The startup world is obsessed with sexy.
The next unicorn. The hot disruptor. The sleek app promising to change the game overnight.
But after two decades in the trenches, I’ve learned something different: boring businesses are the ones that win—and keep winning.
If you looked at The Depositary from the outside, you wouldn’t describe it as sexy. We’re not reinventing social media or building flying cars. What we do is take the complex, highly regulated end-of-tenancy process and streamline it—compressing 4 hours of work into 10–15 minutes for letting agents, while improving outcomes for their clients.
It’s not flashy. But it works. It solves a real, painful, time-consuming problem. And those are exactly the kinds of problems that make for scalable, profitable, resilient businesses.
My happy place isn’t hype. It’s diving into processes, workflows, operations, and systems—tweaking, refining, learning from mistakes and making something better.
That’s why the word “disruptor” makes me shudder. Too often, it signals a product built by someone who doesn’t understand the legislative or operational realities of our industry. Disruption becomes a euphemism for undercutting the market—without the infrastructure, understanding, or staying power to survive. Just look at the graveyard of online-only agents.
Meanwhile, solutions that tackle the boring but critical parts of business—compliance, process, finance, operations—tend to quietly outperform over time.
Let’s be honest: true market fit rarely happens overnight. It takes time. It takes deep industry insight. It takes understanding where the bottlenecks are, where money leaks out, where hours are lost—and how to fix that.
That’s what “boring” businesses do. They address overlooked inefficiencies and make them go away. And that makes them indispensable.
Think GitHub. Stripe. Mailchimp. Xero. Slack. None of them were “sexy” in their early days. But they nailed something unglamorous and painful—and that’s what made them huge.
I’ve grown deeply cynical of any startup promising “huge wins, fast.” That kind of hyperbole usually means one of two things: they haven’t hit the realities of operations yet—or they’re too early to know what’s coming.
If you understand an industry inside-out, you know where the drain points are. You know where the frustration lives. And you know how to fix it.
That knowledge doesn’t make your startup sexy. But it does make it solid. And sustainable. And if you get it right, eventually, very successful.
So no, your startup doesn’t need to be sexy. It needs to be useful. Relentlessly so. Solve the dull stuff no one else wants to deal with, and you’ll build something far more valuable than hype—you’ll build a business that lasts.
