The Importance of Passion in Your Business

Instacart: A Case Study

Instacart is a service where people order their groceries online and have those groceries delivered to their house. Instacart and other grocery-delivering apps were vital for those in lockdown during the pandemic. The founder, Apoorva Mehta, describes his experiences on the podcast How I Built This by Guy Raz of NPR.

Apoorva Mehta had many startup ideas before Instacart, but was more focused on making a business idea than finding an issue he was passionate about. His first startup attempt was an app for one-on-one chats with tech luminaries, which tech luminaries don’t have the time to spend on the platform. While the startup was a failure, Mehta found the process of learning more about business and iterating on ideas fascinating.

However, Mehta had become discouraged from trying and failing to create a successful startup, so decided to have a more ‘sensible’ career idea. This would have been a service for lawyers meant to be a social site like LinkedIn. The idea was compelling enough to get about a million dollars of investment, but Mehta was not a lawyer or invested in lawyers’ problems. This meant that he only considered what a good business opportunity the idea could be. This lack of personal investment led him to pull out of the company when he ran into financial and personal difficulties that were outside of his control, costing the investors the million dollars.

After that company dissolved, Mehta went back to his normal life, determined to find a problem that impacted him directly that he could make a solution for. Over the next year, he found that he hated the experience of grocery shopping, especially because everything else about his life was online. He then built a prototype app that people were eager to use, with his friends recommending the app to other people. Apoorva Mehta’s passion to solve grocery shopping led his friends to organically spread news of his app, which did not happen with his less personally motivated projects.

When creating a startup, it is better to have a personal stake in the idea you are trying to pitch than having your entire motivation be what would be “good for business.” The odds of a startup becoming successful are much improved by having a deep knowledge about and passion in the problem you are trying to solve.