The Biggest Software Opportunities Are Hiding in Boring Problems – Part 2 of 5
- May 26
- 5 min read
Marc Snyderman is a frequent speaker, serial entrepreneur, and business lawyer. He is the founder of Next Point Ventures, a venture studio that takes an active role in investing as well as a partner in a renowned disruptive law practice.
There is a moment most founders can recognize, even if they do not say it out loud. You are looking at an opportunity that clearly solves a real problem. But it does not feel exciting enough. It is not a product people will talk about at dinner. It will not go viral. It does not look like the kind of idea that gets headlines.
So, you move on. You look for something bigger, faster, more visible. In doing so, you often walk past the opportunity that was right in front of you. In the last piece in this series, I stated that compliance is a market signal, not a cost center. This piece is about the broader pattern behind it, where else that dynamic appears, and why the founders who recognize it tend to build things that last.
The bias toward what looks interesting
The technology and startup ecosystem has a built in bias toward what looks exciting. Products that are consumer facing, highly visible, and easy to explain in thirty seconds travel well. They attract attention, capital, and talent quickly.
But another category of problems rarely gets the same attention. Problems that are operational, repetitive, process heavy, and difficult to explain in a single sentence.
In other words, problems that look boring. Those are often the problems that matter most. What “Boring” Actually Means When someone describes a business problem as boring, they are usually reacting to how it is presented, not to its importance.
Boring problems do not announce themselves as opportunities. They show up as friction inside real workflows. They look like the following:
Onboarding a vendor and collecting the same information repeatedly
Tracking certifications that expire at different times across different teams
Managing documents that live in multiple systems with no clear source of truth
Preparing for audits with information scattered across emails, folders, and spreadsheets
No single task feels significant on its own. But together, they form something much larger, a system of work that is constant, unavoidable, and increasingly complex. Yes, I did build a system to handle exactly this type of vendor management compliance infrastructure, which is relaunching as The Vendor Hub this summer, shameless plug. From experience, I can tell you it is not boring. It is infrastructure that is trying to emerge.
Why these problems compound
The reason these problems matter is not just that they exist. It is what they repeat. They show up every week, every quarter, every year. They grow as the organization grows. They become more complex as more stakeholders get involved, and more critical as the cost of getting them wrong increases. What starts as a manageable process at ten employees becomes a coordination problem at fifty, and a system failure at two hundred. At that point, no one is asking whether the problem matters. They are asking why it has not been solved yet.
Yet most organizations respond the same way. They add another spreadsheet, introduce another tool, or assign another person to manage the process. Each step makes things slightly more manageable and slightly more fragmented. What is missing is not effort. It is perspective. These are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a missing system.
Why these problems are so valuable
The most valuable software categories tend to share a common set of characteristics. They solve frequent, high consequence, cross functional, and non optional problems.
“Boring” problems check every one of those boxes. They do not depend on user behavior changing. They do not rely on adoption driven by excitement. They are driven by necessity. That creates something most products struggle to achieve, persistence.
Once a solution is adopted, it becomes embedded in the organization’s operations. It becomes difficult to remove, not because of contracts or lock in, but because the underlying problem persists.
That combination of frequency, consequence, and inevitability creates stickiness. Stickiness, more than any growth hack or viral loop, is what creates lasting enterprise value.
The system that has not been built yet
When you step back, a pattern begins to emerge across industries. Organizations need to collect information, validate it, store it, update it, and prove it to someone else. These are not one off tasks. They are recurring functions. Yet, in most organizations, they are still handled as if they are temporary problems through another spreadsheet, another email chain, another workaround.
That is where the opportunity lives. Not in solving a single task, but in recognizing that the entire workflow can be structured, standardized, and turned into a system. What begins as a workaround becomes a tool. That tool becomes a platform. That platform becomes infrastructure.
Seeing what others do not
The founders and operators who build meaningful companies in this space tend to see something others miss. They do not see a set of small, disconnected problems. They see a system that has not yet been designed. They do not ask how to improve the current process slightly. They ask what the process would look like if it were built from the ground up.
That shift moves the conversation from optimization to creation. It is also becoming more urgent. As organizations become more regulated, more interconnected, and more dependent on proving what they do, processes that were once internal are now visible to customers, partners, regulators, and investors. What used to be managed informally now needs to be structured, documented, and repeatable. That increases the cost of friction. When the cost of friction increases, the value of solving it increases with it.
So instead of asking what the most exciting thing is you can build, ask:
Where is work still being held together manually
Where does the same process repeat without a system behind it
Where does complexity increase faster than the tools managing it
Those questions rarely lead to ideas that feel glamorous. But they consistently lead to ideas that matter.
The takeaway
The biggest opportunities in software are often not the ones that capture attention first. They are the ones sitting quietly inside workflows, repeating every day, creating friction that organizations learn to live with but never fully solve. They are labeled boring. They are overlooked. They are exactly where the next generation of infrastructure will be built.
Read more from Marc Snyderman
Marc Snyderman, Attorney, Entrepreneur, Content Creator, & Writer
Marc Snyderman is a business leader, strategist, content creator, and author, as a hybrid business lawyer and businessman with experience from startup through IPO, his wide background provides a backdrop for success across multiple domains. He is a Managing Director of Next Point Ventures, a premier venture studio in the Philadelphia, PA region, and a Partner with OGC Solutions. Marc's mission is to support small and mid-sized businesses with disruptive models and technology.
