ZenPayroll is now Gusto | Hacker News Reader

ZenPayroll is now Gusto

zenpayroll.com

76 pointsgoeric69 comments

I'm assuming they renamed because they lost the USPTO trademark case against Zendesk [1] or just decided they didn't want to fight anymore.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2014/12/20/zendesk...

Probably to avoid confusion with Zenefits, as well.

They also announced benefits. Could be to avoid confusion with Zenefits.

Too many "zen" companies...

I actually thought they were the same company until right now, so this certainly makes sense.

I thought the same too.. I thought they were part of Zenefits.

They are both trying to cannibalize each other's target markets. I don't see zenefits (with their project nutgrab or whatever it was) catching up to gutso.

Gusto co-founder here! We actually changed our name because ZenPayroll no longer adequately described what we bring to our customers. We're not just payroll and payments. Gusto is all about empowering companies to put people first.

I see the MBAs have gotten to you.

What do you mean by that? It's catchy and fun but not really informative or helpful by itself.

>What do you mean by that?

To some on HN, MBAs are uninformed miscreants who ruin everything. Everything but engineering is a waste of money.

I know. Cheap shots should involve more work, though.

If it involves more work, it's not a cheap shot :)

Really though, I don't have anything against what he said, nor against MBAs (...well, some MBAs maybe). It was just poking fun at vacuous sounding corporatespeak.

Just like the comment it was in response to.

>We're not just payroll and payments. Gusto is all about empowering companies to put people first.

The vague mission statement of "empowering companies to put people first" that could mean literally anything from genocide to running a grocery store.

exactly. which people? employees? customers? someone else?

"Gusto is all about empowering companies to put people first."

This could mean anything or nothing. But he knew that already

In the context that it was said, it's not very ambiguous. It's obvious what they do and you can see what they're branching out into. It sounds vague and like corporate-speak on first gloss but it does make sense.

Well, not necessarily. Starting off with a more accurate keyword (payroll) and then broadening it up as you extend your service (benefits) makes sense to me, and I'm far from having an MBA.

Also, the prefix "zen" is being a little bit abused these days.

> Starting off with a more accurate keyword (payroll) and then broadening it up as you extend your service (benefits)

They should have renamed to Zenefits! Wait...

Makes a ton of sense, good work guys. Congrats!

It actually makes no sense at all...

I like ZP (now Gusto), I really do, but their support over time has been lacking (and it feels like it's degrading), and as a customer I'm growing increasingly concerned that they're growing too fast to keep up.

Granted - I'm a tiny account (3 employees). That said, it's frustrating that it takes weeks to get answers to questions (some simple, some less so). When I finally do get someone's attention, the resolution is generally a good one, but it just feels like they're flat-out understaffed on the support side - which is disconcerting when dealing with things like payroll, taxes, etc.

I certainly wish ZP all the best, and perhaps this expansion into new lines of business will help them hire more support staff... but a part of me feels like, "guys, get your house in order first before your start expanding."

Hi Kevin! I'm the community manager over at ZenPayroll. Thanks for taking the time to post.

I can't tell you how sorry we are to hear about this issue and there's no excuse for the delay in our response. Please rest assured that your business (no matter how small) is incredibly important to us. In fact, because your company is small, we especially want to be there to help!

We have been particularly busy lately on the support side, especially with the launch, but again, that's no excuse. We hold ourselves to a certain standard of delight on product, support, and overall customer experience and we didn't deliver on that for you. We should and can be better.

We want to let you know we've done a ton of hiring lately, in addition to opening up an office in Denver that is focused specifically on support and care. As a result, these kinds of wait times should not continue going forward.

One of our team is looking into your case and should be responding shortly. We are always committed to getting better and appreciate you giving us the chance to prove that. Thanks and again, we've very sorry about that.

Yeah, my company has 3 overlapping products now.

Zenefits, zenpayroll, and indinero (bookkeeping / accounting). They all offer some sort of employee onboarding and have their hands in payroll to a certain degree.

