I Accidentally Almost Started A Business. Here is What Happened. - An image showing the word "Business" written in bold letters, followed by a full stop. The letter 'B' and the full stop are in black, while the rest of the letters are in pink.

Anyone who has ever started a business would know of the pain and deliberate effort required to do so. Yet, here I claim that I almost started a business accidentally. Well, give me a chance, and what awaits you is a rich story/report filled with details that any entrepreneur or business enthusiast would find helpful and learn from.

Whether it be with my writing or generally in life, I relish solving problems. Solutions that create value for people are especially interesting to me. So, naturally, this story starts with a problem. But of all possible industries, the problem that caught my eye came from the air travel industry.

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The Vacation Rush and Unexpected Waiting Times

Just to be clear upfront, I have zero experience in the air travel industry and have no business solving any problems there. But I started observing something very unique happening recently.

A few weeks back, I saw people in a local Facebook community post their woes about having to wait hours and hours at the local airport security queue. Some folks posted pictures of kilometre-long queues that took more than ten hours to clear. Understandably, quite a few people had missed their flights as well.

I Accidentally Almost Started A Business. Here is What Happened. — An illustration showing a cute toy-like fat aeroplane that has a pink and white colour scheme. The lower half of the aeroplane and the upper half of its tail are coloured pink while the rest of the plane is white.
Illustrative art created by the author

We have the yearly vacation rush at this time of the year. So, there is nothing new there. However, it turns out that many of the airport staff were fired during the peak COVID lockdown time. Back then, the air travel industry was under immense pressure to save money wherever possible.

Many folks that were fired promptly said “no, thank you!” when requested to rejoin after normal life started to resume. Being massively understaffed, the local airport did not have the capacity to predict and handle spikes in incoming travellers.

Online Frustration

Back to the local Facebook community — I saw the number of airport-related posts steadily increase over the weeks. On the one hand, anxious travellers would post requests like the following:

“We are travelling at ‘x’ time on ‘y’ date. Can anyone (at the airport) provide information on what the current status at the security queue is?”

On the other hand, a section of the community members would get annoyed and express their annoyance very openly.

The Problem that Caught My Eye

As I saw the same series of events recur regularly in the Facebook community, it started nagging me. “There has to be a more efficient solution for this problem”, I thought to myself.

Usually, when I start thinking like this, the problem fills my head until I have figured out and implemented some sort of a solution for it. Within the next couple of hours, as I was taking a walk, it occurred to me that I could solve this by just providing a common platform and thus relieving the online community of the burden.

My Potential Solutions to the Problem

I came up with two approaches to solve the problem. The first would just be a page that features a poll. Users would have the option to choose from various waiting times such as: ‘less than 30 minutes’, ‘1–2 hours’, ‘2–3 hours’ etc.

The tricky bit with this poll would be that all votes that are, say, two hours older than the current server time must be discounted/deleted/dropped. This way, the poll results would display the current trend for waiting times at the airport.

My second solution involved a front-end editable table (dressed up with lipstick as a beautiful responsive form, of course) on a webpage. People at the airport could update their waiting times, and prospective travellers could just check the page and get to know the current status.

Implementing the Solution

You see, I am not a programmer (yet). So, while my abstraction skills are ‘okay’, implementing solutions is where I lack speed. I was now more than 6 hours into solving this problem. I did not wish to ‘waste’ more than one or two days on the solution.

After spending two more fruitless hours on the first alternative, I realised that it was way too complex for me to implement within a day. So, I ditched it and started with my second alternative (the editable front-end table).

I was able to progress surprisingly fast and was ready to launch within the next couple of hours.

How I Accidentally Almost Started A Business

I am ‘generally’ good at expressing myself via my writing. So, I wrote a 400–500 word post about my solution proposal in the local Facebook community. I also mentioned clearly that this is just an experiment and I cannot promise anything. This solution would only work if enough people are kind enough to play ball, after all.

There is one small fact that I haven’t mentioned about this online community yet — it has more than 200,000 members. And my post started blowing up. People were happier for the fact that someone was willing to solve this problem than for the actual solution.

Within the first few hours after launching, the page I put together had more than 1500 visits. Some of the members encouraged me to develop this as a business. Just to be clear, I had no intentions of starting/building a business; I was just solving a problem that I found disturbing.

