Gusto delayed public self-serve launch until months after Demo Day
Josh Reeves · From A Pivot To Building A $9.6 Billion Payroll Company · Y Combinator · Mar 18, 2025 · at 10:57
Gusto CEO Josh Reeves describes early customer onboarding and their staged rollout strategy after Y Combinator.
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“After demo day, we actually did not launch the product. That was also kind of a non-obvious choice we made. We'll probably talk about the seed round we did, but we actually didn't launch publicly where you could like come up as a stranger who we've never met, right? All the other YC companies we had met and knew, but like a stranger who we've never met could come to our website, could set up, could add employees, could go run payroll, and it would all work. And if they wanted to call us, they could, but it would actually all be there ready for them to use. We didn't actually do that till December of, so several months later.”
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