We seem to spend a lot of time syncing our employee records between all 3, it is not great.

Of those, I probably need zenefits the least of all of those, and I would consider switching to gusto's service just to eliminate the complexity.

One of the main benefits of a truly integrated payroll, benefits, and compliance product is that you don't have to worry about the syncing of employee records across these systems. We intentionally wanted to start at the lowest, most fundamental layer (payroll) and build these other pieces into a single product.

if you knew all along that you were going to expand to these other services, why did you name the company 'zenpayroll' to begin with. without more context, this sounds like a rewriting of history.

Or to be more charitable they wanted a name that conveyed the one thing they were doing and didn't want to prematurely optimize for something they couldn't be 100% certain they'd execute on or what timeline they could accomplish it in.

I think HN needs another "be nice" post from management.

To an employee, the actual benefit offerings are the primary consideration. If one provider had great payroll but so-so benefits, that's not worth a slight reduction in management overhead.

Simplyinsured (also a yc company) does health insurance, if thats the only thing you are using zenefits for.. They can get you off zenefits in like an hour if you call them.

IDK how small your company is but I HIGHLY recommend switching to JustWorks. We were able to remove a lot of duplicated services by just using them. It's got a brilliant interface and is super user friendly for our employees.

We simply didn't need the level of functionality required in other software applications, which were clearly built for small to medium sized companies with an actual HR department. We wanted to hire employees and contractors, manage their payroll, manage time off, and give employees other basic benefits, like Healthcare and transportation.

Only downside to JustWorks is that it costs more than Zenefits which is free. Can't speak to Gusto's capabilities and pricing though.

Thanks for the kind words, GolfyMcG :)

First off, congratulations to the team. This is a big change and I'm sure a huge amount of work went into making this happen.

I wonder what this says about the company's focus. They started out focused on payroll, with the BI press release saying they had 20k customers out of millions of small businesses. So obviously a lot more to be done and they are off to a good start. Which raises a few questions:

Do they consider payroll "solved"? Payroll seems to be a pretty massive problem with as much to be done as when they started.

What are they bringing that Zenefits doesn't? Zenefits does payroll and benefits as well, so if you are going to take them on directly I would have hoped to see a lot more about differentiators.

On the one hand, very exciting. On the other, I'd be worried that they are letting a huge competitor drive their actions. Payroll (to an outside) still seems to have massive potential.

Zenefits does not do payroll, they "integrate" with other Payroll providers. Of the providers I've been most impressed with ZenPayroll so this is a very exciting announcement.

To a small business owner, I'm not sure they know or care about the difference. Zenefits advertises themselves as payroll, benefits, and HR.

Defintely see your point though it seems like a distinction customers won't know

They'll know when they have to go sign up with a separate payroll service like ADT. It makes the offering less attractive.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/project-nutshot-zenefit...

Wasn't payroll solved decades ago? How have companies been paying their employees? We paid our employees through BofA and it was cheap and easy.

It could be cheaper and easier. We used Wells Fargo's payroll service because it was quick to set up, but a big pain to use. .NET-style web interface from 10 years ago, impossible to get the report you wanted (or you have to pay for it if it was long enough ago, like many bank shenanigans), hard to understand, and worst, they'd send a sheaf of paper twice a month that I promptly shredded.

Using ZenPayroll now and processing payroll is painless and cheaper. The benefit will multiply once we use some of their newer services as well.

It was solved with a lot of tedious, manual work. I've been using ZenPayroll for the last few months, and I was surprised at how well done it is, how easy it is to use.

Came from ADP, ZenPayroll has been so much better, and cheaper to boot.

Gusto co-founder here. By no means do we consider payroll to be finished! This is something that every employer needs and will always be a big (if not the biggest) part of Gusto. One of the main reasons why our benefits offering is so good is that it's built on top of our own payroll offering.

I was curious about the name change in regards to when people hear your name for the first time.

When people hear the name Gusto it does not immediately reveal what it is. When they hear something with the word payroll in it, they can take a guess that it has something to do with payroll. Did you consider this when making the change?

