Everyone's Trying to Build Flashy AI Tools — But Here's Where the Real Money Is Being Made Here's why the next billion-dollar AI startups will solve boring, painful problems.
By Ashot Gabrelyanov Edited by Chelsea Brown
Key Takeaways
- Building solutions for tedious, time-wasting tasks and problems that cause stress, repetition or fear is more valuable and profitable than chasing flashy AI novelties.
- Everyday annoyances, though unglamorous, have huge market potential because solving them makes people's lives significantly easier.
- Additionally, modern AI tools let founders build these solutions alone, without teams or fancy interfaces.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Most people building with AI are chasing the same thing: viral chatbots, cool demos or the next trending wrapper. But I think the real money — the serious, unicorn-level money — is somewhere else entirely.
It's in the stuff nobody wants to touch. Tedious, time-wasting, must-do tasks. The things you hate doing, but have to. That's where the next wave of AI companies will emerge.
Painful > pretty
AI that makes you laugh is fun. AI that gets your taxes filed, your Visa sorted or your documents organized? That's life-changing.
When I moved to the UK on a Global Talent visa, I couldn't find a single tool to track my absence days — something crucial for maintaining legal status. So I built it myself. Not to show off. Just to solve a problem I was quietly freaking out about.
That's the kind of "boring" problem most people overlook. But if it causes stress, repetition or fear — it's valuable.
There's more money in fixing one painful workflow than chasing 100 likes on a fancy AI-generated avatar.
Related: Don't Be Afraid to Embrace Boring Ideas
The more annoying it is, the bigger the opportunity
Scheduling medical appointments. Submitting invoices. Picking wines from a 40-page restaurant list. These aren't sexy problems. But they're everywhere, and no one enjoys dealing with them.
I've built apps that take care of those exact scenarios. Some were simple side projects, but they solved problems that people repeatedly run into. That's the magic formula.
In a piece I wrote earlier — 7 AI-Based Business Ideas That Could Make You Rich — I pointed out that the most profitable ideas are often hiding in plain sight. This is another example of that.
No team? No problem.
The tools available now are ridiculous. With GPT-4o, Supabase, Vercel and Claude, I've launched entire products in a week — solo.
No designers. No backend engineers. Just a painful idea, an AI stack and a few cups of coffee.
I'm not the only one. I've seen one-person shops build apps that manage apartment leases, prep legal docs and even coach you through IVF. They're quiet tools with unflashy interfaces, but they're deeply useful.
If you're a founder today, your MVP doesn't need to be impressive — it just needs to make someone's headache disappear.
Build for Tuesday, not for tech Twitter
Some of the smartest founders I know aren't even trying to go viral. They're building for Tuesdays — for that one problem that hits at 4:00 p.m. when you're stuck in a bureaucratic loop and need someone (or something) to handle it for you.
And here's the kicker: The more boring the problem, the less competition you'll have. AI founders are still chasing novelty. That's your advantage.
This article on overlooked metaverse jobs made a similar point: There's a fortune in places people ignore.
Boring doesn't mean small
If you told someone a decade ago that accounting automation or AI-powered scheduling tools would be billion-dollar companies, they'd probably laugh.
Now those tools run quietly in the background of almost every business.
The lesson: Don't build for applause. Build for relief. If your product makes someone breathe easier, saves them time or reduces stress — they'll pay for it.
Even if they never tweet about it.
Related: Why Unglamorous Entrepreneurial Opportunities Can Be Lucrative
Boring tools can still build billion-dollar companies
If you need proof, look at Expensify. It started by solving one thing: making expense reports less painful. It's not exciting, not revolutionary — just useful. Nobody dreams about scanning receipts, but millions of people have to do it.
Now Expensify processes billions in transactions. All because it made one annoying task easier.
Same story with Calendly, which killed the back-and-forth of scheduling. DocuSign, which removed the pain of printing and scanning contracts. UiPath, which built a massive business by automating office tasks.
None of these were flashy, but they fixed something people deal with every day. That's what makes them work.
If you're building with AI, forget the hype. Look for the problems people quietly suffer through. The ones they never talk about publicly, but deal with constantly. That's where the best ideas live.
Boring isn't a weakness. Boring is a business model.
You don't need a revolutionary idea. You just need to make one annoying thing go away.
If you can do that, it won't matter how it looks. It will sell.
