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Ask HN: Are you interested in a 'boring' business?
This thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2755215) got me thinking the other day. I've met a lot of folks in the Bay Area that are going after 'exciting' businesses, I'll use a definition of exciting as a business that can get significant press coverage. However, I'm someone that's been in the B2B world for some time now, I seem to come across a lot of opportunities that are from a technical perspective not exciting at all....at least not initially.
Just because they aren't exciting from a technology perspective, doesn't mean that there aren't great companies waiting to be built there.
I'm wondering, how many of you are interested more in the company building that then the technology building? i.e. who's interested in a boring business more than an exciting one?
(Braintree's Bryan Johnson talks about this in his 37Signals interview - http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-braintree)
- mindcrime 15y agoI'm wondering, how many of you are interested more in the company building that then the technology building? Well, I wouldn't say that those things are mutually exclusive. I'm pretty interested in both, myself. I mean, I'm working on a B2B, enterprise software startup, which is "boring" by a lot of people's standards, as far as I can tell. But I think the technology we're working with is pretty damn exciting personally; especially some of the stuff that will probably be on the roadmap for some "post MVP" releases.
- vrikhter 15y agoI think that's a key factor. Any project after it gets off the ground and starts to grow significantly will bring its own complexities to deal with that can be quite exciting.
- diolpah 15y agoI concur. We operate a boring retail operation, but there are still plenty of technical challenges, from automating warehouse operations to building elegant and generic conflict resolution systems for promotions, taxation, etc. At risk of offending the HN echo chamber, I would argue that boring enterprises often offer greater technical challenge than "yet another photo sharing app" startups do. Of course, as Twitter demonstrates, the simplest application becomes a technical challenge at scale.
- thiagofm 15y agoThere's a big difference between owning microsoft(or say, sap?) than working or it. There's no "not exciting" business.
- ig1 15y agoHere's a list of non-exciting parts of a business: CRM, forms, cashflow management, hosting, file syncing, due diligence. Now here's a list of companies that made them exciting: Salesforce, Wufoo, inDinero, Heroku, DropBox, Duedil If your business isn't exciting your customers, then you're doing something wrong, it doesn't matter if you're b2b or b2c.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- qq66 15y agoWe're building an enterprise software company focused on document collaboration. Sounds pretty boring, but the technology that we're building is really advanced -- we've implemented PhD theses and then extended them to achieve the kind of collaboration fidelity that we need. The "consumerization" trend in the enterprise has basically eliminated the "crappy product, hardcore sales" approach to enteprise software. Our role model for product design, technology, and overall quality is Apple. So: NO! We're not more interested in the company building than the technology building. And NO! We're not interested in a boring product. What we are doing is building great technology for business. Nothing boring about that. Email me at amal@getliveloop.com if you want more details. We are based in San Francisco, VC funded, and hiring an engineer.