Startup karna hai ...

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon. I was aimlessly scrolling through reels on my phone when the screen lit up — Dheeraj calling.
Dheeraj is a friend and also my classmate. We spent four years together in college.

But since we got busy with our respective lives, we barely talk — maybe once every six months.
Without trying to calculate precisely, I can safely say it had been six months.

“Hey, how are you, brother?” I asked.
“All good. You tell me,” he replied.
“Same old, man. Five days of office, and two under my wife’s rule.”

Barely three or four minutes into the conversation, we ran out of things to talk about.
Not knowing what else to say, and expecting a cliché response, I asked a worn-out question:

“So, what’s going on in life?”

“I’m thinking of quitting my job,” he said.

Now that I didn’t expect — not from him.
If it had been someone else, I might have brushed it off.
But Dheeraj isn't the kind of guy to say lightweight things.

“What happened? Why?” I asked seriously.

“Man, this life of sitting all day grinding paper — it’s not for me.
I don’t want to spend my life like this.”

I said, “Coming from someone preparing for UPSC, that’s surprising.
What if, by chance, you’d made it to the interview?”

“Dude, working here made me realize — even an IAS life isn’t something I could survive beyond a few years.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“Startup.”

“What kind of startup?”

He began explaining:
“I have this idea — formalizing nannies and household help. Let’s build an aggregator app or website.
I’ve faced this issue a lot recently. Every couple of months, the old help leaves and I have to hunt for someone new.”

“How will you make money from it?” I asked, cutting straight to the point.

“Brokerage,” he replied.

I said, “Even if you make ₹5,000–10,000 once, where will the repeat revenue come from?
This feels more like a side hustle, not something scalable enough for a full-time company.”

“Plus, similar websites already exist in most cities.
If this were a real business opportunity, someone would’ve already built a working aggregator.”

“You can’t control quality — the maid will work as she wants.
No standard service, no reliability. Without a standard, what can the client expect?”

“And if you want to enforce standards by training the help, you’ll need a proper institute.
That’s not a solution — that’s a can of new problems.”

Surprisingly, I didn’t have to try hard to get him to see it.

This kind of delusion isn’t rare — and it’s not even wrong.
There might be a term for it — I don’t know — but for now, let’s just call it experiential entrepreneurship.

We often try solving a problem we’ve personally faced,
without thinking whether it’s viable as a sustainable business,
what the revenue model is, or how many people actually want this solution.

He asked me, “So, do you have any better idea?”

I said, “Why don’t we build a Zomato/Swiggy for highway and road travel?”

“Tell me more.”

And then I launched into a monologue:

“See, on highways, the first problem people face is finding a decent restaurant or dhaba.
Second — even when I find a place, they may not be serving what I want.
Third — order it, then wait forever for the food to arrive.
But when I’m on the road, my priority is to reach the destination as fast as possible.”

Everyone’s got Google Maps on while driving these days,
tracking their ETA, racing to beat it.

“Why not charge these fast-paced travelers ₹10 in exchange for saving them time?”

There’s a problem on the restaurant’s side too —
Drive-thrus are currently limited to big chains like McDonald’s, Domino’s, KFC, Burger King.
Even if I’m a big restaurant owner, I wouldn’t have the guts to train staff or modify infrastructure for a drive-thru.

“But imagine — without changing their setup, what if we offer the same convenience via our app?”

He was getting the idea and said, “Cool — let’s think over this for a couple of days and talk again.”
We spoke a few days later — and we both were on the same page.

But now came the real question — one I had held back till then:

“Look, it’s fine that you want to quit your job.
You’re not alone — a lot of people want to.
But who quits a government job?
These folks retire, not resign.
And definitely not the ones who get called officers at the office.”

Dheeraj is an officer in a major government department —
a post that people wait in line for years to reach…
and still don’t.