What I found after 50+ founder chats
Bit of a different one today.
Back in Feb I started talking to high ticket eCom founders. Not one or two. More than fifty. Proper conversations. Cameras on. Honest chats about what’s actually going on behind the Shopify screenshots.
Some were more seasoned than me.
Some were just getting started and saw promising numbers.
Most were somewhere in the messy middle… making money, but feeling like the whole business was sitting on their shoulders.
Every chat went for about an hour. Some went waaaay longer.
And afterwards, I’d spend another hour+ going through notes, patterns, common pain points, what was missing, what was working, what wasn’t (with the help of my good friend ChatGPT).
After ten months of this… a few things became stupidly obvious.
Most experienced dropship founders don’t have a product or niche problem.
They don’t lack ideas.
And it’s definitely not laziness.
The real issues were almost always the same:
- they couldn’t see their numbers properly
- margins were too thin or too random
- traffic was inconsistent so every win felt like luck
- and their team (if they had one) relied on them for everything
And honestly… I’d lived a lot of that too.
So none of it surprised me.
It just confirmed what I’d already been feeling for ages.
Talk soon,
-Matthew