Building an automated digital product business as a solo founde

About a month ago.I realized was spending more time managing tools than actually building products.

Every new customer meant another series of manual tasks:

.Checking payments
.Updating records
.Sending access information
.Organizing customer data

None of these tasks were difficult,but they were repetitive and took time away from building.

That's when I started asking myself a simple question:

How much of this process can be automated?

I'm not trying to build the next unicorn.

My goal is much simpler.

I want a digital product business that can run with as little manual work as possible.

Ideally:

.Customers can discover products
.Payments are processed automatically
.Content is delivered automatically
.Customer data is organized automatically
.Support workload remains manageable

Right now,my stack looks like this:Telegram→Make→Notion→Payhip

Each tool handles a specific part of the workflow:

.Telegram for community and communication
.Make for automation everything together
.Notion as the operational database
.Payhip for selling digital products

One thing I've learned so far:

Building the automation was actually easier than designing the workflow.

The technical setup took a few hours.

Figuring out how everything should work together took several days.

I also learned that automation creates new problems while solving old ones.

For example,one of my early Make scenarios failed because of an incorrect mapping field.

Nothing critical happened,but several records didn"t sync correctly to Notion.

It took longer to find the mistake than it took to build the workflow in the first place.

At the moment,I only have a small number of users.

But I wanted the system to be scalable before growth becomes a problem.

Some challenges I'm still working through:
1.Managing user journeys across multiple platforms
2.Keeping customer data synchronized
3.Handling automation failures gracefully
4.Creating a workflow that remains easy to maintain as a solo founder

One thing I'm still unsure about is whether Notion is the right long-term database for this setup.
A lot of solo founders seem to start with Notion and later migrate to something more robust.

For those of you building digital product businesses or small SaaS projects:what become your biggest operational bottleneck as you grew?

And if you've used Notion as the center of your workflow,did you eventually move away from it?

I'd love to hear what worked-and what didn"t.