
Why we’re building a boring business (and you should too) - aresant
http://www.meetingburner.com/blog/2011/07/12/why-we-are-building-a-boring-business/
======
patio11
Some additional reasons to solve boring problems for business:

1) People pay serious money for solutions.

2) Your competition is often clueless companies or, even better, clearly
subpar manual processes or Excel spreadsheets. (Every Excel spreadsheet which
has ever been emailed is a startup waiting to be born.) Nobody in the Valley
will realize you exist, since they'll be too busy with mobisocialfotogames and
other businesses attempting to separate jaded twenty-something's from money
that they don't have and wouldn't spend if they did.

3) Most boring problems have a fascinating underbelly, if you're inclined to
look for it. I knew a guy who did paper sales once. He was brimming with
enthusiasm for it: he was an absolute magician who spoke the secret language
of Paper. Every sheet had a character and a story, and he knew them all.

~~~
chc
Patrick isn't joking about paper, by the way. Choice of paper stock can make a
huge difference either consciously or subconsciously to how the message
printed on it is perceived. Ask somebody at a paper company to show you
sometime if you don't believe it.

~~~
patio11
Other things you never know about paper until you work at an office supply
store:

1) There are over a dozen perceptually different shades of white, grouped
mostly into blue whites and yellow whites. There is a difference in use cases
but I can't remember it and don't want to just make up one.

2) There are over a dozen common weights for papers. This chiefly becomes an
issue for "resume" paper, which is the king of papers. It's the stuff you
reserve for wedding invitations and, well, resumes. It's for when writing the
document on _actual money_ would still be a totally valid use of funds if the
document got a positive response as a result.

3) Some types of papers have a front and a back.

4) The microstructure of paper determines how it interacts with ink and office
equipment. Don't put inkjet paper in a laser printer or vice versa: you're
asking for jams, and the color won't stick the right way. (Inkjet paper is
designed to have lots of surface area at the microstructure level, the better
to trap ink. Laser paper is designed to be as flat as possible, the better to
burn quickly and efficiently in a localized manner when struck with a laser.)

5) How much money paper costs is _exquisitely_ sensitive to how much of it you
buy at a time. Major American school districts, who _quite literally_ buy it
by the truckload (one truck carries approximately 8 pallets, 50 cartons to a
pallot, 5 reams to a carton, 500 sheets to a ream), pay about a fifth what you
would if you went over to Staples and picked up a ream.

~~~
abstractbill
_Laser paper is designed to be as flat as possible, the better to burn quickly
and efficiently in a localized manner when struck with a laser._

Not that it affects your point at all, but laser printers don't work that way
(by burning paper). It's still ink-on-paper, the laser beam just tells the ink
where to go: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printer>

~~~
chc
He probably meant "heat up." Laser printers use heat to make the dust they
print with work like ink.

~~~
jonah
No.

The laser removes the static charge in a pattern on a charged rotating drum.
The charged drum then picks up the toner particles - essentially styrene and
carbon black - the paper is pressed against the drum transferring the toner
particles.

Finally, a pair of heated rollers melt toner and fuse it to the paper.

It is correct that laser paper is smooth but that's so the toner not scattered
by the rough paper and can be fused fully.

------
replicatorblog
This is completely true, I work in med devices/pharma and there are relatively
small companies that generate more revenue that the entire music/video game
industries.

Pharma companies will lose $50B in revenue this year due to expiring patents.
To put that in perspective imagine if every game and music company in the
world went out of business simultaneously. Then double it. That is the scale
of revenue loss in pharma and the industry will still be worth $720B. It is a
"boring" industry from a software perspective, but its magnitude is amazing.

Also, "Boring" is as much a perspective as a category.

MailChimp has built a massive business in email marketing and are one of the
cheekiest companies around.

AirBNB helps people book hotel rooms.

37 Signals makes a close cousin of meeting software.

At least that's what their SW does. I'm sure if you asked the owners of those
co's they'd say they help organizations communicate with their members, people
form real social networks, and entrepreneurs build their businesses.

There is a Disney saying "Magic doesn't make it work, the way we work makes it
Magic" Having the right perspective can add 80 IQ points!

~~~
tectonic
Can you give us some examples of what sort of web-application-solvable
problems this industry might have?

------
dotBen
It all comes down to how much risk you want to take.

(In general:) Consumer orientated startups have the potential to become
ridiculously valuable companies - lets just define that as a valuation of
$1bn+. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare (soon), etc. But your chances of getting
there are 0.001%.

Business orientated apps that real solve a genuine problem are more likely to
be 'successful' (say, valued at $100m+) but unlikely to become $1Bn businesses
(on it's own - you might get acquired, or you could become a software behemoth
like Atlassian with 100's of products - but these are not really 'startups'
anymore) .

