Gusto

Dandy

Gusto

Gusto charges a monthly base fee plus a per-employee fee. The Simple plan starts at $40/month plus $6 per employee per month.

Plus and Premium tiers add features like time tracking, PTO management, and dedicated support at higher price points.

The per-employee pricing creates natural revenue growth — as customers hire more people, Gusto makes more money without any additional sales effort. This aligns Gusto's success with their customers' growth, which is a beautiful incentive structure.

Additional revenue comes from embedded financial products. Gusto Wallet (employee banking), Gusto-run health benefits, 401(k) administration, and workers' comp insurance all generate fees.

The payroll platform becomes a distribution channel for financial services — once you process payroll for a company, you have a direct relationship with every employee and can offer them financial products.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

Gusto

Josh Reeves, Edward Kim, and Tomer London were Stanford engineering graduates who noticed that every small business owner they talked to hated the same thing: payroll. Running payroll meant calculating federal, state, and local taxes, filing quarterly returns, issuing W-2s, managing direct deposits, and dealing with an alphabet soup of compliance requirements (FICA, FUTA, SUTA).

One mistake and the IRS sends a penalty notice.

The existing solutions were terrible for small businesses. ADP and Paychex dominated the market but were designed for mid-to-large companies.

Their interfaces looked like they were built in 1998 (because they were). Their pricing was opaque.

Their customer service required calling a 1-800 number and sitting on hold. Small businesses with 5-50 employees were dramatically underserved.

The trio founded ZenPayroll in 2011 (rebranded to Gusto in 2015) with the mission of making payroll dead simple. The first version was a clean web interface that let business owners run payroll in a few clicks — enter hours, review the numbers, hit submit.

Gusto calculated all taxes automatically, filed them with the government, and sent direct deposits. What used to take half a day took five minutes.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

Gusto

Gusto grew by being the payroll platform that accountants recommended. Accountants manage payroll for thousands of small businesses, and Gusto built a dedicated Partner Program for accounting firms.

When a CPA recommends Gusto to all their small business clients, that's efficient distribution at scale.

The product-led growth motion is strong. Gusto's clean design and simple setup meant small business owners could sign up, enter their employee information, and run their first payroll without talking to a salesperson.

Free trials converted at high rates because the alternative was going back to manual calculations.

Expanding from payroll into HR, benefits, and financial services followed the natural workflow. Once Gusto ran payroll, adding benefits administration was a natural upsell — the same system that calculates pre-tax deductions can also manage the benefits that create those deductions.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

Gusto

ADP and Paychex aren't going to cede the small business market quietly. ADP Run is their small business product, and they've been modernizing it aggressively.

ADP has 70+ years of trust, massive sales teams, and relationships with every accountant in America. Gusto has a better product experience, but ADP has distribution that's hard to match.

Rippling is the most dangerous competitor. Parker Conrad (Rippling's CEO) is building an "all-in-one" HR/IT/Finance platform that includes payroll alongside device management, app provisioning, and expense management.

Rippling argues that payroll should be one feature in a broader system, not a standalone product. If companies buy Rippling for IT management and get payroll included, Gusto loses the deal.

Moving upmarket is hard. Gusto's sweet spot is companies with 1-100 employees.

Larger companies have more complex needs — multiple pay schedules, union rules, multi-state compliance, custom integrations — that Gusto's platform historically hasn't handled as well as incumbents.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

Gusto

Gusto Payroll — automated full-service payroll processing with tax calculations, filings, and direct deposits across all 50 states. Gusto Benefits — health insurance, dental, vision, 401(k), HSA, FSA, commuter benefits, and workers' compensation administered through the platform.

Gusto HR — hiring and onboarding tools, employee self-service portal, org charts, and document management. Gusto Time & Attendance — built-in time tracking with PTO management, holiday calendars, and overtime calculations.

Gusto Wallet — a free employee financial wellness app offering early wage access, savings accounts, and financial planning tools.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

Gusto

Google Capital (now CapitalG) led the Series C. General Catalyst invested early and has been in multiple rounds.

Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity participated in later growth rounds.

Y Combinator was the starting point (Winter 2012 batch). The company was valued at $9.5 billion in its latest funding round in 2022.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.