Somewhere, a founder is trying to make a genuinely useful company sound more interesting to someone who will never buy the product.
Stop doing that.
If you fix inspection paperwork, sell the inspection paperwork. If you help a factory quote jobs, talk about the factory. If the exciting part of the week is that an order went out correctly, explain why that matters.
The customer already knows.
They know how much time the problem eats. They know who gets called when it breaks. They might have spent years assuming that this particular piece of their working life was going to stay annoying forever.
That is a pretty good place to start a conversation.
You still need a business. A boring market can have terrible margins, slow purchasing and customers who have no budget. Obscurity doesn’t magically make the economics work.
But neither does a fashionable category.
We’d rather see a founder understand one expensive problem in uncomfortable detail than collect the right words to describe a giant opportunity they’ve barely touched.
Who pays? Why now? How do they do the job today? What would make switching worthwhile? Answer those and your company starts getting interesting very quickly.
You can find plenty of ambition inside an unglamorous first product. The founder who knows the workflow might see an entire operation that could work better.
They just have somewhere specific to begin.
Let the dinner conversation be boring.
Build the thing the customer calls you about on Monday.
Budera Hot Takes. Strong opinions from people actually paying attention.
