🚦 365 Days of Stories: Day 39 - Don’t Just Pick a Big Problem — Pick the Right Problem

Let’s talk about something that most first-time founders (including me) get wrong — how we pick a business idea.

🧠 The Logic That Led Me In When I was starting my first venture, I asked the classic questions:

“Is this a real problem?” “Is it a large-scale problem?”

I looked around. What’s something everyone complains about? What hits us all every single day?

Traffic.

It affects millions. It wastes hours. It causes stress. Perfect, right?

I felt I had struck gold.

Then came the “solution” — carpooling. Simple. Scalable. Socially impactful. I thought I had it all figured out.

I mapped the usual pain points:

Carpooling isn’t mainstream.

People don’t trust strangers.

Coordination is hard.

And I believed — with tech, we can fix this.

So without further delay…

I dove headfirst into building the product.

🛠️ One Year Later… Reality Hits After months of design and coding marathons — the product was ready.

It was launched. And within weeks, I realised:

I had spent a year solving a problem I didn’t fully understand.

Here’s what went wrong:

1️⃣ 🚧 Challenges I Hadn’t Anticipated Chicken-and-Egg Problem We needed both ride givers and takers, at the same time, in the same area. Without both, the system didn’t work.

2️⃣ Customer Acquisition = 💸💸💸 Getting users on the platform wasn’t easy. It needed capital, marketing muscle, and trust — none of which we had.

3️⃣ Legal Grey Areas On paper, carpooling seemed fine. Even my lawyer said there was no explicit restriction. But on the ground? Cops stopping cars, questioning drivers. The uncertainty scared users.

4️⃣ “Social Good” Isn’t a Business Model Everyone says they care about pollution and traffic. But very few change their habits for it. Mass adoption needs personal incentive — not just a good cause.

🎯 The Realisation In hindsight, I should have done this instead:

✔️ Built a dummy app or even a landing page ✔️ Tested if people were interested ✔️ Measured response, feedback, behaviour ✔️ Asked: Will they actually use this? Would they pay for it?

Instead, I went into product mode — because as technologists, that’s our comfort zone.

But startups aren’t built by writing code — they’re built by validating need.

And this was the painful but powerful lesson I learned.

🏆 Lesson #1: Don’t Just Pick a Big Problem — Pick the Right Problem ✅ Make sure the problem is real for others, not just you ✅ Validate the demand — even in the roughest form ✅ Think about user behaviour, cost, scale, and legal reality ❌ Don’t assume “if I build it, they will come” ❌ Don’t fall in love with the idea before testing it

Those 1.5 years taught me more than any book or MBA could. It taught me humility, patience, and the brutal beauty of first principles thinking.

👉 What’s one business idea you chased that didn’t work out? What did it teach you?

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