Ever think about the fact that the guy who created the bendy straw became a millionaire from it?

He didn’t invent the straw. But he did invent the bendy straw. And for that, he became wildly successful.

It’s funny, right? Some of the most successful businesses ever built are the ones you’d never hear pitched at a startup event. Bendy straws. Pet rocks. Post-It notes.

But they aren’t all groundbreaking, net-new ideas. What about the HVAC companies? The irrigation and drainage empires? The tech people made rich by building back-end, non-flashy technology?

They exist too. And their businesses all have something in common.

The idea of starting them makes us uncomfortable.

The discomfort comes when someone asks what your company does, and you have to say things like “we manage schedules for cleaning companies” or “we help plumbers with invoicing.”

That instinct to downplay it or change the subject is a signal. It’s pointing at a gap: what sounds impressive versus what actually works.

We spend a lot of time chasing passion like it’s a career compass. But it turns out, passion is a pretty terrible compass for picking a market. Where everyone’s passionate, everyone piles in. Returns compress.

The real opportunity is in the spaces nobody thinks to look.

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Amar Ghose grew up in Palo Alto. Google’s campus, Facebook’s headquarters, Apple Park, all within 25 minutes. Everyone around him was building ‘the next big thing.’

He worked in sales at UserVoice, a customer feedback platform that fit the Silicon Valley script.

Non-technical but sharp, Ghose was the kind of person who could’ve pitched investors on social networks or SaaS platforms or anything else that mattered in the California tech mythology.

Then in October 2012, he stumbled onto a Reddit thread. Someone was documenting the day-to-day of starting a maid service. Amar read it and thought: I could do this. So he did.

He launched Fast Friendly Spotless, a residential cleaning company, while keeping his day job. The whole operation ran on two 30-minute blocks a day. He’d handle scheduling, call leads, notify the cleaning teams.

Fourteen months later, he moved 400 miles away and shut it down.

But his friend Arun Devabhaktuni, a Stanford PhD with an MIT degree, noticed something. The internal scheduling tool Amar had built to run the maid service was elegant. “This should be a product,” Arun said.

ZenMaid launched in April 2013.

The first customer came five months later. By the end of that year, they had five. For the next three years, MRR stayed flat around $300.

Amar spent 5am to 8am cold calling before his day job. No big launch posts or co-working space credibility. Just a guy, a phone, and a tool for maid service owners.

Here’s what’s interesting about that choice.

Ghose had legitimacy in the right circles. He’d worked at a trendy startup. He lived in the epicenter of venture capital. He could’ve positioned himself as a founder in a way that opened doors and impressed people.

Instead, he chose to build scheduling software for cleaning businesses. He chose to spend his mornings cold-calling housekeeping operations in suburban America.

That’s an identity negotiation.

Identifying boring markets is easy. Admitting you’re interested in one is the hard part. The discomfort Ghose would’ve felt telling people at a Palo Alto coffee shop that he built maid service software? That’s the invisible barrier most of us never acknowledge.

His approach captures the real play: build compelling software for a niche nobody’s fighting over. You get the craft of building something elegant and the economics of being the only serious option.

By 2024, ZenMaid hit roughly $2.6M ARR with 1,000+ customers, fourteen employees, and zero outside funding. He built an 8,000-person Facebook community for cleaning business owners. Became a bonafide expert at something genuinely valuable, in a space where expertise was rare.

Looking at Ghose’s trajectory, the passion clearly came after the mastery, not before it. Three years at $300 MRR isn’t the behavior of someone driven by excitement. It’s the behavior of someone who kept building until the expertise itself became the motivation.

The problems worth building for rarely come with applause. Doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile.

Time to do something concrete with this.

Spend a week paying attention differently. When you hear someone complain about scheduling, invoicing, or managing a team of cleaners, pay attention to it. When you see a clunky process in an industry that hasn’t been touched by software, write it down.

Ghose didn’t dream about starting a maid service. He saw a Reddit post and thought about it differently than his peers would’ve. That’s it. That’s the whole move.

For any problem you’ve noticed, look at who’s already operating in that space.

If acquisition activity’s increasing, that’s a tailwind for you. More buyers = more exit paths.

Then check the flip side. Are a hundred VC-backed startups already competing for the same customer? If yes, you’re walking into a crowd. If no, you’ve found a gap.

We covered a deeper framework for reading these market signals in a previous edition. The demand evidence hierarchy covered there (from search signals to willingness-to-pay tests) gives you a concrete way to pressure-test what you’re seeing.

This is Cal Newport’s core argument from So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Mastery breeds passion, not the other way around. If you spent three to five years becoming genuinely excellent in this space, would you develop real expertise? Would you become someone other people need?

If yes, the motivation will come. Passion follows mastery. Newport argues that it almost always does, once you’re good enough to see why something matters.

If your gut says no, if you can’t imagine caring about the work even after getting good at it, trust that. Every boring market isn’t your boring market.

If a market passes Steps 2 and 3 and you’re still hesitant, ask why.

Is it because the economics genuinely don’t work? Or is it because you’d be too embarrassed to explain it at a dinner party?

That question is the whole newsletter in one sentence. The answer tells you everything you need to know.

From noticing the problem, you start seeing it clearly.

From seeing it clearly, you start building.

From building, you’re off to the races.

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