I was genuinely overwhelmed by the response. There was, however, one big problem!

Post-Launch Challenges and Spasms

The members were genuinely helpful and requested similar pages for a couple of other airports as well. I entertained their requests. I just had to replicate new instances of the current solution from my side.

While the response was largely positive for my solution, the issue was ‘data’. I had no way of verifying the information that was being posted on the page. On the one hand, the people sharing the information were anonymous. On the other hand, the post could not be deleted by anyone other than me once it was registered.

If all of this sounds like a recipe for disaster, it indeed is. I started sweating badly; if any traveller would miss their flight or suffered any inconvenience because of misleading information, I would feel responsible. I realised the heap of trouble I got myself into.

Furthermore, the thought of getting into legal issues started tearing at my brain as well. In just two hours, due to the intense stress, while thinking of a solution, I developed back and neck spasms (ouch!).

I Accidentally Almost Started A Business. Here is What Happened. — An illustration showing a desperate-looking bleak stick figure that has three question marks on top of its head. It seems to be confused about what to do next.
Illustrative art created by the author

As far as I could think, this problem could be solved using a zero-knowledge-proof approach (for a detailed review, check out my essay on this topic). The person updating the information should not reveal any personal information such as location, flight number, check-in status, etc. At the same time, the person reading the information should be able to verify/prove that the information is legitimate.

To pull this off, I had to become an “authority” of this service. How the hell am I supposed to do that overnight? I was genuinely considering shutting the service down. No information is far better than misleading information, afterall.

Curtains Fall as I Almost Started a Business

Shortly after my page went viral, the corresponding airport staff took notice of it and started tweeting ‘official’ updates on the security queue every two hours. In one instant, I felt relief. Finally, there was an authority on the matter.

My page was still getting a constant stream of visits. So, I promptly linked the official Twitter account to my page and embedded their feed on the page as well. Following this, my back spasm gradually started relieving itself as well.

As for the other airport pages, I just wrote a message that I am shutting them down due to misuse and abuse. Again, no information is better than misleading information.

Lessons Learnt

I did not set out to start a business with this solution. However, since the dynamics developed in the direction of a business, this presents itself as a useful case study. Here are five important business lessons I learnt from this little adventure:

1. Critical services come with critical responsibility. It makes sense to find a suitable co-founder for operating such businesses. There will be suffering; suffering together is better and healthier than suffering alone.

2. Prioritising solutions, value-addition, and connecting with your end-users/clients/customers over profit/money really pays off.

3. Paid advertising is overrated. Social media products like Facebook have a reputation for capping views in order to sell you their paid advertising model. However, in my case, as I dedicated the solution to the right community, the post continues to gather views and interactions even as I write this essay.

4. When solving technical problems, it helps a great deal if one can write code. I severely felt handicapped when I couldn’t quickly transform my designs into working prototypes.

5. Last but not least, I feel that it is crucial to consider the legal implications of one’s actions when it comes to exploring business opportunities. I had listed proper disclaimers and policies to the best of my knowledge. But I cannot shake the insecure feeling even now.

Final Thoughts and Future Plans

Before winding up this essay, there are two important phenomena that I wish to share with you:

1. When I proposed my solution originally, I thought that I was solving the problem of today’s traveller. Anyone travelling today would check the page today, right? But in reality, the people who visit and revisit my page are the ones travelling several days later. They seem to use the status check to cull their insecurity. While I haven’t fully understood this, I found the phenomenon interesting.

2. Even after I shut down my service and linked/embedded the official Twitter feed, my pages are still getting a steady stream of visitors. I see people revisiting my page as well for updates. I don’t understand this either. My guess is that network effects and some sort of ‘trust’ built are the reason for this.

I had no clue that one could learn so much about end-to-end product design, UX, bug-fixing, etc., in just two days. I am thankful and am continuing to analyse the information I have noted down and gathered from this little adventure. I am certain that I can build on top of this knowledge for my future projects.

For now, I plan to focus on web development and programming skills (where I feel the weakest). I hope that the case study that I presented in this essay benefited you in some way as well!

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Further reading that might interest you:

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