What happens when a cybersecurity engineer walks into a fashion boutique? For Harish Chandramowli, it sparked an idea that’s now helping small fashion brands save time, money, and sanity. A chance observation in a New York store became a mission to untangle problems in inventory, communication, and operations many brands struggle with.
In this episode, I speak with Harish, founder of Flair Software, about how he went from working at Bloomberg and MongoDB to building a platform that fixes the messy back-office problems fashion brands face. Harish explains why seasonal inventory is a high-stakes game, how communication breakdowns can cost thousands, and why he built his solution to integrate with Shopify instead of competing against it. Tune in now to learn more.
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From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We have a lot of technological advances, a lot of digital technology, and a lot of the efforts around it have been used primarily around digital products, primarily around some of the platforms and everything else, but there’s also an aspect that I’m hopeful around that really takes some of the digital technology that we have and uses it to enhance the physical products and the actual life that we have outside of our computers in real life. My guest today, Harish Chandramowli, is the founder of Flaire Software and he has some interesting solutions for the fashion industry and other kind of inventory-related pursuits.
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Harish, welcome to the program.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for joining us. Now, first of all, kind of have your feet in both worlds, whether it be kind of our technological world as well as the world of fashion, the world of some of these in-real-life types of pursuits. Tell me a bit about your story, where you started and how you came up with the idea, what you observed that led to Flaire Software.
Yeah. Just taking a step back, I am not from fashion industry. It’s all pretty new to me. I did my master’s in cyber security actually in Johns Hopkins, then I worked as security engineer in a bunch of very data-related platforms like Bloomberg, MongoDB. And MongoDB was my last gig where I primarily started as cloud security engineer but moved on to like an Atlas dedicated team where you see how lot of different people use databases. And, interestingly, there are a lot of retail companies using databases very heavily. That made me more and more curious on how software is being used in retail industry and why database is like one of the biggest line expenditures. On top of that, when I was looking into ERPs, Oracle is one of the biggest player in the ERP market, which made me even more curious on what this space is. What happens around here? Why is a database company spending so much on an ERP, on like a data workflow?
Yeah.
This kind of made me curious but, again, it was more like I don’t think I was into fashion or any of those things. I went to this store called ONS in Soho. It’s a great store you should check out if you are ever in like downtown area in New York.
What’s the store called again?
ONS.
Okay.
Orange, Naples, San Diego. So if you go to Soho and like downtown in the fashion districts, you will notice a lot of these small, small brands which is not your typical H&Ms or Zara.
Yeah.
So I was there, I was actually listening to their team meetings, talking a lot with their founder. I was looking at how they are operating in the back office. The first thing that stood out to me is that fashion as a whole uses a lot of software. One aspect of it which we are all familiar with is designing the fashion, like the threading, modeling and like the cut and everything. Another easier to relate option is like e-commerce site, where you list, sell products, and then there is a big piece of back office operation which kind of brings together your design teams to your sales team, your customer service team, which is ERP. And what I really noticed is that, especially in fashion, T-shirts are looked at size and colors, whereas a female swimwear product has cup size, torso length, color, and regular sizes. That means everyone looks at product in a very different way, and, often, people spend 100k, 200k hiring software engineers to customize the product structure on how they look at their business in the back office, how they analyze is my orange color moving faster than my red color, or is this torso length moving more than the other length? And it was very expensive, and having worked at MongoDB, having seen how a schemaless database, how giving the power to user to define schema can help people, it just stood out to me that why haven’t we done that in ERP? And that’s what led to Flaire.
Essentially you looked at what happens at a lot of these smaller fashion companies and figured out a way that you could really kind of simplify their operation.
Yes.
You didn’t originally come from the fashion industry. Does the fashion industry have a special meaning to you or is this just the industry that you happened to observe this retail issue where you’re going to be taking this to kind of other components of retail?
So I was looking at different retail things. One of the things that really stood out for me in fashion industry is the season. One, even within our customers, I have seen some of our customers go bankrupt just because they had one bad season.
So the need for inventory planning, the need to analyze your business comes very early in your life cycle compared to other businesses. Share on XYou need to move fast. You can’t sit on a lot of inventories. At the end of every four months, you need to decide do I sell my inventory at 50 percent loss or do I sit on it for the next season? Sitting on it for the next season means your cash is locked up, you can’t buy new products for the next season, and you are not making profit on it. So, all this decision making and all the need for an ERP or need for a workflow automation platform comes very early in the cycle. That’s one of the reason I took fashion industry. Apart from that, I was always curious. Because when I grew up, I grew up in a place where all these manufacturing happens, so we used to buy clothing in kgs and pounds. You don’t go and buy a t-shirt, you buy a pound of t-shirt.
Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh ––
–– the factory. So I was always curious on how things have changed between factories and how you buy clothes to here. So there was a bit of curiosity.
So you alluded to like right now or before your solution, most of these companies were essentially hiring data scientists to comb through all this data, seeing what color was moving, probably looking at factors like month of the year, trends in style and stuff like that, right?
Primarily, more than that, people use engineers to push into some kind of like a data store where they can do the analysis. But then at mid-level, people are not even doing that. They are trying to handle everything in spreadsheet because they don’t have the money to hire those engineers so they were literally doing that in spreadsheets.
When you looked at these organizations, what are the size? How many total employees would one of these brands that you see in Soho, one of these kind of stores have?
If I look at our customer profile, various customer profile, it varies anywhere from like 6 to 7 employees to 25, 30 employees, based on the size. $30 million brands, which is like one of our lower end of the customer base would be like 5 to 10 employees, whereas the $60, $70 million brands have like 20 employees.
When I think about companies around that size, there’s certain hyper-specialized positions that not necessarily being hired out unless it’s like specific to industry, so when I think about a company that’s a thousand people, say, almost every one of them is going to have data engineers, data scientists, something even for just their operations, whereas the smaller ones probably not. So, these companies, let’s say one of them has 15 employees in your end, what is that makeup of the employees? Is it just like kind of a marketing person, a CEO, and a bunch of, you know…
Exactly. Most of them are tech savvy. One, they know what information they need to make decisions, but they have no idea how to get those information. That’s where they look up to us and be like, “Hey, if I have this information, I can make a better business decision on how to plan, how much inventory to buy, when to expect an inventory, when to book a marketing campaign,” whereas they have no idea how to get those information because your CRM is very decoupled from your ERP which is very decoupled from the interactions that a purchase manager is having with a factory on, “Can we produce this? Can we not produce this? When this can be produced?” So, they are looking to us and be like, “Hey, I have all these separate information, how do I bring these things together? Can you make a software that can help us and give us the detail in the simplest possible way?”
Typically, if I just look at what the situation would be, a CRM would have, say, I don’t know, the number of a certain item that’s selling each day. That information would be there, right?
Two things, most of often than not, CRM, especially in this industry, happens is with B2B businesses, so what would happen is that you will –– so you are sitting in July and you will be selling your winter clothes as bulk orders. So you will be negotiating with other shops on like, “Hey, do you want to buy 200 of my t-shirts in December?” and they would sell it. Because, for normal consumer, you don’t have to track much because that marketing and everything is just like Shopify does that, it’s a very different tech stack, very different problem, which is being solved by hundreds of companies out there so I now have to educate them. It’s like, “Go and pick and choose different companies every month and see which works for you.”
Yeah, because there’s a lot of them.
Yes.
So you’re talking more about the brands that have the B2B sales.
B2B sales, and these are companies that has mostly back office operation. When I talk about back office operation, it’s not consumer, it’s like even within your production line, for example, you have a new design that’s coming up. That means, before it goes on sale, you need to have a model. You need to have then the photo shoot for the model. But to do the photo shoot, you have no idea when your dress is going to be done to book those models, and production manager has those ideas, but then when there is a delay in factory, the information only goes to production manager and the production manager needs to update the marketing people, which doesn’t happen often, and then, sometimes, I have had customers tell stories like, “I spent $5,000 to bring a model to do the photo shoot and then I just never realized that the dress is not going to be there.” You can’t wait for the dress to arrive because now you are sitting on the inventory without doing a photo shoot. When you book in advance, you need to know there is a delay so that you can cancel the appointments. Such nuances in operation, that’s where we come into play.
I think one thing to orient everyone listening is how much it does cost to keep inventory. Because I think a lot of people in any other industry might not understand that if you have, say, excessive inventory, there’s a cost associated with that.
Excess inventory has a cost associated with it, unsold inventory or delaying your go to market, it has a cost associated with it. And a season is just four months. If you sit down on inventory doing all these operations for a week, you are losing a week of sales, which is such a big number, because you are not looking at a week in a year, you are looking at a week in four months. That means your inventories are going to lie there and you are losing profit.
And so what you offer is a software solution that takes all these components of running the business, inventory management, scheduling, and everything else, what all goes into this software that you bring to everyone?
