How Your Startup Can Find Opportunity Where You Least Expect It

Gamifying the mundane is next-level entrepreneurship

Joe Procopio
5 min readOct 27, 2021

--

Photo by Steven Lasry on Unsplash

This week, I answered a question about sales contracts, asked by an entrepreneur who apologized in advance for the boring nature of her question. She also made it clear that she was not looking for legal advice or definitions of terms, but rather how to use elements of the contract itself to optimize opportunity and maximize her profit.

Impressive. This is actually next level entrepreneurial thinking — to look at what’s essentially a rubber-stamp process and try to find a competitive edge.

I gave her what I believe to be a solid answer — where to add flexibility and how to avoid most of the pitfalls you can run into when contracting with a large customer who employs an army of lawyers — as well as how to engage with an attorney of her own without spending a fortune.

But that boring answer got me thinking about some of the other boring areas that we entrepreneurs tend to overlook and rush through.

Why do we tend to gloss over the opportunities hidden in the mundane? I’ve got some insight, culled from the last 20 years of turning over a lot of stones to find every entrepreneurial edge.

Why entrepreneurs skip the…

--

--

Joe Procopio
Joe Procopio

Written by Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. I write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com