Your Annoyance Might Be the World’s Next Innovation

A note to young leaders.

When mentoring young entrepreneurs in search of business ideas, I often say:

“Pay attention to your irritations. What pisses you off today might one day make you rich.”

Odds are good that whatever is repeatedly pissing you off, is also repeatedly pissing off millions of others too.

In 1996, hardware engineers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith faced a maddening daily reality: their company’s firewall blocked personal email access at work. Personal emails had to wait until they got home each day. The frustration gnawed at them.

Instead of lobbying IT for an exception, they asked a different question: if browsers could reach any website, why not your inbox? That reframe became Hotmail – email that lived in the browser, accessible anywhere.

Hotmail launched on July 4, 1996. Within three months it had 100,000 users. Within one year, it had surpassed 7 million users – making it the fastest growing media company in history at that time.

Microsoft came knocking within days. The first offer was $160 million. Bhatia declined – a compounding user base was the ultimate negotiating leverage. Hotmail eventually sold for $400 million, a mere 18-months after it had launched!

Note, Bhatia and Smith didn’t begin with some grand mission about “disrupting communication.” They simply started with what annoyed them – corporate firewalls.

What’s the firewall in your life?

Will you just complain about it, or will you do something about it?