Why boring businesses win

When I first started working on commission in Stockholm, against the advice of literally everyone I knew, I learned a very fast lesson about what actually sells. People do not want to buy your revolution. They want you to fix the annoying, mundane problem sitting on their desk right now. It was at that PR agency that I met Fredrik Bage, who casually told me I would be good at sales. A few years later, we decided to test that theory and started Mediapilot together. We were not trying to disrupt the fabric of society or put a man on Mars. We were building a solid, functional media agency in Stockholm. It was not the kind of company that got us invited to speak on brightly lit stages about the future of humanity. We were just doing the work. But over the roughly seven years we ran it, that unglamorous company grew to create more than 100 jobs. We had a real business, with real cash flow, because we chose to be consistently useful rather than occasionally glamorous.

The cost of being cool

There is a massive premium on fashion in the startup world, and it is a premium you pay out of your own pocket. If you decide to build a flashy consumer app, you are fighting a brutal war for attention. You have to convince users that your new concept is worth their time, which means you spend an absolute fortune on marketing and user acquisition before you even know if the product works at scale. You compete for developers who only want to work on the trendiest stack, and you fight for investors who are looking for a lottery ticket. Boring businesses bypass this circus entirely. Boring means there is already a known demand. You do not have to waste your breath educating the market on why your category exists. You simply look for a space where businesses are already spending money to solve a headache, and you offer to solve it slightly better, faster, or cheaper.

When you build something boring, you do not have to convince people they have a problem. You just have to be the one who finally fixes it.

I saw the exact same dynamic play out later when I worked on the commercial side at Happeo. Intranet and employee experience software sounds like the sort of thing that puts people to sleep at dinner parties. Try explaining the nuances of corporate internal communications to someone over a glass of wine in a loud restaurant. They will nod politely and immediately start looking for the nearest exit. But from a commercial perspective, businesses absolutely rely on it. A fragmented, disengaged workforce costs a medium-sized enterprise a measurable, painful amount of money every single month. When you walk into a boardroom and offer to patch that specific leak, the conversation is entirely rational. You have real payers looking for real solutions, not easily distracted early adopters looking for a quick dopamine hit. It makes the sales cycle predictable, and predictability is what builds healthy companies.

Plumbers get paid

Right now, I spend a lot of my time building Substrat, which provides infrastructure for AI builders. AI is obviously the shiny object of the decade, but we are deliberately sitting in the basement, working on the pipes. Let the visionary architects fight over the industry awards and the magazine covers. The plumbers are the ones who always get paid. We are building the unsexy foundational layer that other companies need to actually make their glamorous applications function properly. This is the exact same philosophy I apply to my small number of angel investments and my property portfolio. I look for the fundamentals. I want to see a clear, undeniable line between the service provided and the invoice paid. If a pitch relies on capturing millions of eyeballs first and figuring out a business model in three years, I politely pass. The risk of relying on attention is simply too high.

The freedom of the mundane

Since around 2010, I have kept a written life plan that I sit down and update every year. I score my health, my finances, my work, my personal time, and my relationships with family and friends out of ten. I can tell you quite frankly that the years I spent chasing things that looked impressive on paper were the years my personal scores took a massive hit. I moved my family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018. It was meant to be a two-year experiment. We are still here, largely because I finally realised that business does not need to be a constant, exhausting struggle for relevance. Boring businesses fund a very good life. They allow you to log off, go play terrible tennis in the Spanish sun, enjoy good food, and actually be present when you sit down for dinner. I haven't got this all figured out by any stretch, and I still make plenty of bad calls. But I know for certain that I would rather own a quiet company with a hundred paying clients than a famous one with a hundred thousand free users.