u/DependentPurchase269

genuine question because im at that point and keep going back and forth on it. been building a tool for shopify store owners for about 9 months. small team. i still answer a lot of the support myself because i tell myself i learn from it. and thats true. i do learn from it. but i also spend about 3 hours a week on questions that are almost identical to ones i answered the week before. the thing that keeps me doing it manually is that i feel like the moment i hand it off or automate it ill lose the signal. i wont know what people are actually confused about. so at what point did you make the call? and how did you make sure you kept the learning without keeping the bottleneck?

curious where people draw the line.

i find myself doing the same things repeatedly, knowing i should set something up to handle it, and still doing it manually because setting it up feels like it takes longer than just doing the thing.

then 3 months pass and i have done that thing 200 times.

what was the thing that finally made you sit down and build the process? like "maybe instead of answering these questions manually i could just automate it". or was it a time threshold?

things like 'is this safe if i have X condition', 'will this work for my specific situation', questions that are too personal to answer generically on a product page.

do most people just accept that those customers won't convert? or is there a practical way to handle that volume without hiring someone specifically for pre-sale support?

asking because i keep losing people at that exact point and trying to figure out the right approach for a small operation.

started building a tool for shopify store owners. thought the customer was the founder.

spent months making the dashboard cleaner, analytics better, onboarding smoother. i thought "founders love dashboards". "founders love data"!

actual usage was happening entirely outside the dashboard. the tool was doing its job on product pages talking to shoppers. the founder just wanted it to work and not think about it.

the customer for the dashboard was me, not them. i built what i would want, not what they needed.

the founders who stayed were the ones who set it up once and forgot it existed. the ones who needed a dashboard were actually telling me the core product wasn't working well enough.

took way too long to figure that out.