Why the Boring Industries Are Actually the Interesting Ones
In 2012, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham wrote a short essay titled "Schlep Blindness." A schlep, in Yiddish, is a tedious, tiresome chore. His question was simple: why do smart people fail to see enormous opportunities sitting right in front of them?
His answer: because it's a hassle.
More precisely, because we don't even register the hassle. When a problem means fighting with banks, cutting through regulation, and meeting people face-to-face to win them over, our subconscious filters it out before we ever notice. That's why, even though everyone knew the payment system was a mess for more than a decade, people kept building recipe sites and neighborhood event apps. The company that actually solved payments was Stripe — now valued at $91.5 billion.
Peter Thiel saw the same phenomenon from another angle: "Competition is for losers." Everyone crowds into glamorous markets because they look attractive. But looking attractive also means the competitors are already there. The industries no one bothers to look at have no competition — and where there's no competition, a monopoly becomes possible.
Put the two ideas together and you get a single formula.
A boring industry = no competition, thanks to schlep blindness = a monopoly opportunity
It may sound like theory. But examples that move exactly along this formula already exist all around us.
Toss: a super-app that started from the "boring problem" of bank transfers
When Lee Seung-gun, a former dentist, founded Viva Republica in 2011, eight services — including a social app and a polling app — failed one after another. The ninth thing he tried was "simple money transfers." The reaction around him was cold. For a startup to take on a transfer market monopolized by the banks looked reckless, and transfers without a public certificate — the government-mandated digital ID then required for Korean online banking — fell outside the bounds of the law at the time.
It was a textbook schlep. He had to win over financial regulators, visit the banks one by one, and wait for the rules to loosen. The service was even shut down just two months after launch. The big banks wouldn't open their doors, so he integrated smaller institutions one at a time — Jeonbuk Bank, the postal service, the Saemaul community credit cooperatives.
Everyone knew transfers were a pain, but no one wanted to fix it. It was simply too much of a hassle. Exactly as Graham described, schlep blindness was at work. Today Toss is a full-scale financial platform with 26 million cumulative users and 1.1888 trillion won in revenue in 2022.
Baemin: what came from questioning the "that's just how it is" of phone orders
When Kim Bong-jin launched Baedal Minjok — known as Baemin — in 2010, the food-delivery market was already enormous. It's just that ordering still ran on paper flyers and phone calls. The idea of ordering food from a smartphone wasn't itself remarkable. What was remarkable was shouldering the schlep that came after it.
Visiting restaurant owners one by one to persuade them, keying in menus by hand, integrating payment systems, building out delivery infrastructure. This wasn't flashy technology — it was the realm of legwork and repetition. The incumbents had left this market alone not because there was no money in it, but because it was too much of a bother.
Baemin was acquired by Germany's Delivery Hero in 2019 for roughly 4.8 trillion won. A considerable sum for daring to question the "that's just how it is" of flyers and phone calls.
Coupang: the company that won the most boring war of all
What Coupang's founder, Bom Kim, focused on wasn't technology but logistics. He built fulfillment centers across the country, hired delivery drivers directly, and invented the concept of dawn delivery.
Logistics is the area founders most want to avoid. It's capital-intensive, slow to monetize, and operationally complex — a completely different world from building one slick app and scaling it. But that's exactly why, once Coupang established itself, no one could catch up. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 at a market cap of around 100 trillion won. All of it unfolding in the most boring war there is: parcel delivery.
Three structural advantages of boring industries
There's a pattern running through all of these cases.
First, the cost of validation is low. Glamorous industries have to manufacture demand first. They start from "will people even want this?" In boring industries, that question is unnecessary. The pain already exists, and so do the people willing to pay to make it go away. Before Toss, everyone already felt the friction of money transfers; before Baemin, the delivery market was already worth trillions of won. The distance to PMF — product-market fit — is structurally short.
Second, there's little competition. As Graham put it, a schlep is like an undervalued stock: high intrinsic value, low demand. Everyone wants to build a social app, but few want to break through financial regulation or pour concrete for a fulfillment center. That's precisely why Toss, Coupang, and Baemin each secured a near-monopoly position in their respective domains.
Third, legacy becomes a moat. Boring industries are usually old ones. Old means the incumbents have come to accept inefficiency as a given. Regulations, customs, industry networks — these are barriers to a newcomer, but assets to someone who has worked in the field for years. The fact that Lee Seung-gun absorbed how financial regulation actually works over the course of eight failures is not unrelated to Toss's success.
Startups are built up out of legacy
These stories all point to a single place.
The startup that reaches PMF fastest comes not from "inventing a new industry" but from "knowing exactly where the inefficiencies in an old one lie." Not from glamour, but from familiarity. Not from invention, but from recombination. And that familiarity is something only a person who has spent enough time inside the industry can possess.
Graham also told us how to overcome schlep blindness. Don't ask, "What problem should I solve?" Instead, ask, "I wish someone else would solve this for me."
If an answer comes to mind, it's probably sitting in a pretty boring industry. And that, precisely, is the interesting part. Libretto is doing exactly that work right now.
