You can find a billion-dollar idea in the problem everyone in your industry complains about. Thousands of people feel the same pain, decide it’s too boring or too complicated to fix, and move on. The size of that pain tells you the size of the market. Fix it, and the market is yours.

Ryan Petersen felt that pain every time he imported goods for his ecommerce business. He founded Flexport in 2013, with Y Combinator as his first investor . Flexport now has 3,000 team members and a last valuation of $8 billion . Petersen says it’s the only top-100 freight forwarder founded after the web browser in 1990. He also says that last year, Flexport automated about 50% of the work of freight forwarding. In the 10 years before that, it managed 5%.

I founded Coachvox in 2023 to build AI versions of coaches and consultants. I’m a non-technical founder, and with AI I feel like I have superpowers. I asked Petersen how he finds the ideas everyone else ignores, then leverages AI to make them huge. Here’s his method, and how to use it in your industry.

The Ryan Petersen method for finding billion-dollar ideas others ignore

Cure your schlep blindness

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an essay called Schlep Blindness about founders who avoid ideas that involve tedious, unpleasant work. He wrote it about Stripe, which fixed online payments after almost every founder had worked around the pain. Petersen says the essay reads the same with Flexport in place of Stripe. “A hundred percent of people who ever imported something experienced this pain. It was like, this is ridiculous. Why do I have to go through this?”

Petersen had an ecommerce business and hated the process of clearing customs. The paperwork was slow, and there was no software to help. So Flexport started as a customs brokerage. Other people look at a problem like that, overestimate the challenge and underestimate the opportunity. Write down the pain everyone in your industry puts up with, and start there.

Follow the mystery to the margin

Freight forwarding should be called “freight email forwarding,” Petersen jokes. For years, logistics meant people passing PDFs and spreadsheets to each other. “We’re just shipping cardboard boxes around the world,” he said. The complicated language protects the people who use it. “Where there’s mystery, there’s margin.” A forwarder that makes shipping sound impossible can charge more for it.

Take out the jargon and some of the work is hard. A 747 has room for 600,000 iPhones, but it would be too heavy to take off with more than 300,000. Forwarders mix heavy and light freight from different customers while prices spike and crash with demand. That is the math of Wall Street traders, and Petersen doubts anyone in freight has read Nassim Taleb. “AI is making it really possible to understand all of these things.” Cut through the jargon, and the hard problem left behind is the start of a billion-dollar company.

“I’m not the smartest person in this company by any means,” Petersen said. He asks the questions other people are too proud to ask. “If you ask dumb questions, eventually you become smart. If you don’t ask the question, you’re capped at how smart you’ll ever be.” Being the founder helps. “I know that I’m not stupid. So I don’t mind if you think I’m stupid.”

The questions start with the customer. “Try to live through their eyes, see the world through their eyes.” He wishes he had found Elon Musk’s five-step algorithm at the start of Flexport. It begins by questioning every requirement and ends with automation, and Petersen says it would have saved Flexport a lot of pain. Everyone else in the industry makes things sound complicated. Be the person who makes them simple.

Make the risky path the safe one

Petersen’s parents and older brother are entrepreneurs, and he never felt employable. “To me the risky thing to do was to get a job,” he said. When he lived in China 20 years ago, his rent was $120 a month. “I can always make money on the internet.” With costs that low, starting a company felt safe. His only job was making pizza at Domino’s at 15. “To be an entrepreneur, you have to challenge everything, challenge the status quo. That’s kind of the whole point.”

I worked in pizza too, and we still say it in my company when people start stressing. It’s just pizza. Petersen’s version comes from the military veterans on his team. “Nobody’s gonna die today.” Peter Thiel once told him that in a crisis, “everybody will rally around the calmest person in the room.” Keep your costs low and your head calm, and you can afford to challenge anything.

Treat it as your life’s work

Flexport began as a side project while Petersen was CEO of another company, a profitable one that had stopped growing. Getting licensed as a customs broker took years and an FBI background check. “The day I got the license is the day I started Flexport.” That was 2013, after about 4 years of nights and weekends.

In 2022, Petersen brought in Dave Clark , and in 2023 he stepped into the executive chairman role for 6 months while Clark led the company as CEO. On a walk, Paul Graham asked Petersen if Flexport was his life’s work. Petersen said yes, and that he thought Clark would perform the CEO role better. “That’s like saying some other guy would be a better husband for your wife: It might be true, but you shouldn’t act on it,” Graham told him. Before long, Petersen came back as CEO, and even with more than a billion dollars in cash, the company felt like it had its back against the wall. “There was no choice but to have courage.” Since then the company has improved its EBITDA by more than $948 million thanks to improved cost discipline and industry-leading growth.

Disrupt yourself before someone else does

A Flexport customer had a customs rule that applied to about 1% of its shipments, and writing software for it never made sense before. “Now that code is free to write,” AI catches it. Petersen expects freight forwarding at Flexport to be fully automated by the end of 2028.

He is excited and paranoid at the same time. He goes through every part of Flexport and asks which parts AI makes easy to copy, then invests in the parts that are hard to copy. “There’s no sacred cows,” he said. “Do what’s best for the customer.” Build the thing that would replace your business before someone else builds it.

Where to look for the billion-dollar ideas Ryan Petersen says others miss

Petersen thinks the automation of Flexport will be mostly solved within 18 months, and the bigger prize comes after it. The fundamental promise of your business never stops developing. “You’ll need more people, not less, as you optimize this, because your product will be so much better, that you’ll want lots of sales people and account managers to get it into the hands of every business in the world.”

People have called Flexport unsexy for years. Petersen calls business “the most interesting thing in the world.” Look for the pain that bores everyone else. “You don’t make money doing easy things.”

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