I don’t think there’s a polite way to say this, so I’ll just say it: for about two hours a day, for years, I stared into the absolute filth of the internet.
Not because I wanted to. It was my job. Well, not officially. My job was running a social network. But back in the early 2000s, when you let people upload photos to your site, moderation was less of a task and more of a personal descent into madness.
Imagine this: you’ve had a long day. You open your laptop, turn on the TV for background noise, and start scrolling through thousands of thumbnails. Every refresh brings you another hundred images—some innocent, most not. Naked strangers, weird cartoons (Marge Simpson was popular, for some reason), and just general chaos. I’d sit there for hours, clicking on anything that needed to go.
At first, I flinched. Then I stopped flinching. Eventually, I just got numb.
And it was my life for years.
You don’t really think about it when you’re in it. At the time, I was just trying to keep the site clean enough to run ads and not get banned from the internet entirely. But looking back, I can’t help but wonder: Why didn’t I stop and think, “This could be a business?”
Because it could have been.
It was 2000. The internet was exploding. Moderation was a problem for everyone, not just me. There weren’t any fancy tools back then, no AI, no sophisticated algorithms. Just me and my terrible, terrible task.
If I’d leaned into that problem instead of just enduring it, who knows what might have happened? Maybe I could have built the early version of the tools we now take for granted—the algorithms that automatically filter out copyrighted material, hate speech, and, yes, the occasional rogue cartoon character.
But I didn’t. I just kept moderating, refreshing, clicking. And I wonder how many other people are doing the same thing right now. Stuck in a repetitive, annoying, or downright awful task without realizing the opportunity it’s screaming at them.
The funny thing is, when I talk to people who want to start businesses, they always ask, “Where do the best ideas come from?” And the truth is, they’re usually sitting right in front of you.
Most great businesses don’t start with someone daydreaming about how to change the world. They start with someone gritting their teeth, hating a task, and thinking, Why does this even exist?
The problem is, when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t see the opportunity. You just see the pain. I know I did.
But here’s what I tell people now: the pain is the opportunity. Those repetitive tasks that make you want to scream? Those things you wish you never had to do? They’re the roadmap to something better.
I wish I’d seen that back then. Instead, I just kept clicking.
I look at the tools we have now—AI moderation, automated systems, even the ability to identify copyrighted material or offensive content—and think, This could’ve been me. I had the problem. I had the motivation to solve it. I just didn’t have the foresight to see beyond my immediate frustration.
But that’s the thing about opportunities: they don’t wear neon signs. They show up in the form of inconvenience, annoyance, or even disgust. And you have to be paying attention to notice them.
Next time you’re slogging through a task you hate, stop and ask yourself: Does this have to exist? Could I make it better? Could I turn this into something people would pay for?
It’s not glamorous. It’s not the stuff of inspirational quotes. But it’s how most of the best ideas are born.
If you’re curious about the full story and just how much garbage I had to look at back then, I’ve got a video where I dig into it. [Insert linked thumbnail here with no explanation.]
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