Payroll is difficult to get right, especially for small businesses, where there just isn't a lot of bandwidth. The three founders of payroll and benefits startup Gusto learned that the hard way, running their own small businesses before linking up to try to fix the broken SMB payroll system in 2013.

The co-founder and current CEO of Gusto, Josh Reeves, summarized on TechCrunch's Found podcast recently: "The founding team got interested in this area by their own personal painpoints, but they didn't want to build a company that would just serve their own problems.".

"We got talking to customers right away," Reeves said. "Even though we are based in Silicon Valley, we really focused on the mainstream small business. I love reminding folks that there is more than one dentist office in the U.S. than there are tech startups. We would go out, meet them, talk to them, interview them, get feedback."

Reeves discussed how, from there, they built the company to where they are today, 11 years and 300,000 customers later. The company has since added healthcare benefits as well, a response to customer demand, Reeves said. Gusto has also had to navigate growing competition in the space and how to best aid companies in transitioning their services to supporting a remote workforce during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the company has stayed laser-focused on small and medium-sized businesses-a fractured market compared to, say, enterprise-instead of trying to move up the stack or go for bigger customers.

"I'd describe Gusto as a tremendous product for one to 500-person companies across all of the United States," Reeves said. "But the truth is, there are 6.2 million employers in America and 4 million are less than five employees, over half are less than five employees."

Reeves also spoke of a decade since the founding team is still around the company, how they plan to continue expansion and offer other tools for small business users, and why they feel it is just the starting point.

We love fixing stuff in people's lives, Reeves said. The truth is we're still early. If you look at market-share, wallet-share and the product mix we have live today, there's just a lot more work to do. So we're eager to go get that work done.