From fashion photographer to founder

Twelve years behind a camera taught me more about building products than any course did. Here is how the two careers fit together.

I spent twelve years as a fashion photographer before I ever called myself a founder. Editorials in Artells, GMARO, Ellements, PUMP. Campaigns for VH1, Fastrack and Radisson Blu. Then the lockdown emptied every studio in Hyderabad and I had a computer science degree, a laptop, and nothing to shoot.

That is roughly how I ended up building software for the brands I used to photograph.

The eye does not switch off

Photography is a discipline of deciding what to leave out. A good frame has one subject, one light, one idea. Everything else goes.

Product work turned out to be the same job with a different camera. Most tools fail because they show everything. The useful ones show the one number that matters this morning and make the rest easy to ignore. When we design a screen at overads, the question is still the photographer's question: what is the subject, and what is noise?

Three companies, one lesson each

Flashoot (2023 to 2026) was a marketplace for booking reel-makers on demand. I was the technical co-founder, built the mobile app and the backend from scratch, and we grew it to close to a million dollars in revenue before the exit. The lesson: a real business is mostly operations, and the code only matters when it removes a phone call.

WTMF AI (2025 to 2026) was an AI companion for the 2:43 AM overthinkers. Five thousand users in the first three months, later acquired by a startup in the mental-health space. The lesson: people will tell software things they would never say out loud, so you had better treat that with respect.

overads (2026 to now) is the one I am building today. Marketing automation for small teams: describe a job in plain English and it runs on a schedule, drafts the post or the report, and waits for your yes. Ad access is read-only. The lesson so far: say no to almost everything, and print a blank before you print a guess.

Why keep the photographs up

Because they are still the best portfolio I have for the thing I actually do, which is taste. Anyone can ship features. Deciding which ones deserve to exist is the photographer's job, and I am not done with it.