Founder Playbook · Starter Story
5 tactics from Bo
I Make $1.7M/Year In The Most Boring Niche Imaginable
Watch the full episode“a lot of founders only think about market size also ask how many smart capable founders are actually choosing to build here in sexy categories AI apps social platforms creator tools the market might be huge but you're competing against hundreds of wellfunded teams in unsexy markets you get the opposite real demand high willingness to pay and very few people who want to touch the category that a symmetry is your edge”
Score ideas on competition-to-demand ratio, not market size
Stop scoring ideas on TAM alone. Score them on the ratio of demand to capable founders chasing it. In AI / creator tools you're outgunned by hundreds of well-funded teams; in unsexy compliance, tax, legal, and immigration workflows you face almost zero serious competitors despite obvious demand and high willingness to pay. That competitor-vacuum is your moat before you've written a line of code.
“extremely high pay taxes compliance doiciles people don't want to deal with them they just want to hire somebody to pay somebody just to forget about this which is exactly why they're willing to pay”
People pay just to forget about the problem — that's the boring-niche signal
The strongest signal in unsexy markets is that customers will pay simply to stop thinking about the problem — tax filings, compliance audits, immigration paperwork, estate planning. Willingness-to-pay isn't correlated with how much value you create; it's correlated with how much dread you remove. If the DIY alternative is hours of confusing forms or thousands of dollars to a lawyer, your productized middle path is the no-brainer purchase.
“In Texas you can say here the likely financial benefit and here is what our service costs it makes the customer decision rational and straightforward so you need to sell less... we even show potentially how much you can save and then in the end we show different plans”
Sell a concrete dollar delta — show savings next to price during onboarding
Pick a category where your value can be measured in dollars saved or earned, not in vague "productivity" or "brighter future" claims. Surface that savings figure during onboarding directly above the pricing tiers — Savvy Nomad shows projected tax savings before plan selection. When "you save $X for $Y" is visible on the same screen as the checkout button, the math sells the product and your marketing copy can shrink.
“pick one workflow productize it and if you can build the requiring layer on top don't try to build a platform pick the most common most painful workflow and turn it into repeatable stepbystep product for us it was a state doicile change we didn't try to solve all of the international taxation we solved one thing really well”
Productize one painful workflow — refuse to build a platform
Resist the "platform for X" instinct on day one. Identify the single most frequent, most painful workflow inside your category and turn it into a tightly scripted step-by-step product with a recurring subscription on top. Savvy Nomad picked state-domicile-change, not all of international taxation. The narrower the wedge the easier it is to dominate, price, and expand from later.
“what I really like about all three ideas the customer is often the same person at different stages it's not three separate customers in my opinion it's one customer and multiple revenue events”
Treat one customer as multiple revenue events across life stages
Design your roadmap as a customer journey, not a market grid. The expat who needs a US domicile change today is the same person who needs tax-friendly jurisdiction entry next year (Dubai, Costa Rica, Malaysia), and cross-border estate / banking next decade. Each life stage becomes another paid product to the same customer — compounding LTV instead of paying for new acquisition.