Compliance software is boring. Nobody dreams of building it. The category sells itself with screenshots of dashboards, not stories of liberation. There's no Apple keynote for the audit-trail feature.
That's the moat.
Boring things are protected from competition the way exciting things aren't. Every smart 25-year-old wants to build the next consumer AI app. Almost none of them wants to spend six months understanding what an Annex II entity is. The barrier isn't technical, the technical part is straightforward. The barrier is willingness to care.
You can compete in a boring market with a much smaller talent pool, much smaller marketing budget, and much less hype than you'd need in any flashy one. The customers are real, the budgets are real, and the founders who'd otherwise be your competition went to do something more interesting.
The question is how you stay motivated. The honest answer is most people don't. They start a boring company, ship the first version, get bored themselves, and drift into the next shiny thing within six months. The few who don't have a way to keep the work alive.
Three things that work for me.
First, a mission line that's audacious enough to remember on bad days. Mine is: halve Europe's NIS 2 compliance bill, no matter what it costs us. Thirty-one billion euros. That number is too big to ignore and too specific to fake care about. When the work feels small I remind myself I'm trying to cut that in half. The form-builder isn't the point. The form-builder is the means.
Second, daily minimums you can hit on the worst day. Three outreach messages. One useful comment under someone else's post. One thing shipped, even tiny. The point isn't intensity. The point is that the worst day still ends with progress. Compounding requires presence.
Third, reframe what counts as boring. Filling out compliance forms is boring. Building the system that makes 29,500 companies not have to fill them out is infrastructure. The same work, different lens. Plumbing is boring until you remember it's the reason buildings exist.
The big-vision-keeps-boring-work-alive trick has a catch. You have to actually believe the mission, not just say it on the landing page. The first month I caught myself reciting it instead of feeling it, and the work got harder for no reason I could articulate. The fix was to read the law again, talk to a customer, and remember what their actual problem looked like. The mission isn't a poster. It's a thing you re-verify by looking at the world.
Boring is the moat. Mission is the fuel. Daily minimums are the floor. Everything else is optional.
— Simon