Potential customer here. One guy's experience. As a technical founder of my own company, the founder of Zenefits ( reportedly, they maybe use that line but com

Potential customer here. One guy's experience. As a technical founder of my own company, the founder of Zenefits ( reportedly, they maybe use that line but coming from standard sales reps ) reached out and suggested I take a look at Zenefits. I looked. I asked two different "startup CFOs" about Zenefits. I found the following conclusions: * The market is crowded. Trinet is what everyone in the valley has been using, and no one has serious problems with them. It's not like, you know, fighting the intrenched taxi mafia. Zenefits is not disrupting anything, they're simply competing. * According to my sources, Zenefits is the hardest company to work with of benefits suppliers. Compared to Trinet, when your CFO-type calls Zenefits, they get long wait times and unprofessional answers. One of my sources was forced to use Zenefits ( by a founder ) and considered them a time sink. * High prices. Because of a small installed base, Zenefits didn't have the ability to create a large insurance pool and have market power with insurers. They claimed low prices, and did have low prices for their service, but the numbers penciled out higher because of higher health insurance prices. If they think prices go down when they get bigger, maybe the would have needed to subsidize prices. Not a win. Part of our startup culture these days is "damn the law, make customers happy". I'm not super thrilled about that attitude, but it is what it is. The zing against Zenefits in this article is poor technology ( uh, chasing MPV is all about poor technology ), and poor legal practices. I honestly didn't care about either - I care about user experience and prices. My internal recommendation not to use Zenefits was poor user experience, and high prices. I didn't like having a sales person tell me prices were low when I had done my research and prices were higher. I didn't like being told Zenefits was easy to use when my people said it was harder to use. And, yes, I sent a note outlining all the to the founder, in the interest of helping a brother out. I don't remember what I got back, but it wasn't encouraging.