Founder Stories: Munir Pathak, SWIRL Technologies
About Swirl
Swirl is a Slack app that enables authentic connections at work between colleagues with similar interests and differences in personal identity to build a culture of inclusion and belonging. Every other week, Swirl thoughtfully matches you to a different colleague to get to know each other better over coffee, lunch, or video call. Over time, Swirl measures changes in perceptions of belonging and inclusion at your workplace to equip your team with insights that can drive strategy and decisions about your culture.
What inspired/motivated you to start your business?
Growing up in an immigrant household, I had one culture at home and another out in the world. It became natural for me to build relationships and find commonalities with people who were different from me, and thinking about identity and navigating cultures is a normal part of my daily life. Some people can relate to this, and some people can't. Pairing my perspective with a clear market need inspired me to come up with a way to help people build relationships across differences independent of their lived experience. Swirl represents my passion to enable authentic connections between people so that workplace culture can empower everyone, regardless of their personal identity.
What has been the most challenging aspect of being a founder and growing a business?
My biggest challenge has been operating as a solo full-time founder. My wife, Mansi, helped me get started and is now in an advisory role. I have a part time software engineer who has taken the product to new heights. But there are so many different components that go into growing a business. Having to think about the problem you're solving, building the right product, targeting the right market, growing a customer base, funding, and iterating on all of it. As a solo founder, initially it was overwhelming to try to navigate this much stuff. What helped was narrowing my focus, learning from the experiences of other founders, keeping an experimental mindset, and building out the right support structure for me to make meaningful progress.
How has Philly Startup Leaders helped you and your brand?
Philly Startup Leaders helped me expand my network, iterate on strategy, and build more brand awareness as Swirl grew beyond an MVP. Participating in the accelerator was a valuable experience, and the opportunity to be part of a community of founders where we can share and receive support has enabled me to continue building Swirl into a sustainable business.
What advice would you give to someone looking to start their own business and/or get moving on an idea that they have?
Create a narrow focus. This is coming from someone with ideas that tend to be large, grandiose, and visionary. To actually take an idea and turn it into something tangible that can become a sustainable business, you have to be thoughtful, narrow, and specific with your focus. I had to work to get to that point. It’s hard to operate on both sides of it but that’s critical to building anything. Then you get into testing it, iterating, improving, and getting it out to the world.