Obviously, we configure it based on customer and their operation, but at the high level, if you want to imagine, one, the bigger piece is communication. Especially with AI, it’s so easy to parse when there is a delay and flag it to people that, “Hey, someone got an email that there is a delay.” That’s the first thing, right? Inventory management asking, yes, we integrate with their warehouse, Shopify so that you get visibility into what inventory you have, but the other big part is having visibility into incoming inventories and planned inventories, because, often, you plan 8 to 9 months in advance so you want to know how much quantity is planned. When I talk about B2B sales, for example, if a B2B person knows how much is planned on which item, they could pre-sell it very easily. So getting that visibility into not just the dates of incoming inventories, even a planned inventory becomes important. So we kind of bring together all these sources. So the first thing we do when we speak with customers is understand what are all the roles that they have within the company, what operations each one does within the company, and where the information needs to be shared. Then we put in like a dashboard kind of thing for each companies on like, “Hey, these are the operations each one is doing and this kind of information needs to be shared and this is where you need to go to get your information.”
And that’s the data that the people in the company need in order to just make the decisions around placing orders and…
Yes. Everyone makes different decisions and look for different data. SEO would come and look at their cost-profit margins and how much money is held. The CFO would come and look at when I need to pay the vendors. You make eight months in advance, often it’s like 30 days after receiving the goods, 60 days after receiving the goods, so I expected the day to be like, “Okay, I am planning for next month. How much cash I have already committed next month?” Because, often, you commit ahead of time, right? That’s the data a CFO needs. The production planning person would come and be like, “Hey, I’m running out of inventories. I need to restock it but how much have I ordered before? How much is incoming? And then decide whether I need to order more.” So everyone will come for different data so everyone have different dashboards that makes them more efficient.
How much is it also about, say, scenario planning and variance? Because I know any retail, you’re going to have, okay, I expected maybe to sell 150 units today but that number can vary quite a bit based on just tons of factors.
So we do want to go there in long term, but, at this point, we haven’t done that because for most of our customers, they are using Shopify and there are so many other apps which is doing this in Shopify. We do not want to reinvent the wheel where some people have done these niche use cases really well. So we always recommend our customers like, hey, we will push all these data, then you can use your Snowflakes or 42 Technologies who only does this inventory planning part really well.
So when you first made your observations in the fashion companies in Soho and looked at kind of what’s going on now and you looked at, you mentioned Shopify a few times, did it ever cross your head that Shopify was going to be a competitor or Shopify was going to be a reason why the solution you’re coming up with isn’t going to work? Or did you always kind of have the mindset that, okay, here’s what exists now, let’s find a way to work with them and find the right niche and find the right combinations?
It’s actually the other way around. If I’m going to say that, hey, I’m going to build an ERP to take on NetSuite, that would sound so crazy, because you need so many engineers, we need to build a lot.
Yeah.
It’s just without that capital, you can’t take on these kind of niche, vertical specific big tools. Shopify is what made it possible. We are very closely tied to Shopify to an extent where I piggyback on every feature Shopify has. The more Shopify builds that makes my life easier. And as a startup, you always look back and reflect on mistakes. One of the probably things I would have walked away from is doing things for people who are not in Shopify because Shopify has done such a good job and I spent so much resources building things that Shopify does for people who are not there and then, yeah, learned my way through, now it’s more like, “Hey, if you’re not in Shopify, we are probably not the right customers,” because we are betting on Shopify doing more, we are betting on Shopify growing like how they are doing right now and complimenting them.
And, first of all, does Shopify have a local office in New York that you can easily use to collaborate with them or visit them?
They have a really good documentation. Anyone can go and build these things based out of their documentation. I’ve never spoken to a single Shopify engineer ’til now. They have done a tremendous job of developer ecosystem.
You talked about this initial mistake with your business, building stuff that Shopify had already built, and then kind of realizing it. Do you believe that for anyone starting a business that has an idea now, a mistake like this is somewhat inevitable in the sense that if you wait until you have figured out every one of these possible things that could be less than ideal, you may be waiting for quite a long time and never get everything started. You know what I mean? What’s the right way to kind of, I guess, accept the fact that a mistake like this is going to be made but then adjust quickly enough to still make the business viable?
Listen to customers, listen to your books. The thing that made me think about it is more like people who are not in Shopify are too small and our annual contracts were like $5,000, $6,000 a year. For people in Shopify, they are big enough that you are talking about like $30,000 a year to $100,000 a year contract. You are building less because you’re building around something that’s well established. It’s kind of like looking at your business as well as how much you are burning through cash for getting that revenue.
