In most rich countries, filing your taxes takes about five minutes. The government already knows what you earned, so it mails you a filled-in form, you check it, you're done. America could do the same tomorrow. The IRS has tried.
It hasn't happened because one company keeps making sure it doesn't. Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has spent more than $45 million since 1998 lobbying Washington to keep your taxes annoying. It hired officials away from the very agency that regulates it. It ran a "free" filing program engineered to be nearly impossible to find. ProPublica spent years documenting all of it.
Intuit doesn't sell you a better refund. It sells you the way out of a maze it quietly pays to keep standing. The complexity isn't a flaw in the business. The complexity is the business. Which means the dread of getting a form wrong is one of the most durable products in America.
Now flip it. Instead of getting rich keeping a form painful, what if you got paid to make one disappear? That's today's idea.
On July 1, Connecticut's CHRO rewrites the compliance rules for public-works contractors: new good-faith-effort plans, bid tabulations, outreach logs, recurring payment reports, all of it auditable for years. Miss a deadline or botch the paper trail and the state freezes your payments and bars you from future bids. Connecticut knows the mess it's creating. It's running classes just to explain the new forms. Nobody has built the software.
BidPacket CT is that software: a Connecticut-first compliance cockpit that turns the whole ordeal into a guided checklist and a permanent audit trail. A hundred contractors at $179 a month, plus advisor seats and packet fees, puts a solo founder near $25K MRR in a niche nobody else touches. Narrow, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of ugly little business that prints money.
Read the full playbook here:
Connecticut's CHRO overhauled its public-works compliance rules. Contractors need guided workflows, audit trails, and packet exports. No one has built it yet.
From the Vault:
Shopify's clean-template era is losing its edge with younger buyers. Early-internet anti-design — forums, Windows desktops, pixel UI — is becoming a conversion tool for limited streetwear drops.
Every new laptop ships with a capable AI chip that sits idle while cloud subscriptions keep running. Here's the switchboard nobody built yet — and a clear path to $1M+ ARR.
