Why convenience is the most overlooked opportunity for scaleups
Innovation has become a buzzword for startups. When moving from startup to scaleup, the default for technology companies has been to chase the next breakthrough product to enhance growth.
But after building two businesses in the specialist cleaning sector, I’ve come to believe that they’ve been directing their energy in the wrong place.
In mature industries, particularly those built around services and operations, growth is often constrained not by the product itself but by how difficult it is to access, distribute or use. The most valuable businesses don’t always reinvent the wheel; they simply make it much easier to turn.
Looking beyond the product
Many traditional industries have matured significantly in recent decades as technology has advanced. Processes have been digitalised, businesses have expanded and customer expectations have evolved.
Take professional cleaning as an example. Window cleaning alone has evolved from an industry dominated by sole traders into one supporting large fleets, commercial contracts, and sophisticated nationwide operations. Technology has transformed everything from scheduling and payments to route optimisation and customer management.
Yet there’s one critical process that has lagged behind the industry’s evolution: convenient access to pure water, which many specialist cleaning professionals rely on to run their businesses.
Pure water is the cleaning agent professional window cleaners, vehicle detailers, and solar panel maintenance specialists rely on to achieve an immaculate finish. It’s the equivalent of Fairy Liquid for washing dishes, or shampoo for washing hair.
Although DIY purification systems have become more sophisticated, many professionals still need to dedicate hours to producing, storing, and managing their own supply before they can start work. As the industry grows and professionalises, this presents a barrier of convenience – especially when scaling your business.
When I started Spotless Water, the challenge wasn’t that pure water itself needed reinventing. It was that access to it had never evolved alongside the industry.
Removing friction creates value
Businesses naturally gravitate towards solving obvious product flaws, but some of the biggest commercial opportunities lie elsewhere.
Every industry develops accepted ways of working that no longer make sense. Over time, inefficiencies become routine, and operational headaches are accepted simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.”
Customers rarely wake up asking for another product feature. More often, they’re looking for ways to remove unnecessary work from their day.
That’s a subtle but important distinction. Innovation isn’t always about adding something new. Sometimes it’s about taking something away.
Solving the problem behind the problem
Rather than inventing a new product, Spotless Water removes the operational burden that comes with accessing pure water By building the UK’s only national network of self-service and 24/7 access pure water stations, the goal wasn’t to change what customers needed, but to eliminate the time, complexity and uncertainty involved in obtaining it.
In doing so, we discovered something that is often overlooked – in many cases, customers value convenience more than incremental product improvements.
Convenience can sometimes be mistaken for simplicity. In reality, making something appear effortless requires significant investment in technology, infrastructure and operational expertise. Customers only experience the final outcome, but behind the scenes, years of engineering, testing and refinement have gone into making that seamless experience possible.
In this case, while the end product of both DIY systems and Spotless Water is a spot and streak-free finish, it is the speed of the journey to get there that presents the ROI. And that’s true across almost every successful convenience-led business. The technology itself isn’t the value proposition for customers; the removal of friction is.
The challenge for founders is recognising that operational excellence can be just as innovative as product development. In many industries, building the infrastructure that simplifies customers’ lives creates a stronger competitive advantage than continually adding features.
Rethinking where innovation comes from
Not every successful startup will invent a new product. Some of the most valuable businesses will instead modernise industries that have been held back by outdated processes, inefficient distribution models or unnecessary operational complexity.
Before asking what new product the market needs, founders should first ask what unnecessary work customers are still doing every day.
The answer may not lead to the next revolutionary invention. But it could uncover an opportunity to transform an entire industry.
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