As someone about to turn 30 and been in this business a few years, I see this
as simply an example of someone with a matured aspiration for what they want
to achieve.

If you are in your 20's, it fits your profile to probably work on something
consumer oriented, taking a risk and also have a lot of run (consumer apps
tend to be more fun that business apps, just saying).

If you are 30+ and not had that big win yet, it might be worth changing your
expectation and working on something that has a higher chance of being
moderately successful so that you are more likely to walk away from your
career with something.

This may or may not be what is going on with the founders of MeetingBurner,
but it's precisely where my head is at as I turn 30.

~~~
matwood
_If you are 30+ and not had that big win yet, it might be worth changing your
expectation and working on something that has a higher chance of being
moderately successful so that you are more likely to walk away from your
career with something. This may or may not be what is going on with the
founders of MeetingBurner, but it's precisely where my head is at as I turn
30._

Completely agree. The other part is that someone who is in their 30s is likely
to have seen the inside of a few large companies and have a ton of ideas about
nagging niche problems that can be solved.

~~~
abalashov
It is. You're just not drinking the SV Kool-aid. :)

------
ibejoeb
+1 for "boring" products. I like making them; it's really a pretty decent gig.

First, there _are_ still interesting problems even in less juicy domains.
That's not particularly relevant, though, because the juicy domains have those
too. At least we're pretty even so far...

The best part, for me, is that I get to make money solving some hard or
tedious problems; clients happy to pay for that, and I'm happy to be in
business. Then, I get to have actual fun with my "toy" projects rather than
worry about finding some obscure way to monetize something that has very
little intrinsic economic potential. I can afford to experiment, run a bunch
of small operations, get other people involved, and see where they go.

In being somewhat tightly bound one side, I have almost unlimited creative
freedom on the other.

~~~
diolpah
I would like to echo this sentiment. Although ecommerce was reasonably sexy in
1999, it is generally regarded by the current tech zeitgeist as stodgy and
boring, despite the fact that there are often very interesting problems to
solve in the domain.

I still love what we do, and the environment still feels very startupy, even
after a few years.

~~~
revorad
Wow, both ties.com and scarves.com have some of the best product photos I've
seen on any ecommerce site. Great job!

~~~
diolpah
Thanks. We have our creative and photography departments mashed into one, so
they tend to approach product photography as a part of design.

------
veastley
"Boring" has become almost a requirement as I evaluate new software business
ideas. The opposite of boring is often flash-in-the-pan fad ideas, and I run
screaming from those. I want to build real products people use, not trendy
solutions in search of problems.

------
cheez
Loading is fast and that's great, but I have 3-4 online meetings a week. I'm
not really bothered with loading time. However, the Webex "join meeting" UI
annoys me to no end.

Tell me about screen sharing, audio and recording of both. That's what I
really care about.

~~~
aresant
"Tell me about screen sharing, audio and recording of both. That's what I
really care about."

That issue is so specific to the litany of using current solutions it's not
even funny - something we definitely hated before building.

We spent a LOT of time making sure audio integration and recording worked
beautifully - we even built our own phone bridge system from the ground up so
that when you click "record" you get audio from dial ins and from digital
users all in one session.

After post-processing the recording on server side you can one click to export
to YouTube, lots more formats coming soon.

In terms of screen sharing, beta accounts let you share with up to 50 (contact
us if you need more), everything is cloud based (multiple cloud solutions for
redundancy) so we're harnessing massive CPU power to deliver an experience
that balances / beats the big boys on speed / quality.

Give it a try - if you didn't follow the link in the post go to
<http://www.meetingburner.com/> and enter beta code "boring" for instant
access today.

Also blog contains updates from the last two cycles that list more specific
feature details.

~~~
cheez
Exactly, I couldn't find this on the main site. I will sign up.

------
astrofinch
I'm 20, and one thing I'd like to do at some point is to get a job as a
management consultant so I can get a cross-section view of the economy and see
what lots of industries look like from the inside. I'm hoping that this will
give me enough domain knowledge in enough different industries to identify a
boring but profitable business idea and then chase it.

Can anyone older and wiser give me feedback on my plan? Is there an easier way
to gain a lot of domain knowledge about how different industries work? I like
the idea of working as a management consultant because

(1) it pays well

(2) my vague impression is that the job consists of having people give you the
lowdown on the problems their business is encountering

but I'm certainly open to trying something else if it seems like a better
idea.

Maybe instead of being a consultant, I should identify a single industry that
seems both corrupt and profitable and take aim at it more directly? Any tips
on finding such an industry?