And so when it comes to listen to your customers and listen to your books, what’s your practice with like how frequently, even to this day, that you kind of, I don’t know, once a week or once a day, whatever, look at your books, look at some of your metrics, or look at whether it’s your conversation with customers or if you have a client success type of person that does those conversations and you just look at the summaries.
So, one, I interact with each and every one of our client because I am still small enough.
Yeah.
And, two, I also believe that every engineer should interact with customers directly so that they become customer success, they become the product people, they help prioritize and they know which features are being used, which is not used, and how much it took from an engineering perspective for them to build. So a little bit engineering focused organization where everyone is forced to talk to customer, everyone is forced to be the client success people helps in terms of planning. I don’t look at my books every day. I mean, yeah, I look at my bank account every day and be like, What the heck I’m doing? I need to do fundraise, like every other founder out there. It’s usually listening to customers, that’s what is the most important thing. And every sales call, every missed deal, every deal you pass saying that they are too early or we are too early, it’s an opportunity for you to rethink on how many deals you are missing, why you are missing, and I kind of do it on a weekly basis. I had 10 calls, I kind of decided they are not a good customer because of X, Y, Z reason, whether it’s a missing feature, whether it’s we are not ready for them or they are not ready for them, that doesn’t matter. You just reflect on those metrics.
And then is there a component also of deciding what size you want to be, in the sense that, okay, you could try to build all the functionality of Shopify and try to compete with Shopify with their maybe five or six core competitors, versus you want to build something for a specific niche type of customer, these smaller, primarily B2B customers that are part of Shopify’s base.
I have a different answer on how or why I started the company. I guess I did not talk about it a little bit. Obviously, I was so happy with all my previous jobs, and I do not want to just do a startup for sake of doing startup. So, for me, even when I started the company, the most important thing is can I add more value than what is out there? I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. And that’s my 101, right? That’s the thesis in which I started this company so that’s the thesis that come along when you talk about do a build with Shopify, do a build similar to what Shopify has done, do I build something other people have done. I’m like I do not want to do the exact same thing other people have done. Rather, I need to bring in more value. That’s what led us to be like, let’s very tightly couple with Shopify.
So it sounds like it’s important to look at the existing solutions out there. Every once in a while, you’ll see some people’s business presentations and, in business presentations, people always ask who are your competitors because they just want to know, and if someone says there are no competitors, usually the response is, “Well, you haven’t done any research. You haven’t tried to find out what’s already out there.” And so would it be accurate to say one of the processes would be to look at who the existing companies are out there and side like, can you add value by providing a better version of their solution versus can you provide value by adding to the solutions already out there?
Yes, exactly. We have competitors. We have done competitive analysis. Part two is, can I really add value more than what the other company is doing is the very first question. When I talked about NetSuite, I’m like I can add more value than NetSuite to an SMB market. That’s why we started. But when I looked at Shopify, if I asked the same question, can I add more value than what Shopify is doing for an SMB market, no.
Yeah.
So, for me, that is like you are spot on. That’s primary question you ask yourself about each and every competitor, and it’s not a blanket question. Am I going to be better than NetSuite? No, not for everyone. If you are like a $100 million brand, I would say do not lose my company. We are not ready for you yet.
Yeah.
So, yeah, the question you ask yourself, you do the competitive analysis and then decide, like, yes, I can do something better than what is out there for this specific customer segment. Then we go there.
So you have a specific customer segment. Do you have clients outside of that segment? Those specific size brands.
So startup 101, obviously, I learned it the hard way by going a little outside when people were so excited. People are like, “We want to use the product.” I got so excited being as a software engineer, like, oh, these many people want to use it. And then you onboard them and then you realize to provide enough value, now your engineering is getting distracted on totally different type of features, type of road map, and that’s not good. So, at the beginning stages, it’s one of the learning I had is cut out, disqualify your customers even if they are excited to use unless you are confident enough that everyone needs the exact same features. So, obviously, we don’t talk in terms of feature when you talk about ICP, initial customer profiling, you talk more in terms of business, but that, by default, leads to do all these people have same pain point and would need similar solution? For me, personally, at this stage of the company, if you are using Shopify, if you are a brand that’s between like somewhere around $10 to $100 million in revenue, yes, I can solve your problem. I can solve your problem better than other software out there, and you are my customer, and if you don’t fall under this segment, I want to be in touch, I want to learn how I can add value to you. I’m not ready to onboard you in my platform.
