A tool built to fix a broken system
Most performance reviews don't measure your actual contribution. They measure how well you marketed yourself. If you didn't track it, it didn't happen.
How I found the cheat code
Early in my career, I was a generalist doing solid work that went largely unnoticed. I assumed the quality of my output spoke for itself.
Performance reviews came and went. Promotions went to people who were better at talking about their work, not necessarily better at doing it. The system rewarded self-promotion over substance.
Then I discovered brag documents as a practice of writing down your wins as they happen. This creates a strategic record of impact, framed in the language that matters to the person making promotion decisions.
I went from generalist to regional director with a salary increase that crossed 300%. The single biggest factor was a document that proved my performance.
The brag doc gave me a record I could point to. It turned vague feelings of "I worked hard this year" into concrete evidence of business impact. When review season arrived I already had it written down.
I built Raisemaker so that anyone can do what I did without the manual overhead of building and maintaining a brag doc from scratch.