Why Boring Industries Are the Interesting Ones

In 2012, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote a short essay called "Schlep Blindness." Schlep is Yiddish for tedious, unglamorous work. The question he was asking was simple: why do smart people so often miss enormous opportunities sitting right in front of them?

His answer: because it's a pain.

More precisely, because we don't even register it as an option. When a problem requires fighting banks, wading through regulation, and convincing people face to face, our unconscious quietly filters it out before we ever consider it. That's why, even though everyone knew payments were broken for over a decade, people kept building recipe sites and local-event apps instead. The company that actually solved payments was Stripe, now valued at $91.5 billion.

Peter Thiel saw the same phenomenon from a different angle: "Competition is for losers." Everyone rushes toward the flashy markets precisely because they look appealing — but looking appealing also means competitors are already there. Nobody looks twice at the industries no one wants, which means no competition, and no competition means monopoly is possible.

Put the two ideas together and you get a formula.

Boring industry = lack of competition due to schlep blindness = monopoly opportunity

That might sound like theory. But there are already real-world cases that played out exactly according to this formula.

Toss: A Super-App Born from the "Boring Problem" of Bank Transfers

When Lee Seung-gun, a former dentist, founded Viva Republica in 2011, eight prior services — including a social app and a polling app — had already failed in succession. The ninth idea was "simple money transfers." The reaction around him was cold. A startup taking on a transfer market monopolized by banks seemed reckless, and transfers without a government-mandated digital certificate were technically outside the law at the time.

It was a textbook schlep. He had to persuade financial regulators, go bank by bank, and wait out the slow grind of deregulation. The service was even suspended two months after launch. Since the major banks wouldn't open their doors, he connected with smaller financial institutions first — Jeonbuk Bank, the post office, local credit unions — one at a time.

Everyone knew transfers were a hassle, but nobody wanted to fix it. It was simply too tedious. Schlep blindness, exactly as Graham described it, was at work. Toss has since grown into a full-fledged financial platform with 26 million cumulative users and revenue of 1.1888 trillion won in 2022.

Baemin: Questioning the "Just How Things Are" of Phone Orders

When Kim Bong-jin founded Baemin (Baedal Minjok) in 2010, the food delivery market was already massive. The only problem was that ordering still ran on paper flyers and phone calls. The idea of ordering food from a smartphone wasn't itself groundbreaking. What was hard was absorbing all the schlep that came after that idea.

Visiting restaurant owners one by one to win them over, entering menus by hand, integrating payment systems, building out delivery infrastructure — none of it was flashy technology. It was legwork and repetition. Existing players hadn't neglected this market because there was no money in it. They'd neglected it because it was too much of a hassle.

Baemin was acquired by Germany's Delivery Hero in 2019 for roughly 4.8 trillion won — a substantial reward for questioning the "just how things are" of flyers and phone calls.

Coupang: Winning the Most Tedious War of All — Logistics

What Coupang founder Kim Bom-suk focused on wasn't technology, but logistics. He built distribution centers across the country, hired delivery drivers directly, and invented the concept of dawn delivery in Korea.

Logistics is the area founders least want to touch. It demands heavy capital, monetizes slowly, and is operationally complex — a world away from building one slick app and scaling it. But that's exactly why, once Coupang got a foothold, nobody could catch up. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 with a market cap of roughly 100 trillion won. All from the most tedious war imaginable: parcel delivery.

Three Structural Advantages of Boring Industries

A pattern runs through all these stories.

First, validation costs are low. Flashy industries have to manufacture demand from scratch — starting with "will people even want this?" Boring industries skip that question entirely. The pain already exists, and so do the people willing to pay to make it go away. Long before Toss, everyone already knew how painful transfers were; long before Baemin, food delivery was already a multi-trillion-won market. The distance to product-market fit is structurally shorter.

Second, competition is scarce. As Graham put it, a schlep is like an undervalued stock — high intrinsic worth, low demand. Everyone wants to build the next social app; almost nobody wants to fight financial regulators or build distribution centers. That's precisely how Toss, Coupang, and Baemin each carved out something close to a monopoly in their own space.

Third, legacy becomes the moat. Boring industries tend to be old industries. Old means the incumbents have long since accepted their inefficiencies as simply the cost of doing business. Regulation, convention, industry networks — barriers to any newcomer, but assets to anyone who has actually spent years inside that industry. It's no coincidence that Lee Seung-gun's eight failures taught him exactly how financial regulation works, and that knowledge became part of Toss's success.

Startups Are Built Up From Legacy

All of these stories point in the same direction.

The fastest route to product-market fit rarely comes from inventing a new industry — it comes from precisely understanding the inefficiencies of an old one. Not from dazzle, but from familiarity. Not from invention, but from recombination. And that familiarity only belongs to someone who has spent real time inside that industry.

Graham also offered a way past schlep blindness: instead of asking "what problem should I solve?", ask "what do I wish someone else would solve for me?"

Whatever answer comes to mind is probably sitting in a fairly boring industry. And that, it turns out, is the fun part. Libretto is out there doing exactly that right now.