~~~
ams6110
What exactly would you be consulting on, when by your own admission you don't
seem to have much background in anything in particular?

~~~
astrofinch
There seem to be some consulting firms (Deloitte in particular) that are
interested in hiring students from UC Berkeley just for the prestige factor.
In the worst case I could get an MBA or do IT consulting. (I _do_ have a
background in software development, but what I'm really interested in doing is
roaming across the economic landscape and finding an industry-specific need
for software that hasn't been written yet, and IT consulting doesn't seem like
the best way to do that if it's mainly about helping businesses maintain
existing systems--although correct me if I'm wrong about that.)

------
mindcrime
A lot of people consider enterprise software boring. Ok, great, I'll happily
relieve a few customers of their money, selling them "boring" enterprise
software. As jasonlbaptiste said here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447428>

in the infamous "How to become a millionaire in three years" post.

 _Charge for something- Building a consumer property dependent upon
advertising has easily made many millionaires, but it isn't the surest path.
It takes a lot of time and scale, which due to cashflow issues will require
large outside investment probably before you are a millionaire. Build
something that you can charge for._

Besides, I reject the notion that enterprise software _is_ boring. I mean,
maybe it _can be_ boring, depending on what you're doing. But the stuff we're
working on at Fogbeam Labs is largely the same technologies people are using
on consumer facing web apps... And on the back end, we're doing really
exciting stuff with machine learning, AI, data mining, information retrieval,
semantic web technology, etc.

The one area where we'll probably always be forced to lag a little, is client-
side technologies; if we find that many of our target customers are far off
the leading edge on browsers. But whatever, we can live with that.

------
rglover
This got me to sign up for the beta. Not to mention the fairly amusing demo
video on their homepage. Interested to play with it and see if it lives up to
it's own hype.

~~~
rglover
Follow up. Signed up for the beta and got an invite in just a few minutes. I'm
guessing they're keeping it open so if you want to play with it, use the
invite code "instant." _Hopefully that wasn't a secret_

P.S. It's a pretty great tool. Going to use this in the near future.

------
Newky
Surely a boring business is only good, if the actual area is of interest to
you. A boring business will surely not keep you working as late or as hard, a
boring business will not stay in your thoughts all day, or jump into your mind
when you should really be enjoying a night off?

A boring area, where your project is a more innovative solution and you are
excited about the area in which you can carve out in this area I would
consider a good business but one in which the sole reason for pursuing is that
its a good business prospect makes no sense to me.

I'm not saying you won't make money, but I want to do that while pursuing
something which I then want to be able to explain to someone with wonder and
obvious excitement.

Also regarding the iPhone mention in the article, I could be wrong but as far
as I know, the opening demonstration of the iPhone was met with a frosty
representation.

------
demian
37 Signals is the perfect example of how you don't have to be a static mass of
grey goo in order to work on something else than mobisocialfotogames (as
patio11 puts it).

I believe there is a rising confidence in the corporate world about the way
companies like Google and Facebook work, and that can be the key to enter
markets controlled by bureaucrats.

We need to call bullshit to those spreadsheeters and power pointers and start
spreading.

------
Shenglong
_have you ever spent the first 10 minutes of your meeting answering technical
questions from guests that are still trying to figure out how to log in?_

This isn't a function of how easy software is to use. Some of the stuff I use,
I find extremely easy and intuitive. What I fail to remember, is that
depending on who's in my group, they may not necessarily understand how to
Google small problems they have, or how the internet works in general (yes, I
had to explain that URL referred to the text input bar at the top of the
browser).

In one case, I actually wrote a PDF document with screenshots, on how to get a
specific software working. As the meeting started, I received a call on my
cell, with a member asking for help, in connecting. After diagnosing for a
little while, I realized it was my fault - I had forgotten to write down that
the software needs to be installed first.

As for this: Plugins? Downloads? Port restrictions on certain computers? I
haven't checked this out yet, but I appreciate the effort of making meetings
easier... but I'd bet six pennies that someone will still manage to screw up.

~~~
rahoulb
Years ago my employer released a new version of their desktop app.

Occasionally, under certain versions of Windows, it would complain and show a
dialogue box during the installation process. We needed to hit a release date
(yes, it was our own fault - we didn't have time to deal with the error
message in the installer) so on the upgrade instructions, on our website, we
added "you may see a box like this [screenshot] - just click the OK button,
the box will close and installation will continue".

A couple of days later we had a call from an exasperated customer - "I keep
clicking OK but the box won't go away".

After an hour of talking we finally figured out that he was clicking the OK
button on the screenshot on the webpage and hadn't even started the upgrade
process.

------
brianbreslin
Can you explain your business model? After beta, whats the price point?

