London: Framing yourself as a student or foreigner disarms customer interviewees
Tomer London · How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem · Jul 1, 2025 · at 35:08
Gusto co-founder Tomer London explains the conversational tactics he used during early customer discovery calls.
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“The first one is, hey, I'm a PhD student from Stanford, and I have a few questions. Do you mind helping? So that again really opens the other person to kind of to being open. They feel like they're not being sold to, or something like that. Then the other one is, You know, using kind of the fact that I'm like a foreigner, like my Israeli car is like, Hey, you know, I'm actually not from here. Can you just explain to me again what does it mean? Like, I'm not from here. Like, tell me more. So it kind of allowed, those two things allowed me to ask questions that are maybe more uncomfortable and the other person kind of not feeling awkward about it.”
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