What I tried
Khaaloop is a mobile marketplace for surplus food. I first explored the idea in India, then tried to launch a version in Cyprus. Restaurants would list food they hadn't sold and people could reserve it for less than the usual price.
I was doing this from the US, which made quite a few things harder than I'd expected.
Why I tried it
Limassol looked like a possible place to try this. There appeared to be restaurant surplus, and I didn't see the same dominant marketplace presence that Too Good To Go has in some Western European markets. I hadn't proved there was enough demand, that was something I still needed to test.
I thought the business model made sense and I could build the product. What I didn't think about enough was whether I wanted to spend years on food surplus specifically. I was more interested in getting a business working than in this particular problem.
What I built
I worked on the mobile app, marketplace architecture, authentication, orders, reservations, merchant workflows, payments, and app-store requirements. I also looked into distribution and what launching in another country would require.
There was enough built that I had to deal with actual launch problems. But the app working didn't mean a restaurant could easily join, take payments, and keep using it. Those parts needed their own work.
What happened
Khaaloop hasn't succeeded commercially so far.
There were issues with advertising into another market, language, KYC, local documents, payment processing, phone numbers, and getting businesses onboarded. I used freelancers and local assistance to help with things I couldn't do remotely.
A lot of the work was figuring out how to do fairly ordinary business tasks in a country I wasn't in. I underestimated how much of that there would be.
What went wrong
I picked this partly because it looked like a good business opportunity. Once I was spending more time on the operating details, I realised I didn't care that much about food surplus. I could keep building features but that didn't change my interest in the problem.
That doesn't explain every reason it hasn't worked. More interest wouldn't have automatically fixed payments or merchant onboarding. It does explain why I should have thought harder before choosing it.
I also needed to check why the apparent gap in the market existed. There might have been room for a new service, or there might have been local reasons the model was difficult. I was too ready to treat the gap as an opportunity.
What I learned
I need to spend more time understanding the people who would use something before building it. A restaurant has an existing routine for leftover food, and a marketplace is asking them to change that routine. I needed to know what that change would involve.
And I need to distinguish between an idea I can make a business argument for and something I actually want to keep working on. I didn't make that distinction clearly enough here.
What I'd do differently
I'd start with the operating questions in one city. What currently happens to the surplus? Will merchants do the extra work? Can the payment and onboarding requirements be met? I'd want answers to those before spending as much time on the full app.
I'd also ask myself if I was getting more interested as I learned about the problem. With Khaaloop, I think I kept treating interest as something I could sort out later.