In 2019, Alan Miegel began a company by asking compensation professionals an unshowy question: what is getting in your way? He had earned the right to ask it. His career had moved from compensation consulting at Bank of America through Salary.com, Workday, PayFactors, and PayScale. Twenty years around market data had given him fluency in both the work and the software sold to manage it. But the decisive education came from dozens of conversations held outside a sales process, where customers could complain without being guided toward a demo.
The answers were repetitive in the useful way. Teams owned multiple salary surveys from firms such as Mercer, WTW, Aon, and Culpepper. They also paid for market-pricing systems. Yet they still struggled with the foundational task: matching a company's jobs to the right external data. Some waited for vendors to load files or return analysis. Every team wanted more control. One third of the people Miegel interviewed were not using the systems they already bought because the tools created more work than they removed.
This was not a cinematic discovery. It was a pattern in a tedious workflow, visible to someone who knew where to look. Miegel's phrasing in Bettercomp's first public essay captured the scale of the ambition: customers did not want a revolution. They wanted better ways to get their work done.
“They didn't want a ‘revolution’, they wanted Better ways to get their work done.”Alan Miegel, 2020
The niche before the company
Miegel's path into the niche began in the numbers themselves. After a brief job as a Y2K technician at Fidelity Investments, he worked as a compensation consultant at Bank of America from 2001 to 2004. Then he crossed to the vendor side. Salary.com put him into geographic sales, western regional accounts, and eventually strategic accounts. Workday followed in 2011.
He remembers his Workday employee number precisely: 764. He says the coffee mug carrying it still exists. During his roughly three years there, Workday went public and grew past 3,000 employees. Miegel is careful not to inflate his part in that story. What he took from it was a product principle called the Power of One: one version of the software, one codebase to maintain, one system improved for every customer.
After Workday came sales leadership at PayFactors and then a series of enterprise sales, enablement, and operations roles at PayScale. The sequence matters because it gave Miegel a view from several angles: practitioner, account executive, manager, operator, and customer listener. By the time he was ready to found something, he did not need to go hunting for a fashionable market. He had a neglected process and a long list of people who understood the cost of leaving it alone.
A minimum product somebody would buy
In late 2019, Miegel brought together Sandra Leon and Derek Watson, trusted colleagues who became his co-founders. Bettercomp began with founder money, then convertible debt from friends in the technology industry. The trio did not use institutional capital to discover the problem. They used relationships accumulated across years in compensation to pressure-test it.
Their first release arrived in 2020. Miegel calls it a “minimum sellable product,” a slight turn of phrase that reveals a lot. Viability can be demonstrated inside a product meeting. Sellability requires an outsider to decide the new thing is worth changing behavior and budget for. Bettercomp's early wedge was market pricing at scale: loading survey data, matching many jobs across datasets, and giving practitioners room to make changes themselves.
Dozens of comp teams described the same matching, loading, and control problems.
The founders concentrated on market pricing instead of building a broad HR suite.
One platform meant each useful improvement could reach the full customer base.
The company borrowed Workday's focus without copying its breadth. Bettercomp would run one platform and make new features available across the customer base. Adjacent needs could be served through partnerships rather than a pile of acquired products. Miegel later compared the approach to the hedgehog in Jim Collins's Good to Great: the animal survives not by knowing many tricks, but by knowing one very well.
Focus also created a compact feedback loop. Customer requests could become a common roadmap. New survey files could be made available in under a day. The company could spend engineering attention on the part of compensation work it claimed to understand deeply. Miegel likes speed, but his writing repeatedly pairs it with stability, security, and usefulness. A feature earns its place by improving the customer's work, not by improving the demonstration.
The founder stands last in line
Bootstrapping is often flattened into a financing choice. For Miegel it was also a pecking order. Early on, he paid himself nothing. Later he took enough to maximize his 401(k) contribution while reporting no taxable income. He had made a promise that his co-founders would be paid before he was. In a 2025 interview, he said they still earned more than he did.
“As the CEO, you think of it like you are the last one to get paid in this equation.”Alan Miegel, 2025
The logic was relational. A young company asks employees and co-founders to accept below-market cash, uncertainty, and work that leaks beyond job descriptions. If the CEO is visibly first in line, the shared sacrifice starts to look like somebody else's subsidy. Miegel wanted the order reversed. His version of founder leadership was not poverty as theater. It was a promise about who absorbed risk first.
The approach did not keep Bettercomp small. Miegel has said annual revenue rose from about $1 million in 2022 to nearly $10 million in 2025, roughly doubling each year. By then the company employed more than 80 people and served over 200 customers. In 2025, Inc. ranked it No. 173 on the Inc. 5000, based on reported three-year growth of 2,255 percent.
What changes after the check
The $33 million financing announced in July 2025 changed the company's resources, not its original complaint. Compensation still accounts for a large share of an employer's spending. The teams responsible for it still reconcile job architecture, survey definitions, locations, ranges, and internal philosophy. Bettercomp's new capital was designated for expanding into new markets, scaling operations, and accelerating AI-powered market pricing and pay recommendations.
Miegel's view of AI is more specific than an enthusiasm for automation. He argues that an intelligent system must sit inside the full compensation context: different survey providers, different cuts of data, a company's own job structure, and its philosophy about how work should be valued. A generic layer attached to an old product may retrieve information. It does not necessarily understand why one match is defensible and another is misleading.
The human, in his formulation, remains in the loop. That boundary fits his career. Compensation is numerical work with personal consequences. Software can find outliers, normalize inputs, and propose an answer. A practitioner still has to judge whether the answer reflects the organization and can be explained to the people affected by it. The product opportunity lives between repetitive labor and accountable judgment.
The spreadsheet has a biography
Bettercomp's paperwork came back on November 14, 2019. Miegel did not select the date. It was also the birthday of his late mother. When the company turned six, he wrote about the coincidence and imagined that she would be happy to see what the team had built. The filing date had become both a corporate anniversary and a family marker.
There is playfulness elsewhere in his public voice. He claims “Wizard-level” Excel skills. In the company's launch post, he reminded old industry friends that a few had been invited to his wedding, then apologized to the rest and assured them the cake was excellent. He calls compensation specialists “comp geeks” and uses the Better name as a running pun. The levity suits a field where the raw material is serious but the daily work can be numbing.
Miegel's stated mission for Bettercomp is to align employers and employees on how work is valued. That is a larger sentence than market pricing software, but the route remains narrow: clean up the data, connect internal jobs to external evidence, automate the grind, and leave room for a person to decide. His story is a reminder that domain expertise is not merely time served. It is the ability to hear the same complaint for the hundredth time and finally recognize a product hiding inside it.
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