I recently changed the name of my side project to make it more explicit because people just did not get the concept when I tried to explain it.

We absolutely did consider this tradeoff and what I've learned during the rebranding process is that it's a tradeoff between short-term and long-term. Having a descriptive name has its advantages in getting your early customers, especially when you're just starting out. It's one of the reasons why we had "payroll" in our first name.

But it's a double-edged sword and having a name that describes what you do also starts to limit you, as we saw. It's one the reasons all the world's greatest brands usually don't have a name that describes what they do -- it becomes more important to have a name that you can build a brand around.

Zenefits does payroll and benefits as well,...

They do, but they are far far far far away from having this stuff solved. Very few people I've talked to are completely thrilled with Zenefits at this point. It's an extremely hard space, and hopefully one that Gusto can bring some new perspective to.

One of the founders gave an amazing talk at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3432

Worth listening to if you are interested in starting a company.

What was amazing about it?

I think every person pulls something unique out of a talk depending on their experience and challenges they are currently facing. For me the biggest thing that has stuck with me was this quote:

"Solve a problem by creating a business rather than creating a business to solve a problem."

I really took that to mean that you need to be more passionate about the problem that passionate about the business. I even used that quote in my YC Fellowship application video.

I really like the Zenpayroll product, but I wish they would focus on expanding into more states before adding benefits etc and trying to compete with Zenefits. This would prevent companies who have employees in multiple states outgrowing them and needing to switch to ADP.

I believe ZenPayroll is in all 50 states as of a few months ago. Looks like benefits is CA only.

Indeed.

>Which States Does ZenPayroll Support?

>ZenPayroll is nationwide!

https://support.zenpayroll.com/hc/en-us/articles/207605278-W...

Geographic expansion is expensive and many companies have died by expanding too fast. They may be trying to built out a broader offering before expanding to ensure that they have enough revenue per customer to expand profitably.

On the payroll side, Gusto is actually a full-service payroll provider in all 50 states, meaning we do all your tax calculations, direct deposits, tax payments, and quarterly tax form filings.

For workers' compensation insurance, we're also nationwide.

For health insurance, we're currently available in California only, but we're already expanding to get nationwide.

For health insurance you're just providing an exchange, not a brokerage right? Or both?

Also, any thoughts/plans to move into the PEO space?

We're providing a brokerage.

Oh nice! Last time I checked I thought you only supported a dozen or so states, but that may have been quite some time ago.

Please add the ability to do 1099-DV payments. As a C-CORP founder this is a serious downside.

I wonder if they already knew about http://www.gustoemail.com/

Good for Zen... er Gusto. I interviewed for an engineering internship there when I was in college and really like everyone I talked with. They seemed to have a great culture and to be solving some pretty cool technical problems. I hope things continue to go well for them as they expand into the benefits market.

Interesting choice for a company trying to break into the HR space. It's not clear how to pronounce it.

Is it -g'oo'stow- or -guh'st'oh-?

Strange. I didn't think it was unclear at all.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gusto

guss toe

It's one of those borrowed words where the English pronunciation is different than the original Italian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Tgrk6dLuw

What's the indication that its an english word v. the spanish word. This is especially curious since their previous name was also a word borrowed from another language.

Gusto(EN) - to do with vigor Gusto(ES) - taste

Anyone with any exposure to Spanish or Italian would think goo-sto.

The pronunciation in English in the US (their target market) isn't ambiguous, though.

Considering the number of Spanish speakers in the USA, particularly in the population centers, and that the word is much more common in Spanish than it is in English, I'm not so sure.

It's gUSto. Like how you pronounce us. The "us" in the name resonates with our mission and is another reason why we liked it :)

Huge branding change. Gusto does seem to me like a much better name than ZenPayroll. Wonder how much they paid for gusto.com...

I was really confused initially, I thought these guys https://www.gousto.co.uk/ were already called Gusto.

Even if they were, the market is clearly different, so they could be both have the same mark.

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