It is said that while starting a business, choose the partner you trust. Anish Kumar Singh, co-Founder - Floww, is a living example of why when you can walk with someone who has the same dreams and passion as you, why walk alone? And how starting a company with that someone, your trusted friend, could well be a great recipe for a successful venture.
Anish is your typical Founder - A hard worker through school, with a dual degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) from IIT Bombay, and a passion to do something that brings real change around. And Prakhar was his perfect buddy - Participating in various challenges with him and displaying teamwork that most feared stepping into competition with. “Along with Prakhar, I participated in more than 13 such projects, and every time it was a new opportunity and challenge. So I learned that doing work is the best way to understand anything,” he says.
His research internship at Cummins was focused on optimizing DG efficiency. With his research of the current solutions, their feasibility and the creation of solution pathways with their respective MATLAB simulations, he even created a difference there - increasing the efficiency of the setup by 3%. It was then time to equip himself a bit more because he knew he was not going to stop just there. he had the ability to solve problems but needed better technical knowledge to do so. Anish enrolled himself in multiple courses in Computer Science and Entrepreneurship and began building his knowledge bank.
Prakhar came up then with a suggestion to give a perfect channel to these energies - Improving fleets for logistics management! One could apply computational optimization to various tasks and have existing processes function better reducing cost, and time and increasing margins. And TMoS was born in 2019. The three years with TMoS were gruelling yet enriching. They realized unlike most industries, logistics and transportation hasn’t had the opportunity to get standardised. Logistics is still in the phase of being a gig-based economy, and a transition towards standardisation is bound to happen like fintech and digital commerce.
Most of transportation companies have manual processes thus they cannot collaborate with companies digitally. And hence TMoS was looking to utilise APIs in some sense to solve this problem. They realised that this bottleneck has been the reason that margins in the supply chain are so tight, thus making transporters digitally accessible using APIs could perhaps solve a lot of these issues. They started seeking aggregation of the orders between different transporters, but then due to transporters having a lack of digital infrastructure, Anish and Prakhar began providing 100% API-based Micro-SaaS to transportation SMEs.
It was a good going - seamless almost till 2020 happened. And the world along with transportation took a huge hit. Everyone was home, figuring out what will be the effect of this unforeseen pandemic on their own health, their families' health and their core livelihoods. Innovation and betterment of existing processes were important but not urgent.
Anish and Prakhar realized this and also the need to switch to something more viable to tide over the pandemic and beyond. And hence, the shift from TMoS to Floww.
“The pleasure of building a product that solves problems for others is a serene feeling. Helping society, and in addition to that, doing it with a friend is a heavenly combination," says Anish. “Prakhar and I, have been coding and building software for the last four years, so it’s always a pleasure to work with a friend on the things you like.”
Up to this point in their journey, Floww has accomplished a lot of what they thought they could in the early stages. Government collaborations, partnerships with numerous businesses and transportation links to develop an effective and sustainable supply chain system. Many of those accomplishments are macro scale and having the ability to serve the larger good.
Anish often says that the one aspect of Floww that thrills him to keep going is the ability to provide at least 80% viable logistical solutions for the SMEs that are being ignored. Sophisticated tech wouldn't work and so their system is fully compatible with WhatsApp - one mode of communication that everyone uses. They believe in the vision and the everyday impact that they have on these small enterprises.
The journey has helped Anish to understand the value of time. Many tasks in the corporate world have deadlines, so it doesn't matter how skilled you are—respecting time is the key. He believes that a founder's life is like a machine, like a car, where both internal and external factors are at work. Regardless of how amazing your sports car is, if it needs to compete on a mountain, the founder will always have the duty to adjust the internal parameters based on externalities. And finally, he has developed a strong feeling of compassion for all. When someone starts their business as a founder, they will be responsible for a variety of jobs, and most of the time, they will only be just about averagely successful. He realized that not all tasks that seem simple are that simple.
Family has of course been a key pillar of support in understanding some of the unconventional decisions he has taken despite being academically brilliant - like the one where he decided not to take up college placements. The fact that they didn't have business experience didn't stop them from believing in his aspirations and letting him tread the path he wishes to follow. Prakhar, his best buddy has been the backbone of his confidence - They are aware of the collective talents and flaws. They know where one would stop and the other must begin taking over. The complementary nature of their personal friendship that transpired into a business relationship is surely one where most challenges get smoothened out by themselves.
Anish shares some advice for those in the same space as him - his fellow Founder-mates. He advises them to start with a strong team that they are familiar with, sometimes valuing trust more than mere capability. Having someone from the industry with experience in the team can also help uncover the problem in the fastest way possible, he says. And f nothing else works, try to bring them as a mentor.
The one thing that he wishes he knew better when he had just started on his entrepreneurial journey - Catching and utilizing opportunities, every one of them that comes your way and this is the greatest advice he wishes to impart to his counterparts.
“When I started in 2019, both of us were young, optimistic, first-time founders. Along the way, mainly in the first year of our startup, we made a lot of errors in snapping opportunities. The importance of catching opportunities for young founders is absolutely important and the one thing you simply must place a lot of focus and energy on."
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