Side-hustle merchants are a filtering stage here. The current environment conditions most 9-5 to chase optionality through a hustle. A good number will churn when life improves. That's very normal. But a small minority won't. I believe those are the ones who discover product-market pull, taste autonomy, and realize the upside of ownership beats incremental salary gains. Every large informal-to-formal business pipeline starts this way.
Instead of questioning when will these businesses scale, I think you should flip it and and question if @KwikNkap can identify, retain, and compound the 5-10% who will. Behemoths come from edge cases with assymetric ambition. Your job here isn't to make everyone scale but to build the rails that let the few who want to scale faster.
From @KwikNkap I’ve noticed that most of our merchants are 9-5ers with side hustles.
And so I wonder if these businesses will ever scale to the level of becoming behemoths or if the merchants will leave these businesses when they get a significant pay bump.