How a Missed Flight Led to Gusto's AI Co-founder Product

Key Insights

• Origin Story: Eddie Kim, Gusto's co-founder and head of technology, built the first prototype of Gusto Co-founder during a five-hour airport layover after missing a flight from London to San Francisco
• Core Function: Gusto Co-founder automates recurring business processes like payroll, time off approvals, and custom workflows—all accessible via SMS and Slack
• Rapid Development: The full product went from concept to launch in just 10 weeks with only five AI-powered builders
• Real Impact: Early customers have discovered unexpected automations, from weather alerts for tour businesses to finding $50,000 in unclaimed R&D tax credits

What Is Gusto Co-founder?

Gusto Co-founder is an AI-powered automation tool designed for small business owners. Instead of manually running payroll, approving timesheets, or managing recurring tasks, the product handles these processes automatically through SMS, Slack, or other channels. It learns what a business does regularly on Gusto—payroll, time approvals, expense tracking—and suggests ways to fully automate them.

Eddie emphasizes that the product goes beyond simple task automation. It runs on a "heartbeat" system that triggers automations at regular intervals, and it can even proactively alert business owners to opportunities they might miss, like tax credits or compliance requirements.

The Origin: A Missed Flight Becomes Innovation

The idea emerged when Eddie set up an open-source AI automation tool (OpenClaw) while on vacation. During his return trip, he missed his connecting flight from London to San Francisco, leaving him with five uninterrupted hours in the airport lounge. Rather than waste time, he pulled out his laptop and used Claude Code to build a prototype that let customers describe what they wanted Gusto to do, and the AI would generate a functional web app.

When Eddie returned to work and shared the prototype with his team, they saw the potential immediately. Over the next few weeks, the concept evolved from a simple web app builder into something more powerful: an automation system that leverages Gusto's existing customer data to intelligently automate business workflows.

How It Works: Data-Driven Automation

The early prototype was limited—it could build CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) web apps but didn't use any of Gusto's existing customer information. The breakthrough came when the team realized they could combine prompts with the vast data Gusto already has about customers: their payroll patterns, industry type, what tasks they perform weekly, and what competitors in their space are doing.

This shift transformed the product from a generic web app builder into a smart business automation platform. Now, Gusto Co-founder can tell a massage spa owner exactly how to extract commission data from their booking system and automatically calculate what needs to go into payroll each week. It can alert a tour business owner about rain and automatically email customers. None of this is manually coded by engineers—it's driven by AI understanding the customer's business and Gusto's data.

The technical design is surprisingly simple: a cron job triggers an LLM every 30 minutes to check if any automation should run. If needed, it executes the task and sends the results via SMS or Slack for final approval.

Building at Scale in 10 Weeks

What stands out most is how Gusto built Gusto Co-founder: with just five people—four engineers and one designer—in only 10 weeks. Eddie credits AI coding tools like Claude Code for making this speed possible.

The team eliminated nearly all traditional software development overhead. No tech specs. No Figmas. No lengthy design docs. No approval meetings. Instead, they maintained one continuous Zoom meeting where team members could hop in and out, sharing ideas and feedback in real-time. When someone had an idea, they'd write a pull request immediately and ask for feedback rather than discussing it in meetings first.

This approach meant throwing away a lot of code. Eddie estimates their hit rate was around 50%—half their ideas didn't make it into the final product. But even with that "waste," it was faster than traditional processes because actually building and iterating beats planning and approving. The designer contributed as much code as any engineer, and engineers became comfortable designing without fear. Roles blurred as everyone's focus became writing and shipping code.

Early Traction and Surprising Use Cases

The product launched with 500 customers, and feedback from an earlier test group of 20 small business owners was overwhelmingly positive. The most immediate reaction came from experiencing payroll automation via text message—something Eddie himself was surprised to find so compelling, but which every early customer immediately appreciated.

What surprised Eddie most was how businesses used Gusto Co-founder beyond Gusto's core offerings. While obvious automations like "run my payroll every Friday" were popular, creative automations emerged: tour businesses requesting daily weather checks with auto-emails to customers, businesses generating weekly competitor reports, and tracking specific business metrics automatically.

One concrete win: Gusto found $50,000 in unclaimed R&D tax credits for a company called Cabana Pools. The business owner didn't even know this credit existed, but Gusto Co-founder flagged the opportunity and prepared the paperwork for approval.

What's Next

The roadmap is expansive. Eddie plans to add more communication channels (Telegram, WhatsApp) beyond SMS and Slack, build hundreds of new connectors to third-party business tools (dental software, inventory systems, etc.), and eventually open the product to people who don't yet have a company or EIN—allowing aspiring entrepreneurs to automate side hustles before they officially start a business.

The vision is broader than just saving time: by automating routine work, business owners can focus on growth, strategy, and building their businesses. Gusto Co-founder could even help users file for an EIN or register as an employer in their state, turning it into something more like a true business co-founder.

Conclusion

Gusto Co-founder started as a five-hour airport experiment and became a product that ships in weeks what might traditionally take months. By pairing AI with the data Gusto already holds about small businesses, the product solves a real problem: the dozens of recurring, time-consuming tasks that distract owners from growing. The fact that it was built by five people in 10 weeks using AI-powered tools is itself the story—a practical demonstration of how AI is fundamentally changing software development velocity at scale.

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Original source: How A Prototype Built During A Missed Flight Became A New Gusto Product

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