Finding meaning

When we started back in 2015, it was obvious to us that house hunting should start with an online 3D tour. So, we simply started building for it. Once we had a prototype, we started talking to builders who would be our customers.

For the first 10 months, we couldn’t get a single customer. We just kept building what we envisioned the product to be. Around the 11th month, the product reached a level of maturity and customers started buying. We were happy to finally find users for our product. By the end of the 1st year, we started getting good traction. We onboarded over 100 builders.

Then, we started thinking: “Ok, we thought this product should exist. It does now and people are using it. What next?”.

At this point, it occurred to us that we were businessmen now and we ought to think like businessmen. So, we decided to come up with a strategy for how we can build a $1B business. To build that big a business, we figured, we had to target a large market. And people also told us we need to address a burning need. Right, that makes sense.

We decided we should build a real estate marketplace. We spoke to all our customers. We interviewed a lot of people who bought houses. We interviewed people who were planning to buy houses. We spoke to industry veterans. We understood the pain points. We realized where the alternatives had shortcomings. We understood the challenges in execution as well. It would be hard, but we knew it could be done.

Then we did a pilot, where we signed up a few people interested in buying a house. We assisted them in buying the house at a fixed charge. We were also fleshing out the product requirements from the interactions. The response we got from home buyers was overwhelming. We started getting inquiries through word of mouth without us even asking. Large market, check. Burning need, check. Scope for competitive differentiation, check.

After the 3rd week, we didn’t feel like working on it anymore. Wait, what?

We were just not excited to work on the idea. We had worked on a product for over 10 months with no positive response from the market but never looked back. But we didn’t feel like working in this new direction when we had such a terrific response and such a great ambition in front of us. Why was this?

On thinking more deeply about the experience, we realized it happened because simply building a big business was not meaningful for us. We had always worked on things we found meaningful. This internal sense of meaning was the source of our passion. When the meaning went away, the passion also went away.

Passion was not something that we were consciously excited about. It was that calm driving force that let us spend long nights and 7 day weeks. We had taken that for granted. So, we gave up that market size approach to figuring out our place in the world. We started looking inwards. We started asking ourselves: What is meaningful for us?

After almost a year of reflection, a lot of philosophical debates, and thought-provoking wisdom from more experienced people in life, we feel we understand ourselves and our purpose better.

EmptyCup is a platform for interior design. A well-designed house slowly shapes the life of the family living in it, in a hundred little ways over a decade. Our mission is to make good interior design accessible to everyone.