams job hopped from role to role. But in April of this year, the 25-year-old decided to pivot, leaving her career in data analytics behind to go all-in on her new venture.

I spoke to Williams to learn about the inspiration behind Salary Transparent Street and more. Below are excerpts from our conversation (some quotes were edited for length and clarity):?

What was the inspiration behind starting Salary Transparent Street? Was pay a topic you have always been comfortable talking about??

One of the reasons I started Salary Transparent Street was because of my personal TikTok. I have a personal TikTok called 'Stocks and Squats' where in January/February of this year ... I started talking about every single job I had and how much money I made for each job. I had a pretty crazy job-hopping journey in my short career, so I was very transparent. The reason I was doing that was because … in my own career experience, I had a really hard time finding good comparable numbers for being a data analyst as a young professional.

It's not like my parents were always people that were like, 'You should talk about your pay.' That was not something I grew up with. It just made sense to me. I just felt like it was the right thing to do, and when I started talking about it on my personal account, it really validated that. People told me how helpful it was. How these numbers had to be out there. Then, weirdly enough, that just spurred this idea that I was like, 'This should be a thing everywhere. I think I'm going to make this happen by asking strangers on the street.'

How has your own career path influenced this new venture?

I was never really sure what I wanted to do in my career. I got the opportunity to break into data analytics after being in a soul-sucking telemarketing job for a couple months. I was making $40k at that job. Living in Arlington, you're living paycheck to paycheck. It's not nearly enough to survive off. That was my first step into understanding why wages were important.?As I kept job-hopping, I was doing a lot of interviews ... and every single time they would always ask me, 'What are your salary requirements?' I had so many issues trying to find the right number, but I went from $40k to $115k by job-hopping in three years. I thought I was killing it. But it wasn't until my fourth job where I was making $90k that I found out I was underpaid by about $15-20k. That was shocking for me, and I had never really considered that an employer would take advantage of me that way. I left that job for another job where I took an offer for $115k, which really validated that I was underpaid.

What led to your decision to quit your full-time job in May 2022?

It was very scary. I left my job in May, and my fiancé left his job in June. We started the page on April 16 ... and then we went to bed and the next day, our video already had like one million views. Since I had been on TikTok for a couple of months at that point, I could see when something worked. I had so many media publications reaching out to me for interviews and for me, that was big. I was like, 'I have something here because it's getting national and international attention.' I knew that there was a way to monetize it. I wanted to be very strategic about that and not rely on my community to fund my salary. I knew that there were brands out there that would be a really good fit to work with us. And because we had grown such a huge platform already in the first month, we were going to be able to charge top dollar for brand deals that was actually going to make us more money combined than what my fiancé and I brought in together. We were both making six figures in our jobs.

What is your creative process at Salary Transparent Street?

The first step is figuring out where to go. We're DMV based, so the easiest places for us to hit are in D.C., Maryland or Virginia. We try to keep an eye out on events and high-traffic areas. The thing is, we'd love to go out to smaller, rural towns, but it's tough because there's not a lot of foot traffic around. So we try to keep those factors in mind to make sure that where we're going there will be a lot of people so we can make the best use of our time. We really rely on our community for that. We'll get a lot of comments from people telling us to go to Kansas City or go to Seattle, and I'll message them back and be like, 'Hey, what? events are coming up that you recommend we go to?' That really helps guide a little bit of our research.?

Then we'll go to the spot. We film with an iPhone, so we move very quickly, very easily. We just show up with the mic and my fiancé films, and we stand in an area that has good foot traffic or we'll walk around the city. We at one time have walked like 15 miles, no joke. I think that was Philly the day we did that. We'll walk and approach people that pass by and ask them our questions. I give them a pitch where I'll tell them, 'We're filming for our TikTok series. We try to advocate for pay transparency. Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions about your work, including what you do and how much you make?' The answer to that differs, of course, but that's really our process. Once we get home, we get right into editing. One video can sometimes take four to five hours to complete, so it takes a lot of time.

Why do you think salary transparency has become so important among young professionals?

I think timing is everything. It's kind of a repercussion of the 'Great Resignation' and this whole movement we've had recently where employees are starting to challenge their employers because of inequalities that you can't hide anymore. There is no sweeping stuff under a rug because we have social media. Everyone knows everything.?When it becomes very obvious, as it is now, that women and minorities and workers with disabilities and the LGBTQ community are very openly and transparently, for lack of a better word, being taken advantage of in their workplaces usually in regards to pay, now people are starting to say something about it. Now we have a movement. Now we have a message. We have our data points. We have our research. We've got this momentum and we're utilizing it to challenge our employers. And by challenging our employers, it's not making an enemy of them. It's holding them accountable. It's huge. One of the things I also really love is that when we highlight these professions that people don't know about, especially when they pay pretty well, it also helps a different part of our community, which is students. People in school who are not sure what they want to do and then they get exposed to these different careers and they're like, 'Wait, what is that? Let me let me check that out. It looks like it's paid well, too.' It gives them something else to think about. It gives people options to explore.

What’s your advice on advocating for yourself, in terms of compensation and beyond??

One of the first things that I think was important for me was unlearning a lot of things that corporate America had spoon fed me. Learning that you don't have to be at one company for the rest of your life, and that there are a lot of benefits to switching jobs and exploring different career paths. You can't start advocating for yourself until you start seeing yourself as an individual, separate from your career in the sense that you need to do things that fuel you. Sometimes sitting at a desk and going through emails is not going to be the answer. So leaning into that discomfort to try to learn new things, but also learning a lot about how to negotiate your salary. If you don't go down that rabbit hole, you're going to be lost.?

Also, lean into discomfort with these conversations about pay transparency. Start talking with your family, with your friends about money. Try understanding why you're uncomfortable about it. I think a lot of the time, people are uncomfortable with pay transparency because they're worried about how money will correlate to their identity and how people perceive them. We put so much value on money and what it says about our identity. That's such a toxic mentality to have because you're undervaluing yourself.

The more you know

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index found that young professionals are more candid about pay than older generations. Some 81% of Gen Zers and 75% of millennials agree that people sharing their pay information will lead to better equality in pay. Meanwhile, just 47% of Gen Xers and 28% of baby boomers hold the same sentiment. See the breakdown below:

??What do you think is driving the pay transparency divide? Share in the comments.