Check

🎉 Super excited to announce Check's partnership with Vestwell today! Like Check, Vestwell’s platform is built with rigor and engineered for flexibility, allowing them to meet partners where they are. Whether it’s powering a simple 401(k) plan or providing a fully embedded retirement experience, this adaptability makes them a natural fit for Check and our partners. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eYRRyWZi

Excited to announce Check's partnership with Vestwell today! Through this partnership every platform built on Check will be able to make Vestwell's full range of retirement benefits available in seamless fashion. There are competing visions for the future of workforce management playing out right now. Traditional payroll and HR providers believe the future is monolithic — and one that they should own. Check's vision is that the future belongs to an incredible array of entrepreneurs and innovators — building new solutions for the industries and customer types they know best. This is classic David vs Goliath. Amazon vs Shopify merchants. Marriott vs AirBnB hosts. We're proud to be working with Vestwell to arm the rebels in this battle. https://lnkd.in/eCDwF3xY

Like many of you, I’m home for Thanksgiving. My dad greeted me this year with a proud grin, handed me a print-out, and declared, “AI knows you!” It was a ChatGPT conversation in which he’d asked what his son does for a living. The answer started with: “Jim Kohl is among the earliest pioneers in developing and promoting embedded payroll. He played a key role at Check, the company widely recognized as the first-mover in this space.” before explaining the finer details of the embedded space. On one hand, I felt a strange relief, after years of trying to explain embedded payroll over dinner, Dad finally got a clear answer (and seemed delighted by it). On the other hand… wow. The work we pour our lives into can now be distilled, explained, and handed to anyone in seconds by a system most of us barely understood last Thanksgiving. It was a reminder of how strange and wonderful this moment is, the things we’ve built are suddenly a question away from being public property. What parts of our stories are we still the only ones who can truly tell? And which ones are we happy to let AI handle? Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours loved ones (whether AI knows what they do or not)

🚀 Pumped to share a case study with OnTheClock, one of our favorite partners here at Check. Sharing some of my favorite pull quotes from Jeff Hughes, Director of Customer Success and Sales at OnTheClock. https://lnkd.in/ejfbz3iT "What stood out was Check's reputation. We had a robust list of requirements and functionality. It came down to having a trusted partner who would be with us throughout the process—a company that has the industry expertise, something we could embed in the product, and a team to help us be successful in the go-to-market strategy. Check stood out there. Plus, some of the other names out there could be viewed as competitors and it would be difficult to get into business and partnership with a competitor." "From ease of execution perspective, taking an already industry-proven enrollment process and embedding it into our product was the easiest and quickest way to get to market. The flow makes sense. Once you’re interested in payroll, you start with eligibility and enrollment, then migrate seamlessly through Check’s setup components. If we had to build each component individually, it would have taken a lot longer. With Check, we launched last December, versus potentially still talking about it today." Thanks Jeff Hughes for the kind words - we're honored and excited to continue to powering OnTheClock's payroll business!

🏇 Has a customer ever asked you for an "electric horse" feature? I used this term yesterday during a product review meeting at Check, and the blank stares of some of my team members let me know that a definition was in order. As far as I can tell the phrase originates from Henry Ford, and was then re-popularized when Steve Jobs invoked Ford to explain his product strategy at Apple. Ford's original quote was, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" The point is: don't always follow your customers' suggestions about the solutions to the problems they're facing. Instead, ask probing questions to identify the customer's underlying problem, and then think from first principles about the best solution. Due to context and expertise, you may arrive at a very different place than your customer, but that will generally be to the advantage of your customer in the long run. Here's an small, recent example of an "electric horse" feature request and how we responded to it. Since the earliest versions of Check's API, our sandbox environment has had a property where payrolls, once approved, are automatically moved through their status lifecycle (from pending, to processing, to paid) by an automated job that runs every five minutes. This makes it so that sandbox users can quickly simulate status transitions on payroll objects, which usually take days to play out in production. A customer asked if we could enable them to modify the amount of time between sandbox status transitions (i.e. change it from five minutes to ten minutes). We dug deeper and understood that this customer's core problem was that they were building a custom set of integration tests on their side, and didn't have time to predictably run all the tests they wanted to on a payroll before it was transitioned to the next status. Instead of giving them a way to control the time between automated status updates, we thought a more direct solution would be to simply give them the ability to control the status of sandbox payrolls themselves. So we built that, and launched it last quarter (docs: https://lnkd.in/e4EehZ3p). I think the "electric horse" feature is a useful concept to have in one's vocabulary as a product person. What "electric horse" features have you responded to lately?

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the inaugural Vertical Software Summit. My 🌶️ take message for the vSaaS founders I spoke with: while there is a lot you can learn from each other, there is no one linear "vSaaS playbook" you should follow. It's entirely dependent on your product and your industry. Some of Check's most successful partners have started their business with payroll and workforce management as the core offering for their customers. Others are on the other end of the spectrum, where they add payroll as one of the final linchpin pieces that completes their vertical ERP. And I've seen still other vertical solutions where adding payroll simply wouldn't make any sense at all. All of these strategies can work great! The key is to obsess over what your customers need, today, and build from there. Own the customer relationship. Take the time to build a great product. Make your customers live easier. The rest will follow. Thank you Luke Sophinos for putting on a fantastic event, Raj Bhaskar from Tight for hosting the panel, and to Itai Damti from Unit and Ershad Jamil for being great co-panelists.