Schlep Blindness and the Unsexy Filter

Two unconscious filters hide good ideas from you. The schlep filter screens out anything that looks like tedious, painful work. The unsexy filter screens out anything that sounds boring at parties.

Payments was a huge, obvious, valuable problem that thousands of programmers walked past daily. Their brains flinched away from the banks, the compliance, the schleps, before the idea even reached conscious thought. The Collisons didn't flinch, and that's a big part of why Stripe exists.

The filters are worth disabling precisely because they're universal. Everyone else has them too, so the ideas they hide sit there unclaimed. Painful and boring problems have less competition and users who are dying for a fix.