Schlep Blindness: The Best Startup Ideas Are the Ones You’re Avoiding

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If you spend enough time around startup ideas, a weird thing happens.

You start seeing patterns.

In NTE Pro, we’ve cataloged 6,500+ startup ideas. Not polished pitches, raw ideas pulled from filings, conversations, edge cases, weird markets, and uncomfortable problems. And the thing that jumps out isn’t how clever the best ideas are.

It’s how annoying they look at first.

Paul Graham has a name for this: schlep blindness.

A schlep is a task that’s tedious, unpleasant, bureaucratic, or socially awkward. And schlep blindness is what happens when your brain quietly filters out ideas that involve too much friction before you even consciously consider them.

The result?

You don’t reject the best ideas.
You never see them.

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The Stripe Question Everyone Missed

Paul Graham’s favorite example is Stripe.

For over a decade, every developer knew that online payments were a nightmare. Forms. Compliance. Edge cases. Bank errors. Chargebacks. International nonsense. Everyone hated it.

And yet… almost no one tried to fix it.

Instead, founders built:

• Recipe apps

• Event aggregators

• Social networks for niche hobbies

Why?

Because payments felt like a schlep. It was boring. Regulated. High-stakes. Easy to screw up. The kind of thing your brain labels as “not a startup idea.”

Paul’s line is brutal:

“Schleps are pretty much what business consists of.”

Stripe didn’t win because the problem was hidden. They won because everyone else subconsciously opted out.

That’s schlep blindness in action.

Why Your Brain Protects You From Good Ideas

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Your brain is not optimized to find good startup ideas.
It’s optimized to avoid pain.

So when you encounter a problem that involves:

• Dealing with regulation

• Talking to angry customers

• Manual onboarding

• Ugly data

• Sales conversations

• Legacy systems

• Boring industries

Your mind quietly reroutes you.

“Someone else will solve that.”
“That’s not venture-scale.”
“Too messy.”
“Too early.”
“Too late.”

Paul points out something important:
Most schlep blindness is unconscious.

You don’t decide to avoid hard ideas.
You simply never let them into the room.

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The Undervalued Stock Market of Startups

Paul compares schlep-heavy ideas to undervalued stocks.

They’re not obviously better.
They’re just avoided.

Which means:

• Less competition

• More pricing power

• Stronger moats

• Slower copycats

The irony is that founders say they want defensibility, but instinctively chase ideas that are easy to start and easy to explain.

That’s backwards.

The things that make an idea annoying are often the same things that make it durable.

Ignorance Is an Advantage (At First)

One of my favorite Paul Graham lines is this:

“If most founders knew how hard their startup would be, they might never start.”

That’s not an insult. It’s a feature.

Ignorance is often what gets you through the door. Once you’re inside, momentum and commitment carry you forward.

This is why first-time founders sometimes beat experts. The experts see the schleps too clearly. The novice just sees a problem that shouldn’t exist.

In NTE Zero to One, this shows up constantly. Founders don’t lack intelligence. They lack permission to start something imperfect, annoying, or unglamorous.

Fake Work vs Real Work

Schlep blindness doesn’t just block ideas.
It also drains execution.

Paul makes a sharp distinction between real work and fake work.

Fake work feels productive:

• Emails

• Docs

• Planning

• Decks

• Meetings

• Research

Real work feels uncomfortable:

• Shipping something ugly

• Asking someone to pay

• Fixing a core flaw

• Talking to users who don’t care about your vision

The most dangerous thing isn’t wasting time having fun.
It’s wasting time doing work-shaped nothing.

That’s how founders lose years.

The Question That Breaks the Spell

Paul offers a simple reframing that cuts through schlep blindness:

“Instead of asking what problem should I solve, ask:
What problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?”

That question bypasses ego.
It bypasses trends.
It bypasses pitch-deck thinking.

It points directly at pain.

This is the same reason tools like EpisodeRecap work. People don’t want “AI summaries.” They want to skip the painful parts of thinking, researching, and extracting insight. The schlep is the opportunity.

It’s also why WhoFiled resonates. SEC filings are boring, dense, and ignored until you realize they’re a live feed of where money is actually moving. Another schlep hiding signal.

The Real Filter for Startup Ideas

Here’s the uncomfortable filter Paul Graham leaves us with:

If an idea feels:

• Slightly boring

• Slightly scary

• Slightly embarrassing

• Slightly annoying

That’s not a red flag.

That’s the entrance.

The best startup ideas don’t announce themselves as important. They whisper, “Ugh, someone should really fix this.”

Most people hear that and move on.

Founders lean in.

One Last Thought

If you’re struggling to find a startup idea, the problem usually isn’t creativity.

It’s courage.

The courage to look directly at problems you’d rather avoid.
The courage to sit with discomfort.
The courage to pick something that won’t impress people at dinner.

Paul Graham didn’t just teach founders how to think.
He taught them what not to flinch from.

And once you see schlep blindness, you can’t unsee it.

The good ideas were there the whole time.
You were just trained to walk past them.