Roshni Mahtani

My wife used to forward me parenting articles.

I'd read a few paragraphs and quietly think: this isn't about us.

Here's what I didn't know until recently.

In 2009, a Singaporean woman named Roshni Mahtani was babysitting two girls in New York when she googled a question she'd been wondering about.

"Can a three-year-old eat durian? Is it too heaty?"

Nothing came up. Not a single useful result. Every parenting site on the internet had been built for a different mother.

The more she searched, the clearer the gap became.

Not just about food. About everything.

Every article assumed one kind of mother. The mother raising a child to be independent. To leave the nest at 18. To build her own life, separate from the family.

That mother existed. She just wasn't most mothers in Southeast Asia.

Roshni knew a different mother. The one managing her in-laws. Raising a child that grandparents, aunties, and three generations of relatives all had strong opinions about. Not raising a kid to eventually leave. Raising a kid who would one day be responsible for the whole family.

That mother had no app.

Roshni's own context made this personal. Her family had been wealthy. Then the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit and they went from millionaire to flat broke overnight. At 15, she was handing out flyers at MRT stations to help pay the bills. Financial security wasn't an abstract value. It was the reason you showed up.

She went back to her rented room in New York that night and wrote her first article. About feeding preschoolers durian.

Then she wrote another. And another. She wrote the first 1,000 articles on theAsianparent herself.

She built it in English first. Then Malay. Then Tamil, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai. Country by country, language by language.

For six years, she took no outside funding. Just kept writing, translating, building.

When she eventually went to raise money, investors didn't take her seriously. She wasn't a parent herself. In meetings, men would direct questions to her junior male staff and ignore her entirely.

She let the numbers do the talking.

35 million people a month. 13 countries. 11 languages. Then came Mama's Choice — a halal-certified product brand she built for the same mothers. 130,000 parent influencers across the region. A US$22 million Series D led by East Ventures. JD.com invested. The Obama Foundation named her to its inaugural Asia-Pacific cohort.

Not bad for a question about durian.

Here's the thing:

Everyone talks about finding product-market fit. Validating demand. Building for the customer who's already raising their hand.

What Roshni understood was simpler: there were tens of millions of mothers nobody had decided to build for yet.

The wrong market was just the one everybody else had walked past.

What's a product or service that still doesn't exist for your specific context — and probably should?