🚀 365 Days of Stories: Day 41 - 🧠Lesson: Not Every Exciting Idea is a Scalable Business
Let’s talk about another business idea I worked on for a couple of months during my second entrepreneurial stint — and what I learned from it.
One fine day, a close friend called me. His wife had recently started a fashion business on Instagram, and he said excitedly, “One of her reels just went viral — over 30 million views!” I was like, “Wow, that’s 3 crore people!”
Naturally, I asked, “What are you guys selling?”
He said, “Memory quilts.” I paused. “What’s that?” He explained — they collect old baby clothes from parents and stitch them into a quilt as a keepsake. It was a beautiful, emotional product.
Then I asked the obvious: “So what’s the problem if your reel has gone so viral?”
He said,
“Between me, my wife, and one employee, we’re replying to 200 DMs every day, sitting 10–15 hours nonstop. But we get 1000+ comments daily — most of them are going unanswered. We’re probably losing real customers, and we can’t keep up.” “Can you automate this?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure right away. But I said, “Give me a few days — I’ll explore.”
I did a deep dive and discovered a tool called ManyChat that allows Instagram automation. I tested it on my own account and it worked like a charm.
I built a full-blown automation that replied to every comment and DM, answered queries, qualified leads, collected customer info, and even took orders — all neatly tagged and tracked inside a CRM workflow.
All of this was set up in 2 weeks.
The results?
Their business grew 5X in a month. They now spend just 1–2 hours a day handling actual buyers. The rest of their time goes into improving the product and running the business.
I was thrilled. I thought — this is a real opportunity! There must be thousands of small businesses in India on Instagram — struggling with the same problem.
So I doubled down.
I made a list of Instagram sellers with over 50K followers. For one whole month, I reached out, pitched the automation, and waited for responses.
But… crickets.
No one signed up.
Why?
When I reflected, I realised: My friend’s use case was an outlier. Most Instagram businesses don’t get 1000+ comments a day. Their reels don’t go viral regularly. They simply didn’t need that level of automation.
The truth is — 👉 Technology becomes critical only when the business reaches a scale where humans can’t keep up. And that moment doesn’t come for everyone.
So what looked like a high-potential idea… turned out to be a one-off case.
And that’s the lesson.
🔍 Lesson: Not Every Exciting Idea is a Scalable Business ✅ Validate whether a problem exists for many — not just one successful use case ❌ Don’t assume every virality is a repeatable model ✅ Automation works — but only when the volume demands it ❌ Don’t confuse exception with opportunity
Sometimes, ideas look huge… but they don’t scale.
Still, it was worth exploring. Because you only learn by doing.