The Best Businesses Often Sell Boring Things
Three businesses. No viral app. No celebrity founder story required. No product you desperately want to photograph beside your coffee. Yet each tells us something useful about what actually makes a bu
By Alice
Three businesses.
No viral app. No celebrity founder story required. No product you desperately want to photograph beside your coffee.
Yet each tells us something useful about what actually makes a business valuable.
Story One: The company selling screws
Imagine explaining the business at a party.
“What do you sell?”
“Fasteners.”
“What kind?”
Nuts. Bolts. Screws. Washers. Industrial supplies.
Conversation over.
And yet Fastenal has built a major public company around exactly this world. Its current investor materials include a 2025 annual report—not exactly the profile of a tiny hardware shop.
Why?
Because a bolt is boring only when you don’t need one.
If you’re running a factory and a specific component is missing, that 40-cent piece of metal can suddenly become more important than a £40,000 machine.
The customer isn’t really buying a bolt.
They’re buying:
the correct bolt, in the correct place, before production stops.
That’s a very different business.
And it points to something founders sometimes miss.
A product doesn’t need to be exciting if the problem created by not having it is expensive.
Story Two: Someone has to take the rubbish away
Now let’s build an even less glamorous pitch.
Every week, people produce rubbish.
You collect it.
Then next week…
they produce more.
So you collect it again.
That’s basically the recurring-revenue model nobody puts on a startup mood board.
WM operates collection, disposal, recycling and related environmental infrastructure. In 2025, it generated about $25.2 billion in revenue.
Twenty-five billion dollars.
From a problem humanity recreates every morning.
And that’s the interesting bit.
We often look for businesses where demand is growing.
There is another category worth noticing:
Businesses where the problem refuses to disappear.
Rubbish needs collecting.
Buildings need maintaining.
Businesses need payroll.
Restaurants need cleaning.
Factories need replacement parts.
Companies need insurance.
Toilets need plumbing.
None of these problems are waiting for a trend.
They’re waiting for Tuesday.
And then they’ll come back on Wednesday.
Story Three: The invisible toll booth of the internet
The third one is my favourite because you’ve probably used its product today without knowing it.
Type a .com address into your browser.
Behind that tiny ending sits infrastructure operated by Verisign, the registry operator for .com.
This is not a business most ordinary internet users spend much time thinking about.
That’s partly why it’s interesting.
At the end of 2025, Verisign reported 173.5 million .com and .net registrations in its domain-name base and $1.66 billion in annual revenue. Its operating income was about $1.12 billion.
There’s no parcel arriving.
No beautiful unboxing.
No addictive feed.
Mostly infrastructure doing its job quietly.
In fact, Verisign said in February 2026 that it had maintained 100% availability for .com and .net domain-name resolution for 28 years.
That’s almost the opposite of a consumer product.
When it works perfectly, you don’t notice it exists.
And customers keep needing it anyway.
Maybe “boring” is the wrong word
Put the three businesses beside each other.
Bolts.
Rubbish.
Domain infrastructure.
They look completely unrelated.
But underneath, there are similarities.
The customer has a real reason to pay.
Demand doesn’t depend entirely on being fashionable.
The problem repeats.
Reliability matters.
And in some cases, switching, failing or going without the product is considerably more painful than paying for it.
That’s not boring.
That’s useful.
I think founders sometimes get this backwards because we’re surrounded by businesses as consumers.
We notice the beautiful ones.
The restaurant.
The fashion brand.
The new app.
The coffee company with extremely confident typography.
But the economy contains another world behind the things we see.
Someone supplies the restaurant’s refrigeration.
Someone maintains the lift in its building.
Someone processes its payroll.
Someone makes the cardboard boxes.
Someone collects the waste.
Someone sells the little rubber seal inside a machine nobody thinks about until the seal breaks.
There are businesses hidden behind businesses hidden behind businesses.
Many will never become culturally famous.
Some don’t need to.
Maybe that’s the better question when looking for a business idea.
Not:
Would people think this is cool?
But:
Does somebody genuinely need this?
Does the problem come back after I solve it?
What happens to the customer if I don’t show up?
And perhaps the most revealing one:
If nobody could post a photo of this business on Instagram, would it still be worth building?
If the answer is yes, you might have found something considerably more interesting than boring.