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Comment by localcrisis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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