Blind Spots in IT Industry: Do They Still Exist?

Many startups try their luck every year, and new platforms constantly pop up to fight for your attention. Judging from this, one might think that every possible business niche in the IT industry has already been occupied.

The Y Combinator’s online course for startups welcomes about 40,000 new participants twice per year! Not mentioning all the other courses and accelerators working in IT.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics, Americans filed 531,728 new business applications in August 2026 alone, underscoring just how many people are trying their luck in building something new.

So, is there IT space so packed that there is no space left for a bright person with ideas? Or perhaps, there are still some blind spots in the IT industry, peacefully waiting to be discovered? Hell yes! Plenty of them.

According to Y Combinator’s official Startup School program, tens of thousands of aspiring founders enroll each year, underscoring just how crowded the on-ramp into the IT and startup world has become.

Who Are All These Millennials and Z Generation Kids?

Young generations of professionals consist of Millennials, who are now in their twenties and thirties, and Z Generation, who are now starting to enter the job market. There are some mental differences between the two.

According to Pew Research Center, Millennials became the largest generation in the U.S. labor force as of 2018, with Generation Z steadily expanding its own share as more young people enter the job market — underscoring how central these two generations now are to shaping workplace culture.

For example, Millennials tend to be more individualistic than Z Generations which focuses on building communities in the global village. However, these generations have many commonalities.

Today’s average standard of life is much higher than it used to be when generations X and Y were young. As a result, the Millennials and Z Generation can actually focus on the upper parts of Maslow’s pyramid. Everything else is already covered.

For instance, on the meaning of life. Thus, what they have in common is an idealistic attitude to life and the desire to make a meaningful contribution to this world.

This natural desire is strengthened by the media even further. Namely, the media is burdened with the winner’s bias. It only presents individuals who are influential in some way — from politicians and famous entrepreneurs to social media influencers. It creates an impression that building an influence and following is the default and expected model of life. 

According to a study published in JAMA Network Open, higher social media use is associated with a greater likelihood of self-reported depressive symptoms in adults — a sobering data point behind the pressure so many young professionals feel to appear constantly influential online.

If you don’t do anything influential in your (professional) life, this means you didn’t develop to your full potential. It also means that you disappointed the whole of humankind. 

Of course, this attitude results not only in the common depression among young people but also in a number of weaknesses that today’s young people have. 

Some of them were ruthlessly exposed for example in the (in)famous story about the FYRE Festival. It turned out that the premise of meeting Instagram celebrities was a reason good enough to spend thousands of dollars to embark on the journey… to nowhere.

How Does the Desire for Impact Make You Blind in Business?

This desire to be influential among youngsters also transpires to business, often at the cost of learning how to identify market opportunities that aren’t glamorous. 99.99% of the startups knocking at the investors’ doors aim to save the world or at least a large part of it.

There is nothing wrong with solving problems. In principle, you need to solve someone else’s problem in one way or another, otherwise, you don’t have a business case. 

The problem starts when you start getting obsessed with the thought that you also have to change someone’s life. Well, that’s not true at all. We like to think about ourselves this way – as heroes and saviors. 

Everyone wants to save the world and inspire people. Yet, the biggest businesses are often quietly built around the simplest, most useful features. None of the “visionaries” has ever thought about them.

The underdog projects that Forbes or The Times will never mention, as they don’t sound cool enough. The pencils of the digital era.

There are thousands of non-complicated, “boring” solutions worth a fortune, and a sound business development strategy for startups often starts with noticing them. In this article, we mention some of them.

What Do the Winners’ Examples Look Like?

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, 82.3% of the country’s more than 36 million small businesses have no paid employees at all — exactly the kind of lean, one-person operation the examples below represent.

1. HelloSign.

The first example of the happy pony land of pencils of the digital era I’d like to mention is HelloSign. The company offers digital signatures of documents, a simple example of how to build a competitive business strategy without reinventing the wheel. You can load your PDF and pick the clots on the document where the signatures should be placed.

Then choose your collaborators and invite them to sign. HelloSign advertises their e-signatures as legally binding.

This sounds cool, but what does it mean in practice? From what you can read on their Legal page, this “legal bonded-ness” boils down to “authenticating the signatures” which boils down to sending invited collaborators emails with invitations to sign. That’s it.

One smart and enthusiastic developer could build such a custom solution from scratch in a week or less. Maybe even in a day. The joke is: that the company received 16 million dollars in venture funding, and currently makes more than 23 million dollars in revenue.

