Apoorva Mehta (Instacart founder) explains using the "adjacent possible" framework to choose and iterate startup ideas that are feasible given current societal norms, culture, and technology. He recounts experimenting with multiple ideas—examples include an ad network for Facebook-era social games, a menu-item ratings app for restaurant dishes, and a daily-deals company focused on lunches and dinners—and emphasizes that rapid iteration is critical. He recommends trying to "kill" ideas early by writing the top 10 reasons they won't work and abandoning those that can't be addressed.
Chapters
I love reading about how you iterated through 20 different ideas. Would love to hear just the range of ideas that you explored and maybe a little bit about how you went about validating and discarding those ideas. Yeah. So I read this book maybe 10, 15 years ago. It's called How We Got to Now. Introduced this concept of adjacent possible, which basically means that a, at any given point in time in history, there are certain ideas that are possible then that were not possible before. That's because societal norms have changed, culture has changed, technology has developed. I'll give you an example. In 2012, smartphone penetration was quite high. Most people had credit cards or debit cards, and it was quite common to shop online. Right. That was a societal norm. As a result of those three things being true. Instacart was actually possible in 2012. People had tried to bring groceries online in the early 2000s. And Webvan. Right. It just didn't work because those three things were not true. And so the idea was just not adjacent possible at the time. And so when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, what companies I wanted to build, I was thinking about what was adjacent possible at that point in time. And I remember at this point, Facebook platform was actually growing quite fast. And there were all these wonderful social games, but they didn't really know how to monetize. And so one of the ideas that I experimented with was an ad network for those social games. Another one was Instagram had just launched at this point in time, and people loved taking photos of their food. And so I thought, oh, this was an incredible trend. But when you entered a restaurant, there was no way to tell what was great there or the reviews of the individual items on the menu. And so I created a menu item ratings app. It was becoming a social norm for small businesses as well as for customers, that daily deals were a concept. And so I created a company just for lunches and dinners. Those are just iterations and ideas that were now possible because of social norms, because of the culture changing, and because of the technology getting to the point where those things were possible. One of the things I learned through this process was that iteration speed is everything. The faster you go through the ideas, the more shots on goal that you have, the more chances you have of success. And the first thing to do is try to kill that idea. And the way you kill the idea is, you know, you write down the top 10 reasons why that idea will not work. And if you can't overcome those challenges. Right. There's no point investing any time into it.
