I’m taking some time off. So instead of doing new interviews, I’m looking back on a few of my old ones and pulling a big idea from each. — Andrew

After hundreds of interviews, the one that I think about most is my conversation with Luke Bergis, the founder of Fit Fuel, who shocked me with how open he was about why his company closed.

Luke launched an online health store that started selling no more than a couple of dozen products, but somehow he found himself dealing with a business that had several thousand products. He carried so much inventory that thousands of dollars of products were rotting on his selves.

As you read that last paragraph, I bet you thought “Of course that’s a terrible idea.” The thing is, as I heard him slowly let his story unfold, I couldn’t help but think there was a lot of logic behind each product he added.

In some cases, manufacturers of products he agreed to carry linked to Fit Fuel from their sites or mentioned the site in magazine ads. They helped grow his overall sales by sending him customers who were ready to buy. In other cases, he was just responding to his customers’ requests.

Individually, each decision made sense, but taken together it caused the site to lose focus which confused customers about what Fit Fuel stood for and kept the company from knowing what was on its shelves.

They sold cereal (it worked for Whole Foods, so why not Fit Fuel?), sexual enhancement pills (sex is a part of a healthy lifestyle and has good margins, right?) and even health food for pets (if you ask any healthy person if she wants her pet to be healthy too, wouldn’t she say ‘yes’?). By the end, the site’s inventory nearly included Viagra for dogs.

I think about Luke’s story every time someone offers to fly me to a conference to speak, or makes me a great partnership offer. It’s so temping to jump on those opportunities because they each make sense. But then I remember Luke’s story and how a collection of good decisions can be a bad idea.