After surveying several dozen digital product sellers about their business the four painpoints they mentioned actually surprised me

Sent a survey to several dozen of our most active sellers as I wanted to understand what's really going on in their day-to-day to help improve the platform for digital product sellers I run. All the respondents were either solopreneurs/entrepreneurs or working with small teams (under 5 people). 

Some of it confirmed what I suspected (😃), but a lot of it didn't (🙃):

1. What people dread and what they'd automate are often completely different things.
Very few people wanted the thing they dreaded automated. People would dread customer service but want to automate their newsletter. We’re not sure if this is because they’ve resigned themselves to the thing they dread or there’s something else going on here. 

2. DMs and comments eat more time than anything else (nearly 4 hours a week) but almost nobody mentioned them as something they dread.
The emotional pain is concentrated in accounting, taxes, and platform friction. The time pain is in engagement. I suspect this is partly because creators and SMB’s enjoy the DM’s (I know I do). 

3. Solo vs. team isn't just a size difference but a fundamentally different problem.
Solo operators need to do *less*. Team operators need their *tools to talk to each other better*. The dread profiles are completely different. Solos are drowning in doing everything themselves; small teams are drowning in manual handoffs between systems.

4. One respondent said: "I can automate nearly anything with Claude, I just want a stable platform."
That one stuck with me in the age of vibe coding. A subset of merchants aren't asking for more features (they can do that themselves), they want reliable infrastructure (which might explain why they are using SendOwl in the first place as our infrastructure can power sellers processing hundreds of thousands of orders). 

We wrote up a deeper dive on our blog, check it out here 

For those creators and business owners reading this: Do you dread the same things? Do you identify with the thing you want automated and the thing you dread being different? 

^(p.s. Also - why… why this pattern? I’m very curious because, honestly, I was confused by the contradiction :/)