Working parents face a time equation that doesn't add up: nine-to-five work schedules, five hours of family time, evening work sessions, and a growing list of household tasks that get perpetually pushed to the weekend. For Ashley Chang, co-founder and CEO of Sundays, this pattern represented both a personal connection to her mother's story and a problem worth solving.
In this episode of The Growth Layer, Ashley shares how Sundays is helping parents reclaim time through a combination of personalized executive assistant support and technology, why her initial plan to build an app gave way to a human-centered model, and what it's like to navigate founder life with a five-month-old.
A Personal Starting Point
Ashley's inspiration for Sundays traces back to her mother, a computer scientist in the 1980s who felt forced to choose between career and family. Without adequate support systems, she stayed home with her children. Ashley expresses gratitude for that presence while also recognizing what was lost: her mother's personal fulfillment outside the home, and the contributions she and countless women of her generation could have made had they been supported in doing both.
Twenty-five years later, Ashley entered the same tech industry and watched talented colleagues, particularly women, struggle as they tried to balance ambitious careers with family life. Having always wanted both career and family for herself, she set out to understand what made this phase so difficult and whether she could help solve it.
The Research: Time, Not Tools
Ashley came from a product management background, having spent over a decade building tech products. Her first instinct was to build an app. But as she talked to working parents, a clearer picture emerged.
The issue wasn't a lack of tools or systems. Parents were already using calendars, task managers, and organizational apps. The problem was simpler and more fundamental: they didn't have enough time in the day.
The typical pattern looked like this: work from nine to five (at minimum), five hours of kid-related responsibilities, then back to the computer for more work in the evening. Everything required to actually run a family got pushed to the weekend, creating a long personal to-do list that consumed Sundays. There was no time for rest, for relationship, or for the kind of presence that makes family life meaningful.
That's why the company is called Sundays. The goal is to give people their Sundays back.
Why Human Support Over Technology Alone
Ashley's research led her away from the app path and toward a human-centered model. Every family is different. The systems that work for one household don't necessarily translate to another. What matters is understanding who a family is, what's important to them, and how they actually operate.
Sundays pairs families with a human executive assistant who becomes their right-hand person. Technology runs in the background to increase efficiency, but the human relationship is the core. This approach allows for the kind of personalized, contextual support that apps can't provide.
The challenge, of course, is matching. Ashley describes it as similar to a dating service, especially for families looking for long-term support. Personality fit matters. Communication style matters. The way someone thinks and makes decisions matters.
Sundays developed an internal classification system based on principles from a book called People Styles at Work. The team conducts an intro call with every new client, assesses their communication style and working preferences, then matches them with someone on the team who complements that style. Currently, Sundays has about 30 executive assistants on staff, all vetted for the skills families need and trained to handle the nuances of family life.
Two Business Lines: Family and Work-Life Integration
Sundays operates two distinct but related offerings. One is pure family support: life maintenance tasks like scheduling dentist appointments, coordinating oil changes, planning birthday parties, managing moves. This side focuses on removing the logistical and mental load that accumulates in daily family life.
The other offering combines work and family support, primarily serving entrepreneurs and business owners who have left larger corporate roles. The differentiator here is integration. Sundays treats the admin tasks across both work and personal life as a single list, understanding that context matters. If a client is fundraising or heading into a busy work period, Sundays knows that's not the time to add complexity on the family side. If the holidays are approaching, they know that Christmas shopping for three kids and twenty nieces and nephews needs to happen alongside everything else.
This dual approach reflects the reality of how working parents actually live. Work and family aren't separate compartments. They're interwoven, and support systems need to account for that.
Seasonality and Demand Patterns
After two full years in operation, Sundays has identified clear seasonal patterns in demand. Summer and the end of the year bring heavy family focus: summer camps, school schedules, holidays. When school goes back into session and at the start of the new year, business support surges as people enter focused work periods.
Currently, Sundays is split about 50/50 between family and business clients, though business clients tend to purchase larger packages, generating more revenue from that side.
Retention and Impact
Ashley distinguishes between three types of client relationships. Some families come with a backlog of tasks and need help clearing it over about three months. Once that's done, they feel stable and pause services, though many return later.
Other clients use Sundays as a long-term partner for recurring tasks: weekly meal planning, tracking when kids last went to the doctor, managing the mental load that doesn't fit neatly into calendars or apps. This ongoing support is where Sundays sees the most impact on workforce participation. When families can consistently offload these responsibilities, they free up time and mental space to commit to work or to feel genuinely present with family.
The third category is full family management: weekly meetings to coordinate schedules, practices, caretakers, and logistics. This higher-touch model serves families with more complex needs.
The research Ashley conducted before launching Sundays revealed that many working parents had less than an hour of personal time during weekdays. Closing the daily household gap could give working moms back 219 hours per year, the equivalent of 27 workdays. Beyond the quantitative benefit, there's the qualitative shift of reducing the mental load, the background processing that never fully turns off.
