I Make $1.7M/Year In The Most Boring Niche Imaginable

Bo

• Background and origin story
  • Originally a software engineer who transitioned into building a business in the unsexy niche of international taxation
  • Rebuilt his life due to the war in Ukraine, which pulled him into navigating international tax realities
  • Previously built a startup in the digital nomad tax space before co-founding Savvy Nomad
  • His co-founder identified the opportunity after meeting Americans abroad who were still stuck paying California state taxes despite living overseas
  • Together they turned the idea into Savvy Nomad, with Bo handling marketing and business while his co-founder handled the initial product
• Business growth and current status
  • Savvy Nomad generates $1.7 million ARR with approximately $140,000 MRR
  • Serves over 1,400 customers and has saved customers an estimated $10 million in state taxes
  • Adds 120 to 150 new customers every month
  • Operates with just six employees

Products and Offerings

• Savvy Nomad helps US citizens living abroad pay less in US taxes
  • Provides three subscription tiers: Basic Domicile, mid-tier Domicile (most popular), and Premium Domicile
  • The core service focuses on state domicile change, solving one specific painful workflow in international taxation
  • Onboarding flow asks qualifying questions, shows potential tax savings upfront, and then recommends the most suitable plan
  • Most customers complete the online portion of the process in less than one hour

Metrics and Financials

• $140,000 MRR with net volume slightly higher due to upfront charges
• $1.7 million ARR
• 1,400+ customers served
• $10 million estimated in state taxes saved for customers
• 120 to 150 new customers added per month

Strategy and Growth

• Built in a boring niche with real demand and almost no competition
• Four reasons the business works:
  • Low competition for real demand, meaning fewer talented founders chasing very real problems
  • Extremely high willingness to pay because people hate dealing with taxes and compliance and just want to hire someone to handle it
  • Concrete and quantifiable value proposition, showing customers exactly how much they will save versus what the service costs
  • Matched the team’s complementary strengths
• Growth engine is built around solving a painful, high-stakes problem where the financial benefit is immediately clear and rational to the customer
• Focused on one specific workflow (state domicile change) rather than trying to solve all of international taxation at once

Tech Stack and Infrastructure

• Entire product built on Bubble for speed and to let non-technical people run things
• Framer for the marketing website
• Ghost for content publishing
• ChatGPT and Claude for operations tasks
• Ahrefs for SEO
• API for AI optimization
• Customer.io for emails
• Power BI plus BigQuery for dashboards and data warehouse reporting
• TurnKey for churn analysis
• Stripe for billing and payments
• SavvyCal for scheduling calls

Three Boring Business Ideas Bo Shared

• Productize immigration workflows
  • People moving to the US pay agencies $8,000 to $15,000 for what is essentially a workflow problem
  • A product guiding the process with templates and optional lawyer review could charge $1,000 to $2,000 and still feel like a steal
• Help people move to tax-friendly jurisdictions and cleanly exit sticky ones
  • People moving to places like Dubai, Costa Rica, or Malaysia are nervous about getting it wrong
  • People leaving countries like Canada, the UK, or Spain face exit procedures, notification requirements, and sometimes exit taxes
  • Productizing both the entry and exit sides of this process is a major opportunity
• International banking, asset holding, and estate planning
  • Founders and investors spread across multiple countries need help opening bank accounts in places like Singapore, choosing jurisdictions for holding real estate or IP
  • No real product exists for this today
  • All three ideas often serve the same customer at different stages, creating multiple revenue events from one customer

Bo’s Playbook for Building a Million-Dollar Unsexy Business in 2026

• Start with painful problems where people are already overpaying
  • Look for categories where people are stressed, confused, or losing money, such as taxes, compliance, legal, workforce, residencies, banking, and documentation
  • The less people want to deal with the problem themselves, the more valuable it is to solve it for them
• Evaluate competition relative to opportunity
  • Ask how many smart, capable founders are actually choosing to build in that category
  • In unsexy markets, you get real demand, high willingness to pay, and very few people who want to touch the category
  • That asymmetry is your edge
• Pick one workflow, productize it, and build a recurring layer on top
  • Do not try to build a platform; pick the most common, most painful workflow and turn it into a repeatable, step-by-step product
  • AI tools now make it easy to productize boring processes without needing a large developer team

Lessons and Advice

• The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner tried one more time
• Bo shut down his previous startup and felt defeated but chose to keep going, and every successful founder he knows has a similar story
• If you are in a low place after a failure, try one more time
• The best opportunities are often the ones nobody is excited about or talking about on social media
• Solving a real, quantifiable problem in a boring niche is more valuable than chasing trendy but vague AI apps
• Regulation and government complexity in areas like taxes and compliance are not going away, and AI and software can now productize these services globally