The Money Is in the Boring Problems

I spent this week building SafeRounds, a free restaurant temperature logging tool.

It’s not going to get me on Product Hunt’s front page. Nobody’s going to write a thinkpiece about it. It doesn’t use the latest LLM to generate anything.

It’s just a simple web form where restaurant staff can log fridge temps, freezer temps, and hot hold temps twice a day. That’s it.

But here’s the thing: restaurant owners actually need this.

Health inspectors require it. Failing to maintain proper logs can shut you down. And right now, most restaurants are either using paper clipboards (that get lost) or clunky spreadsheets that don’t enforce the rules.

I see so many people building with AI chasing interesting problems. Translation tools. Creative writing assistants. Novel interfaces for information retrieval. All cool. All technically impressive.

But when I look at what actually converts, it’s the boring stuff.

The compliance checklists. The required documentation. The forms you have to fill out to stay legal.

Why? Because these aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re must-haves.

You don’t shop around for temperature logs because you’re excited about innovation. You need them because the alternative is failing your health inspection.

That’s a different kind of market. Lower browse time. Higher intent. Immediate utility.

And the boring niches are still wide open.

Nobody’s racing to build better HACCP documentation tools. There’s no VC-funded startup disrupting restaurant compliance logs. It’s not sexy enough.

Which means if you actually solve the problem well, you win by default.

I’m planning to build a few more of these. Not because they’ll get me followers. Because they’ll solve real problems for real businesses. And that compounds differently than viral content.

The next one is LogChef — a recipe costing calculator for commercial kitchens. Also boring. Also needed.

If you’re building something right now, consider this: what’s the most boring version of your idea that someone would actually pay for?

Start there.

Learn more about building small useful tools on my blog, or check out Process Street’s approach to workflow automation.