Accessibility and the Premium Market
Sundays currently serves a premium market. Most clients are at least at the manager level or above in their careers. Ashley acknowledges that the service is not yet affordable for everyone, though she hopes to change that over time.
The model works particularly well for people in the middle of their careers who want to accelerate growth. By reclaiming time and focus, they're able to move up more quickly. It also serves executives who need that time back but are managing busier, more complex schedules.
Ashley notes the tension here: families need support, but in the absence of systemic solutions, the burden falls on individuals to invest in that support themselves. The lack of state or institutional infrastructure for working parents means that services like Sundays remain out of reach for many who would benefit from them.
The Founder Journey: Risk, Resilience, and Realism
Ashley left her role at Carta, where she had been building the VC product line, without knowing exactly what she would do next. She describes herself as a "100% in person," unable to start something new while holding down a full-time job. So she left, worked on a different idea, and took about six months to arrive at the concept behind Sundays.
Her father was an entrepreneur who built medical devices, and she watched him launch multiple companies, some that didn't work and a couple that did. That resilience shaped her understanding of what building from scratch requires.
Her first job out of college was as the first employee at a Y Combinator company. The experience initially made her not want to be a founder. She saw the pressure it put on the founder and wasn't ready for that responsibility. It took years to circle back and feel ready to take it on herself.
Ashley is now five months into parenthood while running Sundays. She had planned for this transition, but the reality has shifted her thinking. She still has the same ambitions for the company, but she's more realistic about what her day-to-day looks like. Before, she could grind through the night if needed. Now, there are real tradeoffs. Missing time with her son means missing moments that won't come back. At this stage, he changes every few days, and that time feels uniquely valuable.
She's still working out what success looks like long-term versus what it looks like day-to-day, and how to balance those two definitions.
The Role of AI and What's Next
The past two years have brought rapid AI adoption, which has implications for a business built on human support. Ashley sees AI as an enabler rather than a replacement. It helps Sundays' team work more efficiently and makes family support more accessible. The bet the company is making is that personal relationships will continue to matter, that the value of a human who knows your family and your context will outweigh the time it takes to prompt AI into producing something equally useful.
Sundays is currently refining its product offerings, moving from saying yes to everything in the early stages to productizing services based on data about what clients actually need. The team is expanding beyond Ashley doing everything herself (hiring, recruiting, sales, marketing) to a small, lean group of people who can own specific functions.
Growth has been steady, though Ashley admits her goals are ambitious and the company isn't quite hitting them yet. She took two months of leave earlier this year, and the team is now recalibrating as she returns and the fall season begins.
Sundays remains a bootstrapped company, having raised a small friends and family round at the start. The service-based model allows them to maintain control and prioritize quality over rapid scaling. Ashley keeps an eye open for opportunities that might be a better fit for venture investment, but for now, bootstrapping aligns with how she wants to build.
Marketing, Community, and Long-Term Growth
Sundays has grown primarily through referrals and LinkedIn, which worked well in the early stages when Ashley was the entire marketing team. The platform's algorithm has shifted recently, so the company is exploring other channels: building out an email newsletter, experimenting with organic outreach, and hosting in-person events to build relationships.
Ashley loves the community-building aspect of events, though she's mindful of the scalability challenge. Some people engage with Sundays for years before becoming clients, which makes those long-term touchpoints valuable even if they don't convert immediately.
Why This Matters
Ashley's work with Sundays addresses a structural issue that affects millions of families. The decision to stay in or leave the workforce often hinges not on ambition or capability, but on whether parents can find a sustainable way to manage both work and family responsibilities.
By focusing on time rather than tools, human relationships rather than pure automation, and integration rather than separation, Sundays offers a model that reflects how working parents actually live. It doesn't solve the systemic problem of inadequate support for families, but it provides a practical option for those who can access it.
The hope is that over time, as the model proves out and efficiencies improve, services like this become more accessible. In the meantime, Sundays is helping one family at a time reclaim their Sundays, their evenings, and the mental space to be present in the ways that matter most.
Key Takeaways
1. Understand the real problem before building the solution. Ashley's research revealed that parents didn't need more tools; they needed more time. This insight shifted the entire business model.
2. Human relationships can be your differentiator in a tech-driven world. AI and automation have their place, but personalized, contextual support still requires human understanding.
3. Product-market fit evolves with data. Sundays started by saying yes to everything, then refined offerings based on actual usage patterns and client needs.
4. Seasonality matters in service businesses. Understanding when demand spikes allows for better resource planning and client communication.
5. Founder life changes when life changes. Ashley's experience as a new mom has reshaped how she thinks about success, tradeoffs, and what sustainability looks like long-term.
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The Growth Layer is a conversation series from Future Digital exploring how real growth happens in health, wellness, and family brands. Each episode pulls back the curtain on the pivots, decisions, and behind-the-scenes discussions that shape category-defining companies. Subscribe for more founder stories and growth lessons from leaders transforming care.
