Can Boring Industries Be a Goldmine? One Entrepreneur's Experience

Many entrepreneurs gravitate toward artificial intelligence, crypto, or whatever trend is hottest at the moment — understandably so, since saying you're building the future sounds far more impressive at a dinner party. But according to BriteCo CEO Dustin Lemick, the most defensible, highest-margin businesses are actually built in boring industries nobody wants to talk about — and most entrepreneurs simply walk right past them.

Lemick comes from three generations of jewelers and is a gemologist himself. He chose one of the least glamorous niches out there: jewelry insurance. In this industry, customers barely think about insurance for months after buying a piece of jewelry; filing a claim used to mean sending a fax and waiting weeks for a response, while claims processing was handled entirely by hand, over the phone.

Lemick describes this kind of 'boring' industry as an overlooked, underserved market: customers are unhappy with the status quo but put up with it because there's no alternative. That frustration is exactly the open door to an unsolved problem. In markets like these, the leading companies grow complacent and stop innovating, relying on the fact that customers have nowhere else to go.

Building the product is only half the battle, Lemick says — reaching the customer at the exact moment they're making a decision matters just as much. BriteCo first sold its service to jewelers, then built a solution aimed directly at consumers, since large national insurers can't justify investing in such a small market.

Lemick also pushes back against the industry's obsession with growth at all costs: 'The whole point of business is to make a profit — otherwise you're not really in business anymore,' he says. In his view, boring industries often turn out to be the most profitable ones precisely because customers there have a real problem and real money to spend — which is worth far more than building 'yet another AI demo.'

If you're weighing your options, Lemick advises looking not for the trendiest opportunity but for industries people complain about yet tolerate, assuming 'it's just never going to get better.' Modernize the technology, reach the customer before your competitors do, and that same boring, overlooked industry becomes an advantage rivals simply can't replicate.