but how do you find these small businesses that need these types of things?
One of my friends lives in a rural area where most businesses never got beyond the Church bulletin board and the phone book.
Suddenly they became cottage country and none of the local businesses were getting any business as they wanted to see websites or at least written down phone numbers and they don't use phonebook.
Take a walk through the small business section of your town and see who has a website. If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify. Lots of desperate closed businesses who will take a gamble on that right now.
The reason tech has not arrived is that there is no person standing in front of them making it extremely basic for them.
So ... they then pay you for helping them get on Shopify? I can see how one might be able to convince a business owner that they could benefit from using Shopify, but is there room in there for a third party to sell configuration services?
Please forgive my being a noob with regard to Shopify. Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the business owner just does on their own, so how does one come across as a _useful_ helper for that process?
You are vastly overestimating their computer savvy in many cases. Lots of small businesses barely have email. So even with the self onboarding option, many businesses need help.
But what I was thinking was more in line with this:
https://developers.shopify.com/custom-development
I am admittedly not a Shopify developer. I just have friends who make decent coin doing it while not being very good coders in general.