Lately I've been thinking about launching businesses that aren't anything special in their own right and that don't require some kind of eureka moment to discover the concept. Clearly that's nothing new: people have been running bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and mattress stores for decades and each iteration doesn't typically bring any major new improvement along with it.
Do any of you have experience starting and running a business that isn't necessarily the next big thing? Software based or not, I'm interested to learn about your experience. What was the business? What was good and bad about it? Why and how did you succeed or fail?
I'm personally more interested in software startups, but I believe you can learn something from anything, so please share away!
98% of making serious money in any business still has to do with good execution and process - it's ultimately about creating reusable business processes that can be replicated at decreasing marginal cost. That's going to be true whether you're a mattress store or a "next big thing" software concept startup. So, they have at least that in common.
Otherwise, more generally, there's the kind of banality you ascribe to bars, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. in every business, even a technology startup--and lots of it. If you're doing something you genuinely enjoy, that just means you're lucky enough that your drudgery/fun mix is something like 90%/10%, instead of the 98%/2% that applies to people who claim to outright to hate their work.
At the same time, there's both room and ample incentive for differentiation through aggressive innovation and novel concepts in these types of everyday businesses, too. So, just because they aren't hot Silicon Valley startups doesn't mean they neither benefit from nor require the same kinds of marketing, branding, advertising, sales cycle and operational challenges.