Should I build in a category I'm genuinely obsessed with, or chase the one with the biggest market opportunity?
The short answer
Pick the intersection, not one or the other - a huge market you're lukewarm about will grind you down through the inevitable 18 rough months, and a passion project in a market too small to support a real business caps your upside no matter how hard you work. The honest test is whether you'd keep working on the problem even without the market-size upside - genuine obsession is what gets you through stockouts, RTO chaos and cashflow crunches that a purely opportunistic founder walks away from. Indian D2C case studies consistently show the winners picked categories they had real, specific frustration with, then sized the market after, not before.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
3 resources1 India-specific1 link-checked
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📄 Article
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Why we picked it
A structured, self-assessment-style framework you can actually run against your own background and category choice, rather than an abstract definition to admire from a distance.
Why we picked it
Surveys multiple early D2C winners together, useful for pattern-spotting how often 'category chosen out of personal frustration, sized for market later' shows up as the actual origin story rather than a market-first approach.
Why we picked it
Looks at what separated Indian D2C brands that scaled from those that stalled, grounded in the local market rather than US case studies - useful for weighing founder fit against market size specifically in the Indian context.
