Some additional reasons to solve boring problems for business:
1) People pay serious money for solutions.
2) Your competition is often clueless companies or, even better, clearly subpar manual processes or Excel spreadsheets. (Every Excel spreadsheet which has ever been emailed is a startup waiting to be born.) Nobody in the Valley will realize you exist, since they'll be too busy with mobisocialfotogames and other businesses attempting to separate jaded twenty-something's from money that they don't have and wouldn't spend if they did.
3) Most boring problems have a fascinating underbelly, if you're inclined to look for it. I knew a guy who did paper sales once. He was brimming with enthusiasm for it: he was an absolute magician who spoke the secret language of Paper. Every sheet had a character and a story, and he knew them all.
Patrick isn't joking about paper, by the way. Choice of paper stock can make a huge difference either consciously or subconsciously to how the message printed on it is perceived. Ask somebody at a paper company to show you sometime if you don't believe it.
Other things you never know about paper until you work at an office supply store:
1) There are over a dozen perceptually different shades of white, grouped mostly into blue whites and yellow whites. There is a difference in use cases but I can't remember it and don't want to just make up one.
2) There are over a dozen common weights for papers. This chiefly becomes an issue for "resume" paper, which is the king of papers. It's the stuff you reserve for wedding invitations and, well, resumes. It's for when writing the document on actual money would still be a totally valid use of funds if the document got a positive response as a result.
3) Some types of papers have a front and a back.
4) The microstructure of paper determines how it interacts with ink and office equipment. Don't put inkjet paper in a laser printer or vice versa: you're asking for jams, and the color won't stick the right way. (Inkjet paper is designed to have lots of surface area at the microstructure level, the better to trap ink. Laser paper is designed to be as flat as possible, the better to burn quickly and efficiently in a localized manner when struck with a laser.)
5) How much money paper costs is exquisitely sensitive to how much of it you buy at a time. Major American school districts, who quite literally buy it by the truckload (one truck carries approximately 8 pallets, 50 cartons to a pallot, 5 reams to a carton, 500 sheets to a ream), pay about a fifth what you would if you went over to Staples and picked up a ream.
Laser paper is designed to be as flat as possible, the better to burn quickly and efficiently in a localized manner when struck with a laser.
Not that it affects your point at all, but laser printers don't work that way (by burning paper). It's still ink-on-paper, the laser beam just tells the ink where to go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printer
The laser removes the static charge in a pattern on a charged rotating drum. The charged drum then picks up the toner particles - essentially styrene and carbon black - the paper is pressed against the drum transferring the toner particles.
Finally, a pair of heated rollers melt toner and fuse it to the paper.
It is correct that laser paper is smooth but that's so the toner not scattered by the rough paper and can be fused fully.
Thank you, that's a lot of great information on paper. I wonder how a resume printed on real money would be received? Then again there's probably at least one artist already exploring this but a quick search reveals nothing.
One minor nit on point 4 though. The laser changes charge on a small area of the drum so the toner adheres there. The flatness of the paper probably ensures good adhesion to the ink and heat transfer during fusing.
As someone who grew up in print shops (my uncle owned one, then my parents started one a few years later), it amazes me how little attention people pay to this sort of thing. The weight of the paper, the colour, the hue, the lettering (raised? embossed?), typeface, font size and weight, balance, white space, everything.
There's a huge psychological impact to be had, and most people don't pay enough attention to realize that they're missing out; pay 20% more and get a business card or resume that triggers just the right response, and people pay more attention to what you've put on the paper.
My university's homepage used to have random quotes by scholars on it's homepage. One of them went something like: "Every topic can be facilitating if you dive into it deep enough". I think it is really insightful.
1) People pay serious money for solutions.
2) Your competition is often clueless companies or, even better, clearly subpar manual processes or Excel spreadsheets. (Every Excel spreadsheet which has ever been emailed is a startup waiting to be born.) Nobody in the Valley will realize you exist, since they'll be too busy with mobisocialfotogames and other businesses attempting to separate jaded twenty-something's from money that they don't have and wouldn't spend if they did.
3) Most boring problems have a fascinating underbelly, if you're inclined to look for it. I knew a guy who did paper sales once. He was brimming with enthusiasm for it: he was an absolute magician who spoke the secret language of Paper. Every sheet had a character and a story, and he knew them all.