First of all, I want to say that it probably does take a lot of restraint to have people come in and show excitement about your product. And I know a lot of people out there are probably just in the process of, “I’m trying to get my product noticed, I’m trying to get a little traction,” and so to have someone excited about it, use it, and be able to say, “No,” I think that’s a really hard thing to ask anyone in that stage to really be able to do.
That is where I am grateful for my customers because all those people came, because my customers went to other people and be like, “We love this product.”
Yeah.
That’s how –– it’s just through word of mouth, and I’m grateful for my customers.
The other question I had is that, given that you said that you were happy with your other jobs, what motivated you to say, “I’m gonna start this business,” because I think a lot of people who are happy at their jobs would have an idea for a business, maybe, but then they’ll be like, “I’m happy with my job so I don’t wanna shake it up”?
I think there are two parts to it. One, I wanted to have a startup a long time back when I was at –– after I graduated, we had a website in India which was just for fun, but now looking back, I really appreciate how well we were doing. We got customers, we solved a pain point that everyone contacted us, but, unfortunately, during that time, all three of us had education loan, we were not able to quit the job, pursue it full time. I always wanted to go back to that when financially I feel I’m stable enough that I don’t need to be rich but I also don’t have the huge education loan.
Yeah.
The point of time was right. At the time, MongoDB did well financially. I was able to be at a place where I repaid my loans. So, yeah, a bunch of life situation came together. The other part of it is, like MongoDB grew really fast. We learned how to grow fast. That also means the company becomes big too soon and you miss working, like everyone knows you, you know everyone, you know every one of your customers, the feeling that every time I release, if a customer doesn’t like it, they can ping me and say, “Hey, I don’t like this feature because of X, Y, Z,” then I can go to the drawing board and make it better and I missed that kind of feeling and that’s what led to this.
This can happen from growth or it can even happen through like a merger and acquisition, where working for a company where you have like 50 employees, and you’re going to know all your coworkers too, that can be a very different experience than even 200, 500, and, suddenly, with the acquisition, even suddenly be in company with like 10,000 people or something like that. It becomes a completely different setup. A lot of other things about the company has to change too.
Yes, and every company has to go through that evolution. If you don’t go through that evolution, you are not growing. So it’s a good and right problem to have as a company, and it’s mostly I feel like each one’s personality. That includes even founders, like nobody before is not that anymore because he felt for the next stage of the company you need different profile of leaders in the company.
I have encountered people and I’m sure you’ve encountered people in your network as well who are the kinds of people that really, really enjoy that, I don’t know, 5-person to 50-person phase of a company and when their company starts growing bigger and bigger, they’re going to probably find their way to exit and then start up another company and they just have that kind of awareness about who they are and what kind of environment they really thrive in.
Yes, and it’s important the other side is also true. I have some friends from MongoDB or Bloomberg, I really want them to come and work for me here. I also know that, technically, they can kill this work. They can do like really good job, but they won’t enjoy it because they like being in a bigger company, they like having a thousand people around them.
So it’s important that everyone, especially if you’re moving to a startup, know that what you are giving up and what you are getting into. Share on XOtherwise, the life will be –– you will just hate the life. That’s the truth.
When people are going through college, people don’t really think about as much. They always tell you, “Okay, what do you wanna do? What do you want your job function to be?” And maybe you think a bit about which industry really interest you and those are kind of intersected, but the difference between, okay, what kind of environment? Do you want to work for kind of a small, stable company, like a mom and pop shop, or even these retail shops that you work with, they probably have some that are kind of just steadily at $50 million, $50 million and stuff like that. Do you want to go to a startup and just try to rapidly grow something? Or do you want to work for some bigger, more stable company where you’re going to have more of a predictable type of day to day?
Yes, and it’s also stress. Startup has more stress. Do you really want to handle that stress? Some people enjoy it, some people don’t like it.
Yeah. So if someone’s thinking about starting up a business, let’s say someone’s in the position that you were when you were looking at these fashion shops in Soho and everything like that, what do you think a person needs to think about when it comes to themselves to know whether or not, first of all, if they are the right person for it, as you said, but also the timing thing that you alluded to around, okay, you had this situation years ago but the timing wasn’t right?
