
Blessed Are the “Boring,” for They Create the Billion Dollar Startups - replicatorblog
https://hackernoon.com/blessed-are-the-boring-9fb800eca775
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akanet
I completely agree, so much so that I claim that "boring" is a positive and
necessary attribute for any small solo business started by a software
entrepreneur. I gave a talk at Dropbox about the necessities of being boring
if you want to start a small business without quitting your day job:
[https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0](https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0).

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themoat
That was great. It really spoke to me, and I really love what you said about
the American Dream. Such a good way to frame it for me.

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AndrewKemendo
Who cares about making billions if it's something you aren't motivated about?
It takes a long time to make a $BN company, it's not like you can just get in
and flip it so you better believe in what you're doing.

You won't find meaning in dollar accumulation - you will find meaning applying
dollars and time to something you believe in.

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replicatorblog
I think the point is that your true passion may lay outside the market or
problem area. In the case of Waste Management/BlockBuster/Extended Stay
America the founder seemed to enjoy taking local businesses and figuring out
ways to get efficiency at national scale. There is no throughline between
trash, videos, and depressing hotels, but there is in the business process
that undergirds them.

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gpawl
That's the much-derided "MBA" concept.

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replicatorblog
MailChimp is on the other side of the spectrum. A purely creative team took on
the grubby problems of email list management and spam filter evasion and used
the profits to fund one of the most creative businesses in tech.

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skdotdan
Am I the only one who finds very interesting many B2B startups that are
supposed to be "boring"?

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replicatorblog
Not at all! But these stories don't get nearly the amount of media coverage
even trivial consumer startups can earn. For instance, Veeva, Service Now,
Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, and Workday are five of the top ten tech IPOs from
the last 5 years. They get a fraction of the coverage even mediocre consumer
IPOs (e.g. GoPro/FitBit) got.

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mindhash
I think this is pretty much true in building a great career. Willing to do the
boring stuff that others are not. Sometimes you end up making things pretty
interesting

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ianamartin
I agree with this as well. Many good comments so far. It's something I
constantly struggle with. My one passion for my whole life has been classical
music. Before I got into software, I played violin for a living. Not a great
living, but enough to scrape by.

That's still my passion. I'm passionate about computers in and of themselves,
and I enjoy the mental challenges that come from tackling the tasks that I get
paid to work on day-to-day. What keeps me motivated in my job now is the same
thing that gets me excited about classical music: you create very special and
very deep personal connections with your coworkers (or co-performers) and your
clients (or audience).

This is one reason I am always much happier with in-house teams serving
internal clients rather than creating products for masses of people I'll never
meet. I can't imagine being happy at a company like google or facebook. But
put me in a medium-sized business where I'm building tools for people I see
and work with every day? I'm super happy. Thrilled that I'm touching people's
lives with my work who I have a real human relationship with.

I have a problem when it comes to pursuing side projects with an aim towards
maybe turning them into a business: the one thing I'm passionate about for its
own sake has little available market. I probably think of 5 different things a
day that would be awesome for classical musicians.

But when it comes down to it, classical musicians are generally not wealthy.
They have very little disposable income, most of them are up to their eyeballs
in debt because instruments are very expensive, and they are not technically
savvy.

Aiming a business at that market would be stupid. They can't afford it, and
they won't understand it. But it's what I care about. So what. It's a bad
business choice. And I just have to accept that.

In the 11 years since I quit playing violin for a living and started my career
in technology, I've come up with exactly one idea that has the broad appeal to
all non-profits across the country. And I sometimes work on that. But, boy:
it's boring.

The thing I'm working on right now is a totally practical itch that needs
scratching, and it's for my family. My family is really big. If you count up
all of the people descended just from my grandparents on my dad's side, we're
talking about upwards of 1,200 human beings. Not all of whom are still alive,
obviously. We've lost a couple dozen here and there. And many are quite old.
My dad will be 98 in a couple of weeks. And he still jogs 5 miles a day. He's
probably in better shape than my neckbeard ass is.

I hope I got his family's side of the genes. His only remaining sibling is
105, and she lives alone and takes care of herself. His mother was 102 when
she passed when I was a kid. So if the 1,200 number seems crazy coming from my
grandparents, I'd like you to remember that that's all the people born and
married into a family where my grandma was born in 1882. That's a lot of time
to generate a lot of kids. And I'm only in my late-30s. So you know, possibly
a lot more to come along. :)

We have an enormous amount of family pride and stick-together-ness. We love
being who we are and knowing that we're sort of everywhere. But it's really
hard to keep everyone up to date.

I want us to have a totally private, secure, ad-free, social environment to
share family news with each other, plan our reunions, figure out who is living
where and when we might be near enough to one another to meet up. I'd like for
us to be able to do this without having to mess with the constantly changing
facebook privacy jiggery pokery.

We don't want to be making the sadly frequent funeral plans in a place where
things could get public because someone clicks the wrong button. It needs to
be dead simple to use. My dad loves facebook and is on it constantly, as are
many of the older people in my family who are still with us. I want to build
something for them that's a default-private place for all of us, and with end-
to-end encryption.

Here's an example case where this would have been amazing. I moved to NYC
almost 2 years ago. I didn't know anyone here at all except for the 5 people
in the startup I was working for. NYC can be a lonely place, what with all the
people around here.

Months later, I got a call from one of my cousins many states away, and she
said, "I heard a rumor that you're in Brooklyn now. You, know, my son lives
about a mile from you. You remember him from when you were kids? He's about
your age. You should get together."

Fast forward a couple weeks and he comes over for dinner. And he has two women
with him. And he says, "Oh hey. These two are also our cousins and live
nearby. We got ourselves a whole fucking crew of Martins here now. Time to
take over the city."

And we are a tight-nit crew today. It was a wonderful thing. I'd like to
facilitate more of that for my family.

So the plan here isn't to build a business that intentionally competes with
facebook or tries to take it on at scale. The idea is to build a better
experience for one specific use case family social connections. Provide some
tools that help event planning for things like weddings, funerals, and
reunions. Some special tools for family tree exploration, wiki pages for
people who have passed away, etc. It's very purpose driven towards allowing
families to stay in touch.

And I figure I can't be the only person, nor we the only family, in the world
who would like something like this. I think this safe, secure environment
would be worth a dollar a month to enough people that I could eventually build
a niche business out of it. I won't ever get hundreds of millions of users.
And I don't want to. I'd be thrilled knowing that 50 thousand people in the
world are using this to stay closer to the people they treasure.

And I'd happily work on that every day until I die.

Sorry, that turned into a much longer post than I intended it to. The main
thing I'd say to people who want to pursue their passions as a business is to
do some deep thinking about what motivates your passion. It took me a long
time to understand that while, yes I am passionate about the actual music that
gets written and performed in the classical genre, there's something deeper
that motivates that passion. And it's something that when recognized can be
applied passionately to a number of different endeavors. It can be a life-
altering experience to come to the realization that what you think you are
passionate about is really a surface level symptom of what's really driving
you as a person.

You may find yourself doing something relatively boring in your spare time.
Like, another social network. Yawn. But you might also find yourself on fire
for this boring work because it is deeply and personally meaningful to you.

