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5 boring internet businesses generating $500K+ a year.
Most people building online businesses are chasing the wrong thing.
They want the next SaaS with a cool landing page. A creator brand. An AI wrapper with a waitlist. Something they can post about on X and get 800 replies saying “huge.”
Meanwhile, a certain type of founder is quietly doing something completely different. Just a simple tool, a growing pile of organic traffic, and a bank account that doesn’t care what anyone thinks of the product.
I spent the last few days going down a rabbit hole that I can’t stop thinking about. Five websites - and I mean websites, not apps, not platforms, not ecosystems - that are boring by every normal standard. Ugly, in some cases. One-trick ponies, in all cases.
And they’re printing money.
What they share is something your next big idea probably doesn’t have: they solve a problem so specific, so tedious, and so unglamorous that nobody else bothered to build them properly. That’s the moat.
Just the fact that talented people look at the opportunity and say really? That? and walk away.
Here’s what I found and more importantly, what you can actually do with each one.
Before We Get Into It
Quick note on how to read this. I’m not just going to describe these businesses and move on. For each one, I’ll break down:
What it actually does
Why it works (the real reason, not the obvious one)
The numbers (traffic, revenue, whatever’s verifiable)
Your entry point - how you could build something similar, or adjacent, without starting from scratch
Here’s a quick preview of what’s inside:
Business #1 - A one-page site built in 2006. The founder works 30 min/month on it. Still pulls 2M monthly visitors and sits in a $375M market nobody talks about.
Business #2 - One founder. $500/month costs. $192K ARR. The idea is so boring most people would laugh, which is exactly why it works.
Business #3 - A website that gets 15,000 daily visitors. Thousands pay for it voluntarily and making thousands in a month.
Business #4 - One job. Unchanged since 2008. 8.2M monthly visitors. $250K/year from ads alone. The #1 keyword gets 788K searches a month.
Business #5 - The most unglamorous tool you’ve ever seen. 2 million users. $40K MRR. Near-zero churn. Grew silently with zero hype.
Let’s go.
Business #1: The Temporary Inbox
Every day, millions of people want to sign up for something without giving away their real email. They know what follows: a newsletter they’ll never read, promotional emails every Tuesday, the dreaded “we’ve updated our privacy policy” chain.
So they need a throwaway address. Something that works for few minutes, catches the verification email, and disappears.
One website built exactly that called