They offer the service at a monthly rate of 15 dollars for individuals and 40 dollars for businesses. And people pay!  

2. Yoast.

The second example I’d like to mention is Yoast. Yoast is a very popular WordPress SEO plugin that helps website owners to make their websites more understandable and trustworthy to Google bots. In the paid version, the yearly subscription is in the range of 100 dollars.

At the moment, Yoast has about 65 employees and brings ~13.6 million dollars in profits per year. These numbers might not sound as impressive for an IT startup at first glance, until you apply real business intelligence for market analysis to them.

After all, the yearly revenue at the level of 145,000 dollars per employee is not uncommon these days. However, their results become much more impressive when you learn more about what the company actually does.

Namely, what the company does is offer a very rudimentary text analysis. This includes counting the number of words per sentence and recognizing active versus passive tense. It also checks the distribution of headers and keywords through the page.

The logic behind it is so simple that almost any programmer with the ability to create WordPress plugins could write such a set of features in no time. 

3. Titlecase.com.

The third example I’d like to mention is Titlecase.com. Just as the name suggests, this website offers nothing else than converting your text to a title-case format.

That’s it. Every student of computer science, or even a teenager interested in programming, would be able to create such a page in one evening.

The joke is that so many people write blogs, books, and other documents that require putting titles in the text. As a result, the site’s traffic is so huge that it generates a lavish passive income from Google AdWords.

What Blind Spots Are Still Left to Be Taken in the IT Industry?

These were just examples of hundreds of trivial solutions that make millions online, each one a lesson in how to use data for business growth. Below, I’d like to drop a few simple ideas that came to my mind that might be of help to someone looking for inspiration and professional development: 

1. An intelligent signature editor online.

If you need to create a digital version of your signature by hand, you will have a hard time, as open online services don’t offer any good solutions — a gap that better business intelligence tools for entrepreneurs could help spot sooner. Most of them don’t use any automatic retouch to smoothen your signature so it will look the same as your mouse movement – edgy and ugly.

Apart from that, options are very limited. Usually, there is a limited selection of ink colors one can choose from, and these colors don’t even resemble natural ink colors. I’m tired of looking for a good signature editor every single time; if one good editor appears, it might attract millions of visits monthly. 

2. Pomodoro timers.

Similarly, millions of people use the Pomodoro technique to organize their working day, yet, there are no good online Pomodoro timers.

According to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Cognition, brief, occasional mental breaks help people sustain attention far longer than working straight through a task — exactly the rhythm the Pomodoro method tries to formalize (Ariga & Lleras, 2011).

Most timers only allow fixed 25-minute work sessions and 5-minute breaks, as in the original Pomodoro method. Most people (including me), however, have their own preferred rhythm. Even if some of the timers offer that option to customize slots, they usually have a very poor graphic design and no additional options.

There are also applications such as TimeOut and Stretchly. But they are inconvenient too. For example, in TimeOut, your working scheme must start from a break unless you buy a paid plan.

No one took this opportunity yet. No one seems to see potential in creating this tool, used by millions daily, in an attractive and engaging way. 

3. Hundreds of missing WordPress plugins.

Almost 30% of all the websites in the world are created in WordPress. Yet it comes as a surprise that hundreds of simple, useful functionalities are still not covered by any plugin.

WordPress plugins are usually priced in the range of 80-120 dollars per year. Thus, if you solve a problem for 1,000 clients, you can live a good life. If you solve a problem for 10,000 clients, you become a millionaire in a year or less.

Conclusion: Isn’t It Easier Than Ever to Fill Blind Spots in the IT Industry?

In a summary, there are thousands and thousands of millionaires who built businesses and realized their business development plan around very simple solutions that could be coded in a day.

Today we live in the times of ChatGPT, a chatbot that can code in multiple programming languages addressing your needs and wishes. This makes it easier than ever to build a business around some of the blind spots in IT industry.

According to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report, software developers using GitHub Copilot completed 26% more pull requests than those without it — one of the largest productivity gains measured across any occupation, and a hint at just how much easier tools like ChatGPT make it to build around the blind spots described above.

While others are too busy saving the world and building a following on social media, these folks are becoming wealthy in the comfort of their own homes and away from the public eye. Producing pencils of the digital era.

We recommend also our articles which may prove helpful when starting a business: “How (Not) to Build a Business” and “Business Development Responsibilities: Looking for a Co-founder? Read This Before You Make Your Choice“.