Why "Good Business Opportunity" Isn't Enough

Instacart: A Case Study

I've watched founders pitch ideas they clearly don't care about. You can always tell. They've done the market research, they can quote the TAM, they've got a deck full of projections, but when you ask them why they should be the one to build this, they don't have a real answer.

Here's the problem with building something just because it looks like a good opportunity: startups are hard enough when you're obsessed with the problem. When you're not, the first serious obstacle becomes an exit ramp.

Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart, burned through about twenty startup ideas before landing on the one that worked. Most of them failed for the usual reasons. But the most instructive failure was a social network for lawyers, basically LinkedIn for legal professionals. The idea was compelling enough to raise a million dollars.

But Mehta wasn't a lawyer. He didn't have lawyer friends complaining to him about their problems. He'd identified what looked like a market gap and tried to build into it. When he hit financial and personal difficulties, he walked away. The investors lost their million dollars.

What changed with Instacart wasn't that Mehta suddenly found his "passion." It's that he started with a problem he personally experienced and genuinely wanted solved. He hated grocery shopping. Everything else in his life was online, why was he still wandering around a store? When he built the prototype, he built it for himself. His friends wanted to use it because it actually solved the problem well. They told other people.

That's the difference. When you understand the problem firsthand, you build something that actually works. When you don't, you're guessing, and your guesses have a high probability of being wrong in ways you won't even recognize.

So if you're sitting on an idea that looks like a great opportunity but you don't have any personal connection to the problem, ask yourself honestly: What happens when this gets really hard? Will you push through because you have to see it solved, or will you start looking for the exit?