London: Polite customer feedback provides zero signal compared to extreme reactions
Tomer London · How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem · Jul 1, 2025 · at 12:24
Gusto co-founder Tomer London explains why founders should disregard polite customer interest and look only for extreme emotional responses.
0:00 / 0:52exact quote · 52.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You need to build a business that's built on either I want it right now. Can I get it? And then you put a price tag and they're saying, I will pay for it, right? So strong positive emotion or strong negative emotion. It's like, this is absolute shit. I would never use something like this. This is gold because that's where you can learn. When someone says that your stuff is absolute shit, it means that you can learn a lot from it, right? There's something in your mental model that was absolutely wrong here. Either it's the wrong customer or something about your service or the way you pitched it. when someone is, you know, emotionally reacting with like engagement and excitement, you know, where can I sign up? You know, on the other side that you hit gold with that particular customer, and you should probably ask and learn what makes it so exciting for them. But 90% of the conversation in the middle you know, there's not a lot of data in there, and you should be very careful reading too much into people in, in that category.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Tomer London
Tomer London: Initial product-market fit means 2 out of 10 prospects love the product
“Product market fit for me is that when you talk with 10 customers, two people are loving this and want this. That's great product market fit. Now, you need to figure out who's the two, who, what makes them special, who are the segments, and then you can pick 1…”
London: Payroll onboarding makes adding adjacent HR tools frictionless
“Payroll data is very, very powerful because onboarding is so complex. There's so much that you need to, we need to know about you as a company in terms of your employees and where, Where, where they work and how much they get paid and like your company address…”
Tomer London: Prior founder experience accelerates validation, but PMF requires luck
“I think having multiple founding journeys for me, having Josh and Eddie, having previous startups, it helps you by one, knowing how to avoid some mistakes. So you don't repeat the same mistakes. So for me, like I can give you a bunch of mistakes. We can talk a…”
London: A true growth mindset means feeling embarrassed by your past self
“What I mean by humble is self-critical in a constructive way. It's kind of like growth mindset, right? Like knowing that you are a work in progress. Every day you're supposed to be better, which means that if, when you look at yourself a month ago or it's a ye…”
London: Strong customer intuition means predicting what customers will say next
“Speak with customers so much, in fact, that you know, you can just start predicting what they're going to say next, because you've heard it so many times before, right? That when you start knowing that, that's like, oh, I've heard this before. Then you know th…”
London: Product Creators Must Actively Seek Rejection in Customer Discovery
“When you speak with a customer, you kind of need to be in the mindset of seeking rejection. You go out there to learn, and again, the learning comes so much from rejection, so you got to go out there and seek that rejection”