It was a wrap that a teammate designed, and we paid someone to put onto the RV. The removal process was all on us though. It took a couple hours and left quite a few blisters on our hands from pulling it off by hand. Definitely worth it though!
47 karma · joined March 24, 2007
I'll be in San Diego this summer for a friends wedding. Can you send me a note at josh@gusto.com? Would be great to meet up while I'm down there.
We want spotlight these small businesses as much as possible, since they often don't get as much attention. You can read about some of them at www.gusto.com/extramile
(1) Each person in the company does customer support on a regular basis. In our hiring process, we screen for folks that care about our customer and the pain point we're solving. This means they're excited to interact with our customers and help them (vs. viewing it as a chore).
(2) Our customer support team is within our product organization. We are available to help you by email, phone, etc. and our goal is to provide the best service possible (with the same mindset on how we've built the product). But, as soon as the call ends, we strive to figure out how to prevent that specific call from ever happening again. The feedback our support team provides engineering and product managers is critical to customer-centric product development.
I think a lot of businesses confuse customer-centric product development as meaning that you should build whatever a customer asks for. Our goal is to truly understand our customers pain points, and then fix them, and often this means creating something that's never existed before (vs. just building a better/faster/cheaper version of what already exists).
btw, we love hearing from customers and we appreciate any and all feedback! I can be reached at josh@zenpayroll.com and if you're interested in signing up, check out www.zenpayroll.com
Here's a link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7265814
There are also two recent blog posts we've made which might be helpful. The first is about the funding, and second is our 2013 Year-In-Review, which highlights what we've been working on.
https://zenpayroll.com/blog/series-a-funding https://zenpayroll.com/blog/zenpayroll-2013-year-in-review
Hope this helps!
I was born in San Francisco, but grew up in the suburbs. When I was in college, I used to travel through San Francisco to visit my family and I told the reporter it's been amazing to see all of the neighborhood changes over the years. SoMa used to be much emptier, and was not a very residential area. After they built the Giants baseball stadium, there was a big building boom, and Mission Bay is now rapidly developing as well.
Separately, we discussed our housing stipend program. This perk was actually inspired by Facebook, which used to give a housing stipend for employees that lived within one mile of their office in downtown Palo Alto. We would do this program regardless of where our office is located (in SoMa or elsewhere) because we see a big benefit to folks not having to commute.
The reporter at the WSJ merged these two concepts, hence the quote you listed above.
As some quick history, the company is a little over two years old and we were a part of the YC W12 batch. My co-founders and I started the company because we had felt the pain of using existing solutions at our previous startups. We also have family members running small businesses, and we had been exposed first-hand to the frustration of doing payroll manually (which is still how many companies in the US do payroll).
We felt that modern software could make this complex process much simpler. It's been fourteen months since our launch and we're proud to be processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll, and serving countless small businesses across the country. I remind the team often that building a great company is a marathon, not a sprint, and we're still at the early stage of our journey. We have much more to do!
During this interview with the WSJ, I talked at length with Debbie about some team programs we put in place. People are the foundation of any great company and the ZenPayroll team is the entire reason we've been able to do what we've done over the past two years.
I wanted to clarify some of the programs she wrote about:
(1) Housing stipend -- the main driver of this perk is actually the desire to have folks live near the office. We would offer this type of program regardless of where our office is located (even if it was in a lower cost area) because we see a big benefit to folks not having to commute. We realize that not everyone can live nearby, and several of our teammates actually live on the Peninsula, East Bay, or other parts of SF. Our inspiration for this perk was the housing stipend Facebook provided it's employees early on, when they were located in downtown Palo Alto.
(2) Flight at one-year anniversary -- it’s easy in startup life to become caught up in the day to day. We’ve always found it rewarding to travel because it gives everyone perspective, and taking a step back can help people better understand what’s important to them, which makes them a better teammate as well. We put the two-year expiration in place as a specific restriction so teammates have to do a trip during that year. They don’t have to go of course, but we do everything we can to encourage them to do it.
(3) Workation -- similar to #2 above, we’ve found that changing our environment helps us think about things differently. Many other startups do similar types of retreats, and we’ve really enjoyed going away as a team for 5-6 days and working on smaller cross-functional projects that can be completed during the workation. It’s also a team bonding event, and yes, many folks in the office like to cook breakfast. :)
There are many definitions of the term "hacker" and I strongly believe there is no single right way to build software. Every team has to find the approach that's right for them and I want to sincerely apologize to anyone that was offended by the terminology we used.
We're proud to be a part of the YC and HN community, and many of my teammates are avid participants in HN.
If anyone wants to chat more with me directly, my personal email address is josh@zenpayroll.com.
Using our new functionality, accountants and bookkeepers can now offer modern payroll to their clients, and manage all of them from a free centralized dashboard.
There's a growing trend of small businesses outsourcing their back-office. These business owners are strapped for time and are juggling many different balls all at once. Independent service providers are there to help but they're dependent on the tools they use, which unfortunately have usually been overly complex and expensive.
With the rise of modern SaaS tools, these accountants and bookkeepers can now offer a much more compelling service to their clients, streamline their business, and hopefully expand.
We're thrilled to be a part of this shift and if anyone ever has any feedback/questions/thoughts to share, I can be reached directly at josh@zenpayroll.com