There is no right answer when it comes to family situation. It’s just like, “Hey, I immigrated from another country. My parents cannot shoulder the education loan. I have to repay it.” So it’s a thing. Other question of like for some people, you need a million dollars in bank to feel safe and do a startup. For some people, you don’t need that. For me, personally, it’s like as long as I don’t have a huge debt, I am happy to take the risk. I don’t need a lot of money to have a happy life. So those situation is very different, but the most important thing is, one, you will spend hours and hours in office. I haven’t heard a single successful tech startup where the founding team doesn’t have to spend weekends, doesn’t have to spend nights in office. That means you are sacrificing a lot of personal time and a lot of family time. And it’s not new. Everyone says, “Hey, if you are a founder, speak with your spouse, speak with your partner,” because it’s going to be hard on them. That’s 100 percent true. There is no way to get around it. I was at my sister’s wedding in India, midnight. I was in her like literally sitting in there and working. It’s like such a big event in my life, my sister’s wedding is such important thing, I had to pick some on call issues.
First of all, I know those weddings in India, they tend to be like, multiday ––
Yes.
–– affairs, but also a very important part in family life. And so you’re saying, there is a there is a sacrifice. I tend to think of it as four barriers that people need to overcome to become successful. The first one is awareness. The second one is actual movement, actually starting something. But the third one is sacrifice, and then the fourth one is handling some sort of a setback or some sort of failure. And I think there’s no really getting around that, you’re going to have to go through those four hurdles at some point.
I don’t see that as a sacrifice. Rather, it’s more like –– it’s something I’m happy to do because this is something I’m so passionate about solving this problem that missing some events in your wedding, missing trips with my friend doesn’t mentally affect me as, “Oh, I am giving up something.”
I had always kind of somewhat thought of it that way, but exercise for anyone to do and maybe that’s something that someone thinking about starting a company can even ponder, imagine it’s six months from now, imagine that your friends, your family, a bunch of people are just going on a trip somewhere and you’re having to miss out. How do you feel about that? Are you passionate enough about what you’re doing? Are you the kind of person that can miss out? And if someone says, “No, I can’t, I can’t imagine that all my friends went to Vegas without me and I’m not going,” then there needs to be a reevaluation around even just what you think of the idea.
Yes. Maybe you like being the fifth employee in your startup, where you get to have these things, not as a founder, but also have that excitement about working in a small company. The life between a founding team member versus a founder is, again, very different.
Yeah. And the other interesting thing is that when you become the founder, you become the CEO, and when you become the CEO, there’s no passing anything off. Everything stops with you. I mean, obviously, there’s people you hire to do stuff, but in a, I guess, larger company environment, when something goes wrong, you can bring it up to your boss, you can bring it up the, quote-unquote, “chain of command,” even though I don’t love that terminology, you can bring it up and you can escalate the issue. Whereas if a customer is not happy with something you’re doing, I mean, that’s ultimately on you. No one else has that responsibility.
Yes. That is definitely one of the biggest takeaway in my last year or two years is, one, I have a friends group where we have a Slack channel where I just post the bad things happening in my thing. My friends just listen to it. It kind of helps to have that support system.
Yeah.
The second support system is like executives at MongoDB or executives whom I have met in other companies. They all mentor you, and whenever I look at one, I’m not someone who used to ask help randomly, but I learned that people are happy to help.
Oh, yeah.
And these people are happy to mentor, and for all those situation, I know buck stop at me, it’s so hard, but having this support system as really important.
If you’re starting a company, I would highly encourage to have a support system. Share on XAnd when you come to the support system, I know in cities like New York and Denver as well, there are kind of these entrepreneurial communities where you can connect with other founders, other business owners. Do you think that that’s sufficient for finding a support system or do you think that we need to look even a little bit further outside those communities and try and just like a family member or a really trusted friend that you’ll know will always be in your corner type of thing?
Both. Like I said, my friends don’t understand business. It’s a lonely journey for a founder, any founder, so they really don’t get what you say, but emotionally having them there makes it nicer. So you definitely need that. Even if you meet other founders and stuff, that friendship, that family comfort, but I feel the other founders’ help is like you know that you are not the only person facing these issues. Every founder has the same issues, and having that community helps. The other thing I noticed in the community is that it’s not just about being a founder. Having people who are in the same stage as you, because life as a founder, before you raise a VC funding is very different. Before you get your first 100,000 ARR is very different. And the more days you go, it never gets easier. And you need other people to be in your stage to understand what you are trying to talk.
It just even reminds me of freshman year in college, when you first arrive in those dorm rooms, suddenly around a whole group of people who are all in that same exact stage as you, first time away from home, for most people, family, and now you’re just starting this really long journey of learning something.
