For years, aspiring entrepreneurs have been told to "find problems to solve," yet this advice often falls flat. The real breakthrough comes from recognizing schleps—those tedious, effortful tasks we've unconsciously accepted as inevitable. As Saeed Reza explains in his analysis, schleps are "anything annoying you have to do to get what you actually want." They range from waiting in line to filling out forms, but their defining trait is invisibility: we stop perceiving them as solvable problems.

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Successful startups frequently emerge from this blindness. Uber eliminated the schlep of hailing taxis. Dropbox solved file synchronization drudgery. Stripe streamlined online payment integration. None required PhD-level tech—just the insight to see a widespread annoyance as a fixable gap.

Why Schleps Remain Overlooked

Two forces perpetuate schlep neglect:
1. Adaptive blindness: We normalize friction until it fades into life's background noise.
2. Status aversion: Tackling unglamorous work (e.g., plumber scheduling tools) feels less prestigious than "AI" ventures—even if the pain point is acute.

The Four-Filter Framework

Not all schleps warrant startups. Viable candidates must pass these tests:
1. Frequency: Daily irritants trump annual nuisances.
2. Pain level: Does it cause mild annoyance or genuine hardship (e.g., 3-month visa waits)?
3. New solvability: Did technology, regulations, or behaviors recently shift? Uber needed smartphones; Stripe relied on cloud APIs.
4. Scalability: Can it generalize? Software excels here—fix once, deploy everywhere.

"The best startup ideas often look like schleps someone finally decided to fix. The hardness was in seeing the schlep clearly and deciding it was worth fixing." — Saeed Reza

Cultivating Schlep Vision

Reza proposes a practical exercise: document three daily schleps for a month. Most will be dead ends, but patterns emerge. The goal isn’t immediate ideas but retraining perception—noticing the friction we instinctively ignore.

The most promising opportunities often hide in society's deepest grooves: processes so ingrained that questioning them seems absurd. Yet these very areas—where "that's just how it is" prevails—hold potential for transformative solutions. The entrepreneurs who thrive are those examining routine struggles through an outsider’s lens, asking: Is this necessary? Or is it inertia waiting to be disrupted?