~~~
aresant
After beta we're going to target the enterprise / corp market for premium
features that are more unique to that set - scale, security, archiving, API,
etc.

We'll always have a solution targeted at people holding meetings for 25 - 50
people, fully featured, and free.

Advocacy from happy users and the viral nature of the product (everybody you
meet with might need their own meeting solution) will power exposure to
decision makers at the enterprise clients (who currently use GTM / WebEx) that
can flip over 500 accounts at a time.

More on all that in a future post - it's a very interesting market!

------
guiseppecalzone
We're building a 'boring' business too (<http://www.hellofax.com>) and I love
it. Document signing is a huge pain. Businesses feel the pain more than most,
since they sign a lot of documents, and they're willing to pay for a solution.

It's way better than the last startup I was at, where we had millions of
users, but somehow couldn't make any money.

~~~
revorad
Do you mind saying what your last startup was?

------
bflesch
Meetingburner is a great product, but their website has very critical security
flaws which may expose all user data. This could include all your beta
signups.

I've already contacted MB via twitter and mail, let's hope I can reach out to
the right person to resolve these issues. It's been a some time since I've
seen such vulnerabilities in a startup.

------
hkarthik
Slightly off topic, but I tried tweeting this post and Bit.Ly reported it as a
phishing site, you guys might want to look into that. Another person had the
same problem. Here's the shrunk URLs:

<http://bit.ly/pvv11g> <http://bit.ly/okHtiC>

------
dy
Very impressive and I like your message - solve real problems that people who
have budgets are willing to pay for.

------
brendino
Here's some validation of the "boring" concept:

<http://techcrunch.com/enterprise/>

It's amazing to see how these M&A transactions pale in comparison to what's
going on in the consumer-oriented space.

------
binxbolling
How is this free?

~~~
aresant
a) See my other posts in this thread - we will be targeting enterprise
eventually, see every free account user as a potential advocate / sharer of
our brand.

b) We've built patented tech around cloud which gives us a cost basis that is
low and we're self funded with years of runway to build the brand and product
the right way.

~~~
BenSS
As long as you don't pull a DimDim, axing the early users in favor of the
enterprise.

~~~
aresant
Won't do it. We built this for us and for you, enterprise will pay the bills
:)

------
mannicken
Clouds that cover part of the text when I'm trying to scroll down and don't go
away? Seriously?

Boring article about boring business with a screwed-up design. Sorry, not even
bothering to read it.

------
lelele
There aren't boring business. There are boring companies.

There aren't boring problems. There are boring solutions.

------
smiler
Why should I pick you over webex?

~~~
bradleyland
I just registered for the beta a few minutes ago, and based on first
impressions, I can give you one very, very good reason. This organization
seems to actually give a shit about the design of their product. I'm talking
the Steve Jobs definition of design: "design is how it works". To be clear, a
products appearance is a huge part of how it works. The WebEx dashboard and
meeting management tools are straight out of a 1997 enterprise intranet. Not
only do they look terrible, but the layout is confusing, labels sometimes
don't make sense, and finding settings is like digging for a proverbial needle
in a haystack.

The only reason WebEx stays on top is because their sharing client is top-
notch. The ability to select and share specific apps is a huge plus. The
current meeting burner sharing client is simplistic, but the ease with which
participants can get logged in to a meeting is a big up side. I can't tell you
how many times it's taken 10 minutes to walk users through all the "allow"
prompts required by WebEx or GoToMeeting.

~~~
aresant
Your comment just made a team of worn out techies very happy, thanks for
checking it out. We think it's at ~B level, working hard on getting it to A+

------
feedus
Ideal 'hacker news spam' post.

------
pitdesi
I love this post - it's exactly what we're doing... disrupting the boring
world of credit card processing. Honestly sometimes it's a bit tough because a
lot of people's (and reporters) eyes glaze over the second we mention what we
do, and they don't care about the fact that we're solving a major pain point

Consumer is super hot right now... as someone earlier said, it is more likely
that you can start a billion dollar consumer business than a b2b play. Some
consumer businesses get funded with very little product and no customers
(Zaarly, Color, etc). I don't know of any b2b plays that do.

Part of me thought I wanted to join a consumer facing company, but what I've
realized is that businesses are consumers too. We get love mail from our
customers all the time, from mom and pops to large public companies. It feels
awesome and is so rewarding. Good luck on your journey!

------
georgieporgie
I forget where it was (Gladwell? Levitt?) that I read about the guy who had
become quite wealthy by selling bowling balls online. It turns out there's a
larger market for it than you might think, and nobody was doing it at the
time.

