Compare / Gusto vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Gusto
BUSINESS MODEL
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.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
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.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
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.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
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.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
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.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
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.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.