Some founders chase moonshots, the world-changing, headline-grabbing ideas that promise to transform entire industries. Akam Hamak is more interested in the small frictions people hit every single day. “Creating products that solve everyday problems” is how the Miami entrepreneur describes a core part of his focus, and the modesty of that ambition is the point.
TabSlice is the clearest example of the philosophy in action. The hospitality platform Hamak co-founded tackles a problem nearly everyone has experienced more than once: splitting a restaurant bill cleanly, without the awkward arithmetic or the uncomfortable pause when the check arrives. It is not a grand problem. It is a frequent one, and frequency is exactly what makes it worth solving.
The strategic insight buried in Hamak’s approach is that everyday problems have unmatched durability. A friction people encounter often is a friction a good product can keep relieving, again and again, for as long as the habit exists. That recurring usefulness makes an ordinary problem a far more stable foundation for a business than a spectacular problem people face only rarely.
It is a contrarian stance in a startup culture that prizes the audacious. The incentives push founders toward problems big enough to impress investors and generate buzz. Hamak runs the other way, toward problems small enough to be ignored but common enough to matter. He is betting that the unglamorous, high-frequency need is the more reliable business, even if it never makes a magazine cover.
The focus plays directly to his strengths. Hamak has been building software since his teens, well before AI tools made development accessible, and an ordinary, high-frequency consumer problem is precisely the kind of challenge a seasoned builder can turn into a clean, dependable tool. The difficulty in a product like TabSlice is not conceptual ambition; it is execution, getting the simple thing exactly right every time.
Everyday problems also align with his long-term temperament. “My focus on compounding value over many years rather than chasing short-term trends” applies as much to product strategy as to investing. A product that quietly solves a recurring problem can compound its usefulness and its user base over a long horizon, growing steadily rather than spiking and fading like a novelty.
There is a discipline in choosing problems this way. Chasing moonshots is, in part, a performance of ambition, a way to appear visionary. Hamak has little interest in that performance. His critique of people who spend their time trying to look successful extends to founders who chase impressive-sounding problems over genuinely useful ones. He would rather solve something real and small than gesture at something grand and unlikely.
The hospitality focus of TabSlice reflects another layer of his thinking. By targeting a specific industry and designing around the needs of both diners and operators, Hamak builds a product that creates value on multiple sides of a transaction. That multi-sided usefulness deepens the problem’s worth: it is not just convenient for one party but valuable to a whole ecosystem of restaurants and guests.
His approach offers a quiet rebuke to the idea that meaningful businesses must solve enormous problems. The most reliable products often hide in the most ordinary frictions, the ones so common they have become invisible. Hamak’s gift is noticing them and taking them seriously enough to build a clean solution, where others walk past assuming there is nothing there worth fixing.
It is also a more accessible model of entrepreneurship than the moonshot myth suggests. You do not need a world-changing vision to build something valuable; you need to notice a real, recurring problem and solve it well. Hamak’s everyday-problems focus is, in that sense, a democratic philosophy, available to any builder willing to look closely at ordinary life.
There is a democratic quality to this philosophy that sets it apart from the moonshot myth. The dominant story of entrepreneurship insists you need a world-changing vision to build anything worthwhile, which quietly excludes most people. Hamak’s everyday-problems approach says the opposite: you need only to notice a real, recurring friction and solve it well. That model is available to any builder willing to look closely at ordinary life, and it relocates the source of a good business from rare genius to careful attention, something far more widely attainable.
This accessibility is part of why the philosophy is worth taking seriously. By locating the source of a good business in attention rather than genius, Hamak offers a model that rewards diligence and observation, qualities anyone can develop, over the rare flash of vision the startup world tends to mythologize. It reframes entrepreneurship as a practice of noticing and solving rather than a gift reserved for the exceptional, which makes it both more honest and more useful to the people who hear it.
His current company applies the same everyday-problem instinct at business scale. Closr targets a friction millions of small businesses share, the difficulty of getting a professional website online, and removes it: the platform finds local businesses without a site, generates a personalized demo in under a minute, and handles domains, hosting, and publishing so the deal can close. It is the same pattern as TabSlice, a common, unglamorous problem solved cleanly, aimed this time at local business owners rather than diners.
For Hamak, the small stuff is not a consolation prize. It is where durable value actually lives, in the frictions people hit so often that relieving them becomes a business worth holding for years. The check at the end of dinner is exactly that kind of problem, and TabSlice is exactly the kind of answer he likes to build. More on TabSlice and his product work is available at his official site.
Learn more: akamhamak.com | Connect on X
