At AVANCE Global, entrepreneur and investor Fernando De Leon recently shared a deceptively simple insight into how he discovers and launches new businesses, offering a fresh perspective on the hidden opportunities that often lie within everyday commercial annoyances.

Rather than merely searching for a cheaper vendor after repeatedly paying steep insurance premiums across his various corporate entities, De Leon took a drastically different approach. He purchased an insurance brokerage and ultimately built two fully functioning insurance carriers from the ground up. Addressing the audience during the event, he summarized his underlying philosophy with a memorable line: "Anytime I get upset about paying for something, I try to build a business."

While the statement captures attention with its bold pragmatism, it also introduces a compelling and practical question for corporate executives, founders, and business leaders who find themselves staring at a stubbornly expensive line item month after month: Can deep-seated professional frustration genuinely help identify a viable, scalable business opportunity?

According to academic research and decades of economic study, the answer is a definitive yes. However, business scholars and experienced entrepreneurs emphasize that the expense itself is merely the starting point of a much more complex discovery process.

Your Frustration Knows Something

The notion that frustration can point the way toward commercial innovation is backed by extensive academic inquiry. Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has spent decades researching what he defines as user innovation—products, services, and practical solutions developed directly by the people or organizations that require them, rather than by traditional companies trying to sell to them.

One of the primary reasons users often excel at identifying effective solutions lies in a concept that von Hippel and fellow researcher Ralph Katz describe as "sticky information." Information regarding what a customer truly needs, why current offerings fail, and how a process can be optimized can often be exceptionally costly or difficult to transfer across markets. This friction exists largely because so much of that critical knowledge is embedded directly within the customer’s specific operational circumstances, daily routines, and lived experience.

Consequently, a business that repeatedly deals with an inefficient vendor, an excessively expensive service, or a clumsy, outdated operational process possesses something potentially invaluable: firsthand knowledge born from direct exposure to the problem.

Being the customer rather than the provider can create a distinct informational advantage. When executives experience the exact pain points of a broken market firsthand, they gain insights that traditional market researchers sitting on the outside may overlook entirely.

Your Problem Isn’t Necessarily a Market

That distinct informational advantage, while powerful, comes with an important caveat that every aspiring entrepreneur must consider before committing capital.

Additional research conducted by von Hippel focusing on "lead users" has demonstrated that certain users experience critical needs long before the broader market recognizes them. Because these users encounter the problem early, the solutions they develop out of necessity can often offer valuable clues about products and services that a wider customer base may eventually demand.

Yet, solving your own operational problem proves only one fundamental thing: that the problem exists for you and your organization. It does not automatically prove that thousands of other customers share the exact same pain point, nor does it guarantee that they will be willing to pay for your newly engineered solution.

This crucial distinction separates a simple internal fix from a potentially scalable company.

Further insight into this dynamic comes from research conducted by entrepreneurship scholar Scott Shane. In studying various entrepreneurs who were presented with the exact same MIT-developed technology, Shane discovered that these individuals recognized entirely different commercial opportunities based heavily on the specific knowledge they already possessed prior to the experiment.

Prior experience and domain expertise shape not only how entrepreneurs choose to solve problems, but also which commercial opportunities they are psychologically and professionally capable of seeing in the first place. In other words, genuine opportunity recognition may be less about sitting around and waiting for a sudden brilliant idea to strike and more about positioning oneself in the right informational environment to notice an opportunity that is already hiding in plain sight.

Before You Build It, Run Four Tests

Given the intricate relationship between personal frustration and market viability, the research suggests that business leaders should pause the next time a major expense makes them wonder whether they could handle the operation better themselves. Instead of diving blindly into a new venture, there are four critical questions worth asking before committing resources.

The first question is whether the problem is recurring. Repeated exposure to a specific pain point allows an organization to accumulate deep, granular knowledge about precisely where existing market solutions fall short and where the greatest inefficiencies lie.

The second question is whether the problem is shared by others. Business leaders are advised to talk to customers, peers, and industry colleagues outside their own company. A personal frustration becomes exponentially more interesting and commercially viable when independent voices describe encountering the exact same obstacle.

The third question involves examining whether you possess a true edge. Knowing a problem intimately matters significantly more when it is paired with specialized expertise, valuable industry relationships, proprietary technology, or unique operating capabilities that allow your team to solve the problem differently or more effectively than incumbents.

Finally, executives must ask whether someone who is not them would actually pay for the proposed solution.

That final question carries immense weight because bringing an activity in-house is not automatically more efficient than outsourcing it. Decades of economic research into the boundaries of firms demonstrate that deciding whether to make a product or buy a service involves navigating complex trade-offs. Bringing an operational activity inside an organization can create distinct strategic advantages, but it can also mean sacrificing cost efficiencies and flexibilities that are readily available through outside suppliers and competitive markets.

Fernando De Leon’s success in the insurance industry worked because his initial frustration ultimately transcended the boundaries of his own companies. What began as an unwelcome operational cost evolved into a specific problem to solve, then a functional solution, and ultimately a thriving business enterprise.

That trajectory is worth keeping in mind the next time an unexpected or stubbornly high invoice lands on your desk. The financial expense itself is not the opportunity, but the detailed information hidden quietly inside it just might be.