Some of the best business opportunities are problems we’ve learned to live with
I was at a family festival with my children when my drink was spiked.
Afterward, I did what most people do and went looking for answers. What I found was a list of instructions: Watch your drink. Don’t leave it unattended. Be careful who you accept a drink from. Look after your friends.
All of it was sound advice, and none of it was a solution. I recognized the pattern right away because I had seen it before in a completely different industry.
When a problem persists long enough, people stop trying to solve it and start learning to live with it. They develop workarounds. Businesses write policies to manage it. Customers absorb the cost. Eventually the problem becomes so familiar that nobody asks the most useful question an entrepreneur can ask: Why does it have to work this way? Some of the best business opportunities are hiding behind that question.
I trained in law before moving into financial markets during a period of enormous technological change. When I entered the industry, its conventions were treated like laws of nature. Markets were complicated. Access required expertise. Ordinary people relied on professionals to navigate systems that seemed designed to be difficult.
Then technology started pulling at the threads. Information became accessible. Trading moved online. Services that once required an intermediary could be delivered directly to consumers. What struck me wasn’t the technology itself. It was what the technology exposed: some of what the industry considered necessary was simply what everyone had become accustomed to.
That insight later led me to create Dabbl, a mobile investing platform built on the idea that owning shares in companies you believe in shouldn’t require a finance degree or a stockbroker. We started with the consumer instead of the financial system. People already knew companies. They bought their products, used their services and had opinions about their brands. Why shouldn’t investing start there?
The lesson I took from finance is that when enough people adapt to a frustrating system, businesses can begin to mistake tolerance for satisfaction. Customers may stop complaining not because a system works well, but because they no longer expect it to work any differently.
Not every frustrating process is broken. Some constraints are real, and experience often reveals complexity that isn’t visible from the outside. The skill is telling the difference between a genuine constraint and a convention nobody has questioned in years.
The opportunities usually sit in the second category: a process designed around technology that no longer exists, an inconvenience that hardened into custom, or a responsibility that quietly migrated from the business to the customer. The phrase “That’s just how it works” is worth paying attention to. Sometimes it describes a genuine constraint. Other times, it means nobody has found a compelling enough reason to change the system.
A second phrase is worth listening for: “People just need to be more careful.” Sometimes that’s fair. But when large numbers of people are told, year after year, to change their behavior around the same persistent problem, businesses should ask whether changing the system could be part of the answer too.
That is what drink spiking looked like to me once it became personal. People go to restaurants, bars, festivals and concerts to relax, dance, meet people and enjoy themselves, and the main response we offer them is constant vigilance. Responsibility for spiking a drink belongs entirely to the person who does it, yet much of the work of prevention has been handed to everyone else.
That realization led my co-founder, Gary Green, and me to build CounterSpike. We’re developing detection technology, but the bigger lesson has little to do with any single product. Persistent problems rarely vanish because someone invents a device. Education, staff training, venue practices, public policy and cultural change all matter. The entrepreneurial opportunity starts earlier, with refusing to accept that the current response is the only possible one.
Customers often see these problems more clearly than the organizations serving them because they feel the friction without hearing the internal explanation. They don’t care that three departments need to sign off, that the software was installed 12 years ago or that the industry has always charged a particular fee. They just know something is slow, expensive, confusing or unsafe. That makes customer frustration useful information for any business willing to pay attention to it.
Founders are told to look for unmet needs. There is another category worth examining: needs that are met so badly that people have stopped expecting better. These problems rarely show up in surveys because people no longer think to complain about them. Look for the workaround everyone knows, the warning customers have been taught to memorize, the task that demands expertise for no obvious reason, or the inconvenience people joke about because complaining seriously stopped working years ago. Then ask whether the constraint underneath it is real, whether technical, economic, legal or behavioral, or whether it is simply habit.
Sometimes it’s real. The economics don’t work. The technology isn’t ready. People won’t behave the way your business plan needs them to. But sometimes the answer is simply that nobody has had a strong enough reason to change it.
Across finance, technology and now personal safety, I’ve come to believe some of the biggest opportunities sit in the gap between what is genuinely unavoidable and what we’ve merely normalized. Entrepreneurs spend enormous energy trying to predict what people will want next. It’s worth looking in the other direction too: ask what people already put up with, and why they’ve learned to live with it.
The answer to that second question is often where the next business begins.
By Mark Ackred, Co-Founder, CounterSpike
For more startup news, check out the other articles on the website, and subscribe to the magazine for free. Listen to The Cereal Entrepreneur podcast for more interviews with entrepreneurs and big-hitters in the startup ecosystem.
