Courtesy of Boy Smells

It’s nowhere near as easy as just hitting a button, especially during a pandemic.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that now, maybe more than ever, it’s easy to run a small business. That where there’s a will (and stable wifi), you can source, produce, and automate your way to residual income. It’s what my Instagram Explore page seemed to suggest one day, surfacing a Reel announcing the “sold-out launch” of something — you never see what — from someone who seemed optimized for the platform: excited for their own success, unburdened by the intensive labor it must’ve taken to get there.

It amounts to an ad for a suite of integrated marketing tools for merchants on Instagram, a platform that I’ve personally come to rely on for my own small business. It has taken me, a millennial, years to wrap