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Research11 Feb 202612 min read

What small Thai businesses actually run on

Interviews with owners about the tools behind their operations — and why the barrier to changing them is rarely money.

By
Thousand Kreative
Published
11 Feb 2026
Source
Studio interviews with owners of small Thai businesses, 2025–2026

Over a year of first conversations with prospective clients we kept notes on one question: what does the business run on today? This is a write-up of those notes, anonymised, with the patterns we saw.

The short version

Chat apps and spreadsheets are the operating system, almost everywhere.

Owners are not resisting software; they are resisting the risk of a system they cannot see inside.

The projects that worked began by understanding the existing arrangement, not by replacing it.

A qualitative study from a studio’s own conversations, not a survey with a sample size. Read it as field notes.