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- The Unheard Roots of Instacart 🥕
Ever heard of Instacart?
The 10 billion dollar company that delivers your groceries.
Today we present to you the unheard roots of Instacart.
How it all began ✨
Apoorva Mehta, the CEO and Co-founder of Instacart, began his entrepreneurial journey when he realized his job at amazon was draining him.
Apoorva Mehta looking cool
He was no longer learning new things at Amazon and things were moving too slowly.
On January 2010, Apoorva decided to act on one of his old dreams. The dream of building his own business and being an entrepreneur.
Looking for ways to get started, Apoorva started attending local founder meetings in Seattle where entrepreneurs would get together and discuss their companies.
During these meetups, Apoorva realized he knew nothing about building a business.
Feeling behind, he got competitive and started talking to every entrepreneur and investor he could find and read every business book he could get his hands on to catch up with other founders.
“I knew I had a lot of catch up to do. I immersed myself into this. I started talking to as many founders as I could find. I started talking to as many investors as I could find. And I started reading as many books about startups as I could find.”
While learning, Apoorva also decided to come with business ideas so he could put the things he was learning to work.
Moving to San Fransisco 🌉
Realizing this is what he wanted to do full time, Apoorva quit his job at Amazon and moved to San Francisco from Seattle.
Keep in mind, Apoorva only knew two people in San Fransisco and as soon as he landed in SF he called them to ask to crash on their couch.
He was introduced to another guy who also wanted to build startups and they decided to work on ideas together.
“We weren’t picky about a particular vertical or market so we were very flexible about the ideas we wanted to try. One week we would work on a analytics platform for advertisers another week groupon for food.”
Although they were running through ideas, the results for all of them were the exact same.
Failure after failure.
The 20+ failed ideas started to get to Apoorvas head.
“At this point in time I would begin to question wether quitting Amazon was the right decision for me. Wether entrepreneurship was for me.”
The attempt at redemption 🏆
During this time Apoorva came up with a new idea that he thought would be their first success.
It was a social network for lawyers.
After raising money, building a team, and talking to hundreds of lawyers he realized this idea was yet another failure.
This was the point Apoorva learned “the reason to start a company should never be to start a company. The reason to start a company should be to solve a problem you truly truly care about.”
The final attempt 🧠
Apoorva decided to give building a company one more shot, this time focusing on a problem he cared about - the pain of grocery shopping.
In spring of 2012 Apoorva wrote the first lines of code for Instacart and began working on the first version of the app.
To validate the idea, he promised himself he wouldn’t go to the grocery shop until the app was completely built and working.
On June 2nd, 2012 Apoorva finished the app and placed the first ever order on Instacart.
Since there was no delivery drivers at the time, Apoorva went to the store and picked up his own order.
What surprised Apoorva during this time was his friends started using Instacart without him needing to sell them on it.
With every single other idea he had to try to sell people on the idea.
This time his friends were using without needing any kind of convincing.
At this point, Apoorva knew he had problem-market fit and kept working on the idea.
And as they say ladies and gentleman, the rest is history.