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Want to Become a Successful Tech Company? Be Boring! Tech companies often only want to work on the buzziest projects. But if they put aside their egos, they'd discover a far wider world of opportunity.

By Paul Nunes

This story appears in the June 2019 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Courtesy of Paul Nunes

Tech entrepreneurs like to create cool technological solutions. Then, they often only want to provide their solutions to customers or clients that are equally cool -- favoring the few buzzy opportunities over many other unexciting ones.

I know this sounds crazy. Who turns down business? But it's true. Many tech startups have focused on splashy, slick apps of consumer convenience, rather than attending to the less visible infrastructure necessary to keep all this running. According to CB Insights, the number one reason cited by startups in postmortems was "lack of a market need" for their product. Hmm.

So what are they missing? First, let's consider the disconnect.