Welcome to the first of (hopefully) many blog posts that will make their way on to our website. This post will be the least educational and useful if you are an aspiring or active e-Commerce business and rather will focus on the Pharus founding journey and how we came to be.

The Pharus team is made up of myself, Marshall, and two co-founders: Jason and Memo (Guillermo for long). I came up with the initial idea to build an AI-enabled financial intelligence platform after working as a fractional CFO and seeing the lack of access that disparate platforms provide to business owners. After quickly realizing my technical chops weren’t cut out for development, I reached out to Jason for help.

Initially, I was hoping that Jason would have someone in network to assist because I expected him to be too busy and talented for my efforts. However, Jason immediately latched on to the idea and we’ve been working together since. Soon after, Jason and I realized that we needed some software and product help. With the help of my college roommate and close friend, I was introduced to Memo and right away he was asking the right questions and had the right experience and attitude for the role. From there, the three of us have gotten hard to work in our own connected but separate silos: Jason in infrastructure and security, Memo in product and go to market, and myself in strategy, finance and operations.

During my last class at University of Chicago Booth School of Business with Michael Alter, I was educated on the effort of Entrepreneurial Selling and the many challenges that come with it. Among many things, Professor Alter repeatedly mentioned that most startups fail because they are selling a product that they want to sell and not what customers want to buy and that startups most often drown, not starve. With this advice, we got to work on talking with as many potential customers as possible to best understand which industries and companies would benefit most from this solution.

After 6 weeks and over 30 customer discovery calls, we quickly found that our product required a standard set of data points, industries that benefitted from increased visibility to their data, and companies that are capital intensive. In a combination between the customer discovery calls and my experience working with e-Commerce CPG brands, we quickly found our niche: inventory based e-Commerce companies.

Now, we are focusing on building our initial POC and product offering for inventory based e-Commerce companies. We are set to launch some initial product screenshots and demos in the coming weeks, and are targeting early Q3 to launch our pilot offering with a few excited companies. In the meantime, we are continuing to talk to as many founders as we can and make sure that we are building something that solves real problems and that people are dying to purchase.

Marshall