Guideline

“Roughly 50%, depending on how you measure it, is bought on our website, and then 50% goes through the sales process.”

“So we managed almost seventeen billion dollars in assets now.”

“Where a lot of other people were going to come from it from a financial point of view and think, why would you do that? Just hire a census or hire a matrix. And I knew they were going to go down the wrong path. And for us as software engineers, we're like, let…”

“It's not that way anymore. And I think guideline had a lot to do with that. But that industry average has come way down. It's now maybe like 80 basis points, 90 basis points or something like that, just fee compression over time.”

“We definitely lost some early plans in the first 100. I would say we probably lost five, 10 plans.”

“Our technical moat led to our pricing moat. You couldn't compete with guideline on pricing still. It's very difficult to compete with us on pricing because we don't have to pay all these middlemen.”

“So we didn't have this and we still generally don't Compete in like a sales led motion. We're starting to now, but that's very recent. That's within the last eight months for us.”

“We charge asset-based fee, but that really covers just every transaction on our platform. So if you want to have a loan, you don't pay a loan origination fee. You want to have a withdrawal, you don't pay for that, et cetera.”

“Actually, I didn't send from Felicis, who's one of our series B, he passed on my seed. And this is the feedback. So you guys, like when you pass and you do give the feedback, it's really important. So I didn't was like, you're biting off too much. You need to …”

“So some of the things that we did early on is we came up with a CEO council. This is just a council where I bring all the executives together. I talk to them in a group. I don't have to relay what one said to the other. We just kind of all do it together. It's…”

“There is no beta at guideline because you can't sign up for a Free for one K like the IRS does not care. Like promise you that like you better be licensed day one.”

“Early on, our very first product wasn't for one K wasn't guideline. It was really just surfacing these fees to the people that were already participating in a for one K. So we built this tool so you could look up your for one K. And we would give you an estima…”

“There's 16 different states that has a required benefit, required benefits. So you have to have some level of retirement benefit.”

“And when we launched, it was incredibly low. I think we launched at zero percent AUM and people couldn't believe that we could do something like that.”

“And they can be start to finish. It was eight minutes. And that was just like unheard of in, in the four one K lens.”

“We're the first one charging a SaaS-based fee for a four one K benefit in the country.”

“So I had gone down this path of buying HR.com, and I thought that we could actually get it because it had been like inherited and moved around a bunch of times. I'm like, man, this could just be like the whole thing. Like, let's just go and become, you know, n…”

“On guideline. We charge on participation. We still only charge you if you use the product. So if you have a 10 person company and seven of you are using it, we're only charging you know, seven times eight.”

“That was fine too, but 92% of all of our participants take our recommendation.”

“And they became our first customer before anybody else. And it was guideline and plaid early on.”

“92% of all of our customers are on an integrated platform”

“The thing that I also said I would never do again would be a transaction-based company. I love the recurring revenue model, like AR is, like, just where it's at. At TaskRabbit, it was like, all right, get all these tasks posted, and then at the end of the day,…”

“Like take it to an individual and show them how much money they're losing over the next 20 years just by paying those fees. And it's a large sum of money. Some of it is 400 to 600,000 dollars. The difference between 1.6% and eight basis points. It's a ton of m…”

“Today. A hundred percent of our plans are auto enrolled. So we don't have anybody that's opted out. If you don't want auto enrollment, you don't get a guideline plan.”

“All inbound at that point, we didn't have outbound until maybe a year and a half ago, and we're almost 10 years old.”

“We're 400 people at guideline, but we service almost 60,000 small businesses at this point.”

“So if you have one or more employees in California, you now have to meet this mandate, which is just a huge, that's 200,000 small businesses across Gusto and Intuit alone.”

“Our first employee was actually a lawyer. And this was a person, you know, generally not fresh out of law school, but somebody young enough to essentially interpret, interpret ERISA, the IRS regulations, Department of Labor, SEC, et cetera. And that was really…”

“We totally made this market with the help of gusto in our early days.”

“I think starting at the bottom and doing the hard things first isn't necessarily like the MO of YC, at least not out of the gate. Not that they don't do really hard things they do, but they don't do them first.”