The other important part for me with speaking with these people is like they know which is confidential, which is not, so even if you say something that’s supposed to be private, you can trust that it will be private because they understand the importance of keeping it between two people.
Oh, yeah, and, obviously, we all know gossipy people in our lives that don’t necessarily always do a good job of that.
Yes. So all those small things plays a role when you speak with other people, try to get inputs or even like vent.
A common example I think that a lot of people can relate to is like you’ve been in a conversation where someone starts venting about a person in their lives, just someone in your social circle that’s really frustrating them for one reason or another. And there’s a vent about that, and there should be kind of an unwritten or unspoken agreement that if I’m venting to you about, I don’t know, Simon over there, just to pick a name that’s not someone I actually know so I’m not talking about anyone, but if I’m venting to you about Simon over there, that you’re not going to go over and tell him the things I said and so forth. But, yeah, you’re right, you can’t always necessarily 100 percent trust everybody, but founders will kind of always know that there is like the same issues of, okay, they’re not going to pay their invoice, you suddenly lost an employee unexpectedly and you only have three and now you have to scramble for a month to get their work done while also trying to rehire. Those are the types of issues that it is easier to talk to someone who’s experienced those same issues.
Yeah. And one of the other example initially started was about like buck stops at you, right?
Yeah.
That also plays the other way around, where even if your customer is very close to churn, you are fighting to keep them, you don’t usually just go and say that to the team immediately, because you want your team to feel safe, especially in a startup environment where every day feels the company is going to end. If your team starts feeling that, the founding team won’t be energized to work. And that was one of the hardest thing for me is like, hey, even whatever happens, I can’t come back to my office room and be like, what the heck went down? Because when my team is there, I need to immediately have that face of everything is good, everything is calm, we are marching towards a bigger goal.
Yeah, and it’s hard because it even reminds me of what parents have to do with children, particularly under the age of 13, where you could have something terrible going on somewhere else or a big threat and you still have to be that calming voice.
Yeah. Nice thing when you are explaining this with real world experience for me is that when people ask me what are the biggest things you have learned in the last two years, the first thing is not about startups, not about anything else. Me, as a person, has grown so much. You learn a lot about yourself. Being a founder is a lot of personal growth.
Even broader than that, there’s a lot of personal growth anytime you take on a new experience that’s different than what you’re accustomed to and you can’t go by a playbook, like, “I do this and then I get that result,” so forth and so forth. You have to deal with that uncertainty. You have to deal with the whole figure it out.
Yes, and anyone who wants to become the founder, one of the thing they should learn is that it’s going to be a huge personal reflection, personal growth, just whatever you think you know about you would not be true at the end of two years.
I mean, and, hopefully, it all turns out for the best, hopefully, it is personal growth rather than personal like falling apart when people become like alcoholics or lose their…
I mean, good in the sense, like, for example, podcast, I would never have thought I am someone who would come and share in this kind of platform. I’m doing it because I’m a founder now.
Yeah, and you’re having ––
You push your boundaries, push your like comfort zones.
At least when you first start, a founder is like wearing many hats, wearing every hat. So, for a lot of people, it’s like sales and marketing. And I guess coming on a podcast would be like a version of that, where it’s like, okay, I never started this wanting to find a way to be in sales, being in marketing, but you have to learn how to sell your product to someone. There’s no getting around it.
It’s not even product. I think, as a founder, at some point, you need to sell yourself as well, which I never at least had to do as a software engineer. My brand name, my degree, my previous companies land me the next job. I never had to go and sell myself explicitly.
Yeah, you have your GitHub and your resume.
Yes, and being a founder was so different, because now I need to talk about myself, I need to talk about why I am the right person to do this. So, yeah, all those things are very new, interesting challenges to think.
And then now that you’re a few years into this, are you happy overall that you went on this journey?
I am happy because I, one, I never grew up thinking I need to do a startup or anything. For me, it is like, “I need to get a job,” “I need to move to a city,” “I need to ––” I’m like, “I need to do a master’s.” But while doing the master’s and the last 10 years has been like, if I solve a problem that helps users and if users say, “Hey, I’m happy. I love using this product,” that makes me happy and that has been the journey for the last two years. Every day, someone comes and says, “I’m happy to use the product,” it makes your day. It’s also the challenge of pivoting. Like I started with some idea. Last two years, AI is changing the world. That evolved my strategy around how I want to build a product, how I see users, how I see problem solving. That pace at which things change keeps me excited. So whatever happens to that, if I have to take the next step, I would still be in this field. That’s kind of like where you stand.
