The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Busque: 100% of Guideline's 401(k) plans require automatic enrollment
“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.”
Busque: Guideline's technical infrastructure cuts out middlemen to create a pricing moat
“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.”
Busque: Guideline was first in US to charge SaaS-based 401(k) fees
“We're the first one charging a SaaS-based fee for a four one K benefit in the country.”
Busque: Guideline created the SMB 401(k) market with Gusto's help
“We totally made this market with the help of gusto in our early days.”
Busque: Tackling the hardest foundational problems first isn't the standard YC playbook
“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.”
Busque: Guideline manages nearly $17 billion in assets
“So we managed almost seventeen billion dollars in assets now.”
Busque: Relying on legacy 401(k) providers like Ascensus was the wrong path
“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…”
Busque: Average 401(k) asset-based fees have dropped to 80-90 basis points
“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.”
Busque: Guideline uses asset-based fees to eliminate loan and withdrawal charges
“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.”
Busque: Guideline replaced routine executive 1-on-1s with a group 'CEO Council'
“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…”
Busque: 401(k) startups cannot run beta tests due to IRS regulations
“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.”
Busque: Guideline charges $8 per active participant instead of per eligible employee
“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.”
Busque: Plaid was Guideline's first customer
“And they became our first customer before anybody else. And it was guideline and plaid early on.”
Busque: I swore to never build a transaction-based company again after TaskRabbit
“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,…”
Busque: Guideline services nearly 60,000 businesses with 400 employees
“We're 400 people at guideline, but we service almost 60,000 small businesses at this point.”
Busque: California retirement mandate affects 200K Gusto and Intuit businesses
“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.”
Busque: Guideline's plan acquisition is split 50/50 between self-serve and sales
“Roughly 50%, depending on how you measure it, is bought on our website, and then 50% goes through the sales process.”
Busque: Guideline lost 5% to 10% of early customers over auto-enrollment
“We definitely lost some early plans in the first 100. I would say we probably lost five, 10 plans.”
Busque: Guideline only started a sales-led motion eight months ago
“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.”
Busque: Felicis passed on Guideline's seed but later led its Series B
“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 …”
Busque: 16 US states now mandate employer retirement benefits
“There's 16 different states that has a required benefit, required benefits. So you have to have some level of retirement benefit.”
Busque: Guideline launched its 401(k) product with 0% AUM fees
“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.”
Busque: Guideline's Gusto integration enabled 401(k) setup in eight minutes
“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.”
Busque: Guideline initially tried to buy HR.com to build an HRIS
“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…”
Busque: 92% of Guideline participants accept automated portfolio recommendations
“That was fine too, but 92% of all of our participants take our recommendation.”
Busque: 92% of Guideline customers are on integrated payroll platforms
“92% of all of our customers are on an integrated platform”
Busque: 1.6% 401(k) fees cost individuals up to $600K over 20 years
“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…”
Busque: Guideline relied entirely on inbound sales for over eight years
“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.”
Busque: Guideline hired an ERISA attorney as its first employee
“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…”
Busque: Guideline's first product was a 401(k) fee estimator lookup tool
“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…”