Powering Solopreneurs One at a Time: Dayslice

With all of the talk of the return to office and the great resignation, there is a groundswell of change around where and how we work. Some of this was caused by massive layoffs in early 2020 when Covid-19 hit. US unemployment hit 14.7% in April 2020, and people were forced to come up with creative ways to make money and pay the bills. With many firms freezing hiring, some people resorted to selling their services and products directly, becoming a business entity in and of themselves, sometimes called “solopreneurs.” As we’ve entered this state of “the new normal,” covid cases have declined along side unemployment, approaching pre-pandemic lows at 3.8% in February 2022

Despite this steady decline in unemployment, Americans are migrating to different jobs at an unprecedented rate. 47.4 million people voluntarily left their jobs in 2021, 9% more than in 2019, and the war on talent to fill open reqs is the most competitive it’s been in decades. In December 2021, about 6.3 million people started new jobs, but out of 10.9 million job openings, 4.6 million roles remained unfilled entering 2022. Yes, some of this is due to lower workforce participation rate, but something else is at play here.

If you look at new business formation data, you’ll see a steady rise in the number of businesses that are “not-high propensity.” This is a fancy term that means a company most likely formed by a soloprenuer. In the latest business formation statistic data released by the US Census Bureau, February 2022 saw the highest share of new business applications from soloprenuers, higher than anytime in the publicly available data.

This post has been heavy data to this point (🤓), but in review:

• Unemployment skyrocketed in April 2020, but is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels
• Despite employment gains, huge vacancies in the workplace remain
• Some is explained by workforce participation, but some is explained by the growing share of new businesses created by solopreneuers

These solopreneurs are a new class of business in and of themselves, with their own unique set of needs to operate their business. If you want to launch an ecommerce site, tons of services exist to run your store (Shopify, Amazon FBA, Narvar, Route, Klaviyo, SurveyGizmo, and the list goes on). But what about people that are selling their time? These individuals are reliant on back and forth coordination via email and text and handle transactions via PayPal or Venmo. Enterprises, and increasingly SMBs, have multiple solutions across procurement, HR, marketing, sales, finance, legal, and so on, sometimes even vertical specific for product and service businesses. Yet these solopreneurs either have to use portions of tools purpose built for another customer segment and over pay, or cobble together disparate tools to come up with a solution that does a mediocre job of serving their scheduling, payments, and social presence needs.

Enter Dayslice

We see the technology stack for solopreneurs as a large, untouched segment of SaaS. With that in mind, we are so thrilled to announce our investment in Dayslice today. Dayslice is building the Shopify for services — a digital storefront for services solopreneurs, where they can manage their service offerings, pricing, scheduling, payments, and audiences. Dayslice was founded by Ishita Arora, someone I had the privilege of working with closely at FleetSmith, where she was VP of product through the acquisition by Apple.

After engaging in user insight-driven R&D, Ishita and her team landed on a SaaS platform that would serve the needs of individual entrepreneurs with similar but unique use cases. She envisioned it as a personalized, conversion-optimized storefront for solopreneurs, individuals building side hustles, “parentpreneurs” and others looking to seamlessly grow and monetize their knowledge — and to enjoy independence and freedom from the traditional workplace grind. The Dayslice team is driven by the potential to empower these individual entrepreneurs.

I adore working with Ishita, but the thing that strikes me most about her is her product excellence, combination of metrics driven accountability with the art of visionary instinct and finally her team building skills. Ishita is an incredible product thinker. I am always impressed by analyses that she shares behind the scenes as new features are prioritized and launched and the speed at which she iterates between good and great, where many may settle for good unconsciously. Beyond her technical skills, she is an empowering people leader. She has strong opinions about finding and retaining talent, onboarding, culture building, all while creating a culture of high performance and accountability, especially important in today’s budding solopreneur world. Few people can do both of these well, and Ishita nails both.

If you are a solopreneuer, working on a side hustle, or trying to completely break free from a traditional 9–5, check out Dayslice.