INSTACART
Instacart has become a name which is taken alongside other commonly used household websites. Well, Instacart was not built in a day. Today, this platform, which lets people order groceries from a nearby store to the doorstep, is worth billions of dollars. To many, Instacart’s story is one of tenacity, grit, and lessons from failure. The founder of Instacart, Apoorva Mehta, did not land here accidentally; he actually failed more than 20 times with his startups and ventures before hitting a bull’s eye with Instacart. Now, let’s plunge into the story of Instacart’s rise and the things that one could learn from his story.
Early Days: A Serial Entrepreneurship in the Making
Before starting up Instacart, Mehta was no stranger to startups-to be sure, until he finally launched the platform, he had just failed with more than 20 different ideas. First, he did his engineering studies and soon found a job with Amazon, where he became a supply chain engineer. That job was stable and prestigious, but it wasn’t long before he understood that this corporate life didn’t suit him one bit.
He needed something more: the thrill of founding his company.
He hence left Amazon and jumped into the entrepreneurial waters by co-founding a number of tech-enabled startups. Mehta’s startups included social networking applications, software that could sell to law firms, and an advertising company. None of them clicked. Every one of them had bombed out for a reason- either the time was wrong, nobody was interested, or the execution sucked.
The Tipping Point: Finding the Right Problem to Solve
But Mehta failed. And failed. And kept failing, though never gave up. He kept trying to find the right idea that would catch on and go big. Then, he sat at home one day and realized that he hated grocery shopping. Still a pain in the era of online orders and food delivery services, grocery shopping still didn’t have a fabulous solution to the problem. Thus Instacart came into being. The reason Instacart worked was that, for the first time, Mehta found a problem worth solving-a problem lots of people actually could relate to. That even though people were getting ever dependent on technology to get every single one of their day-to-day needs catered to, their expectations remained super low when it came to groceries. The premise was pretty simple: an app where customers could order groceries from local stores and have them delivered quickly and efficiently.
Operating and Pioneer Years
Mehta began operations for Instacart in 2012 with a few co-founders. Of course, launching was not precisely easy: grossly underfunded, grossly resource-starved, he became the first delivery person. For months, Mehta himself would take orders via the app, drive down to the grocery store, pick up the stuff, and deliver it himself.
This was one practical way in which he could fathom the problems of his business, and also gave him the much-needed feedback from direct customers.
Getting into Y Combinator, the well-recognized accelerator for startups that spurted Dropbox and Airbnb, among others, was among the biggest early wins for Instacart. Finally, Y Combinator would provide Instacart with all the resources-including funding, mentorship, and connections-it needed to grow. All the persistence that finally began to pay off was initiated by Mehta, and soon Instacart started gathering speed, expanding into new cities and signing partnerships with a number of big grocery retailers.
Learning from Failure
Failure being reincarnated as success can be proved to be true by the Instacart journey of Mehta. His earlier 20 ventures taught him a lot, and many of the contributing factors are still helping Instacart grow. For instance, the importance of solving a real problem that people face every day taught him a lot. Many of his earlier startups failed because they were not solving any pressing problem, or probably the market was not ripe for it.
He knew just how to execute-after all, a great idea only goes so far; it’s in its execution. With Instacart, Mehta wanted to make sure the customer got a seamless experience right from sign-up through to delivery-literally. Being the first delivery driver gave him insight into how he could make the entire process easier for future delivery workers and customers.
Lastly, Mehta knew successes hardly come easy; seldom does a business work out just right on the very first try. It would take him well over 20 tries to find an idea that actually works, then a number of years to scale up Instacart into the billion-dollar company it currently is.
Challenges Along the Way
Even at its growth, it was with hiccups. The grocery delivery market remains an extremely competitive space, with big guns like Amazon and Walmart somewhat treading there. Instacart faced criticism for its labor practices, too-in fact, vocal delivery drivers and shoppers complained about pay and working conditions.
These are some of the issues Mehta and his team needed to sort out while scaling the company further. Further, profitability in most of the technology-driven food delivery companies, including Instacart, became questionable. The margin for grocery delivery is so small, and the company ventured into manifold innovations of business models in order to stay competitive at a profit.
Entailing therein are partnerships with grocery stores, offering membership options which would guarantee users free delivery, and making use of in-platform ads.
The Pandemic Boom and Beyond
Such companies that massively benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic include Instacart. Once people started staying home, grocery delivery became in demand. For so many houses, Instacart has been a lifesaver from the dangers outside the house just to get groceries. Fast-forward to 2020, Instacart would be valued for more than $17 billion-a huge leap from its earlier days. It sets up Instacart for even more growth to come with the continued changing of consumer behaviors online, testing new opportunities along the whole grocery supply chain and extending its services to nongrocery retailers. The bumps are still being worked out, but the story of Instacart remains just an amazing tale of a resilient company in solving real-world problems and finding its reward from failure.
Conclusion
Instacart is proof that these are worth exemplifying for persistence and learning from failures, bringing in their respective groundbreaking successes. Apoorva Mehta’s case study-from 20 failed startups to building a billion-dollar business-needs to be learned from by people who identified a problem in reality and then consistently pursued it. Instacart represents one of the largest grocery delivery platforms across the globe today, and that would not have been possible without learnings it got from Mehta’s earlier startups. After all, it is not the number of failures but the art of learning, adapting, and moving on that defines success.
