At Collective, our mission is to enable Businesses-of-One to become more financially successful by giving them time to focus on their passion and not their paperwork. It’s a big mission. It will take us a long time to deliver. There are a lot of solo businesses. Like, a LOT.
In our first year, we started with just California. Over the last two years, we expanded to serve solopreneurs across 11 states. Now, as we open the New Year, we’re proud to announce that Collective is officially live in all 50 states!
Collective’s mission is incredibly personal to us. We’ve experienced how challenging taxes, accounting, payroll and other administrative tasks are to manage. From seeing our own parents struggle with bookkeeping, to making (painful) tax mistakes ourselves– we’ve often looked back and said, “How much easier could this have been if there had been a Collective?”
This need is acute and growing even faster than we anticipated. Freelancers and other solopreneurs spend nearly 25% of their time on finance and administration. Before our nationwide launch, the organic inbound interest to join our community was overwhelming. With over 50 times more applicants than members, our mission was never clearer – the need for Collective across the country was our next north star and milestone.
Solopreneurship is growing rapidly. By 2027 there will be an estimated 86.5 million freelancers in the United States, over half of the US workforce. Our state expansion is simply the first stop on a long road to achieving our vision of seeing our community thrive. We are more empowered than ever to support the underserved self-employed community by expanding our core services to provide an all-in-one dashboard experience, and eventually offering additional services like business banking, retirement planning and more.
We’re truly grateful to our existing members for helping us reach this milestone. Their invaluable feedback and continued support has been essential and we are excited to partner with them as we continue to expand Collective and serve the rapidly community of solo founders.
Onward and upward,
Hooman
Hooman Radfar is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Collective. Hooman co-founded Collective to create a better world by supporting the largest and fastest-growing class of entrepreneurs in the world – Businesses-of-One.