And then, first of all, how big is your company right now?
I have two engineers in India, one QA person in India, one salesperson in LA, one product manager in New York, and one cold calling. And, sorry, I should know the numbers by heart, around like 8 to 9 people with different roles.
Are you looking to grow? And if you are looking to grow, how far are you looking to go given what you want to do with your company as well as the kind of environments that you feel that you’re best in?
So, I don’t think we need to grow much bigger than what we are right now, because some of the things are like things become more efficient, three engineers can build a lot more than having 15 to 20 engineers two three years back, right? I’m happy with my engineering team. I love them. They do a great job. In terms of sales and marketing, I’m still finding my feet on which is working, which is not working so that’s why there might be changes at the beginning in like trying different profiles. If cold calling doesn’t work, do I bring in someone who goes to a lot of conferences, meet people, or do I bring someone who has already run some brands? So I don’t have a great answer because I’m still experimenting around what structure would take me to the next stage. That’s the first one. Second thing, even from product perspective, sometimes, I am like, do I want to move like this or do I have some other pivots that I want to do that will make me more efficient, less capital expenditure, and give more value back to the customers? So there is always going to be that question you ask every day, every day, and you speak to 10 people, you come back and ask, yes, in terms of team, I’m like at the seed stage, it’s not at where you are going to say, “I have a 100-people company,” you tend to be around those 10 to 20 marks. Only when you are more closer to seed, that’s when the switch happens from a smaller company to like, “I need bigger team. I need bigger people. Now, I am going after 10 million revenue and not a million dollar revenue.”
Yeah. And it’s up to every founder to decide is that something you want and then decide where your funding comes from, because VCs are always going to want that, I think.
Yes. I think at this point also, those numbers and everything you want to expand are decided by your current customers, current income, what money you have in bank, what are your targets. I feel like I don’t have to plan for it, it just naturally happens. Even this expansion of nine people, it’s not like I planned for nine people, it’s like, okay, now the product is there, I need to pick up sales. Now, my ADR has made a list, I need to cold call and try, so it’s naturally like you see a problem, your company has your next step and you try to hire the right people.
Nice. And then any –– before we wrap up, any last messages that you have for my audience today?
One, if you ever want to start a company, always rely on people who have worked before, executives you have worked before, who has gone through it, because I personally was very hesitant in asking for help, but the moment I met people, everyone is willing to mentor, everyone is willing to help you out.
Yeah.
Number two,
I feel you can hear advice from hundreds of startup founders or all these executives, nothing really works. You learn by doing it. You learn by facing the challenge. Share on XEveryone can try to give an advice in my journey. It all helps as a pointer but nothing is like an exact replica.
Yeah, yeah. Harish, thank you very much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, giving us some thought around what it really means to bring a solution, bring something that’s really going to make some people’s lives easier and use it to bring yourself into the right situation where you’re in the right role and in the right kind of position, where your day to day is something that’s satisfying and kind of fits into what you really want.
It’s nice having you. And, again, if anyone even really wants questions, they can always reach out to me in LinkedIn. I’m always happy to connect.
So we can find you on LinkedIn. Any other good way to reach out to you?
LinkedIn is usually the best way for me. I’m very active there. I usually reply to people in LinkedIn.
All right, excellent. And we’ll include his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And I would like to also thank everybody out there for listening today, tuning in to Action’s Antidotes and to just being a curious minded person, being curious about people’s stories and being curious about ideas around how to actually just find the right situation for yourself, whether it is starting up a business or whether it’s a different pursuit based on what you heard today.
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About Harish Chandramowli
Harish has taken Flaire from prototype scribbles to a real AI-powered ERP platform, helping fashion brands stay nimble with tools like code-review automation and smart inventory controls. He stands out not only for his hands-on technical chops but also his willingness to jump from code reviews straight into prospect calls—a rare blend of builder and front-line storyteller. He’s ready to unpack what happens when CTOs trade their code editors for pitch decks, how small workflow tweaks create massive momentum in scrappy teams, and why chasing engineering quality in distributed teams is more than just a hiring mantra.
His story is packed with practical advice on scaling technology from the trenches, fostering innovation, and finding the balance between technical integrity and business demands. Listeners in tech, early-stage leadership, or the future-of-work trenches will get real, usable frameworks from his journey.