How I picked Khaaloop
I thought a surplus-food marketplace could work. Restaurants might have unsold food, people might want it at a lower price, and there were markets where the existing services didn't seem as dominant. I explored the idea in India and later tried to launch in Cyprus.
I could build the product, so I went ahead. I spent time on authentication, reservations, merchant workflows, payments, app-store requirements, and distribution. Working from the US meant I also had to deal with local documents, KYC, phone numbers, and onboarding businesses in another country.
Khaaloop hasn't succeeded commercially. I learned from building it, but I still wanted the business to work and it hasn't so far.
What I didn't consider enough at the start was whether I was interested in food surplus. I liked the business argument more than I liked the problem.
There were a few different decisions in there
A market might have demand without being easy for a new business to enter. A business might work without being something I want to spend my time on. And something I care about might not have a business model yet.
I was moving between those questions without noticing it. I'd find a reason the market looked promising and treat that as a reason I should work on it. I'd think of a way to build the app and take that as more evidence for the idea.
But being able to build something says very little about whether I'll want to learn all the details of the business for the next few years.
What I mean by caring about it
I don't expect every task to be interesting. Payments and onboarding could still be annoying if I cared a lot about the underlying problem. And I don't think people have to start out obsessed with an industry, interest can develop as you learn.
I'm talking more about whether I want to keep finding out how the problem works. Do the new details make me want to understand it better, or am I mostly trying to get past them so the business I imagined can happen?
With Khaaloop I didn't ask that early enough. I kept treating my ability to execute as a substitute for being interested.
What I'm doing with that now
Before choosing another business, I want to spend more time on what people currently do and why. If the idea is a marketplace, I'd want to understand who changes their routine and whether the proposed exchange is even practical locally.
I also want to be honest about whether I like the problem or just the opportunity. It would be easy to look at Khaaloop afterwards and claim I knew it wasn't right for me all along. I didn't, I had to do the work to notice it.
I'm spending more time on construction and physical infrastructure now. I keep wanting to read about how those systems work, even without a product idea attached. That's a reason to explore them further, although it doesn't tell me what I should eventually build.