Aparna Subbaraya had a problem that had nothing to do with computer networks. Her baby's scalp was dry and flaky, and the baby shampoos she had tried weren't helping.
That sent her back to a Sunday ritual from her childhood: her mom massaging oil into her hair.
But the conversation we ended up having wasn't just about how a product gets made. Aparna had worked as an engineer at Meta and Cisco. Starting a beauty company meant giving up the automatic credibility that came with those jobs and learning how to get a stranger to care.
She could believe in the product, hear good things from customers, and still look at her bank account and wonder whether she was doing well.
I wanted to talk about that part too.
In this episode, you'll learn
- What Aparna means by Ayurvedic beauty, beyond adding a fashionable ingredient.
- How a childhood ritual became the starting point for Scalp Kalpa.
- Why customer feedback felt different from a promotion, and why that didn't make the finances disappear.
- What in-person events taught her about explaining a product and making an offer.
- How bundling changed her sales, and why I recognized that lesson from selling my own books.
- Why her friends saw courage at the same time she worried she'd lost status.
Contents
- First, I needed her to explain the word
- The engineering career wasn't a consolation prize
- The Sunday ritual didn't become a business overnight
- Then we got onto postpartum hair loss
- The customer feedback was wonderful. Then she checked the bank account.
- Encouragement doesn't arrive on the schedule you need
- The cost of an event wasn't just the booth fee
- Thirty seconds is a different explanation
- The obvious sales lesson that took me years too
- She thought she'd stepped down. Her friends saw something else.
- Replacing a high salary isn't the only measure
- What she invited people to try
- Questions to take back to your own work
- Watch and connect
First, I needed her to explain the word
Before we got into the company, I asked what Ayurvedic meant. I'd already needed help pronouncing it.
Aparna explained its Sanskrit roots as life and knowledge, and described Ayurveda as an ancient Indian tradition concerned with the whole person. In beauty, she connects that to natural ingredients and a holistic approach.
She also drew a distinction between that approach and putting one trendy ingredient into a product. Turmeric or ashwagandha on a label wasn't, in her view, enough to make the whole thing Ayurvedic.
Naturally, I asked about gummies.
If I took an ashwagandha gummy, did that count? Could there be an Ayurvedic gummy?
She wasn't eager to make an absolute declaration about every possible product. But she said the traditional approach favored taking things through natural food sources, with other forms such as pills coming later if needed. A gummy didn't fit what she meant by the tradition.
That distinction mattered to the company story. She was talking about ingredients and the process of using them together, rather than treating a fashionable word as the product.
The engineering career wasn't a consolation prize
I asked her to walk me through how she had become a software engineer.
Growing up in India, she felt the expected career choices were fairly narrow: engineering, law, or medicine. She couldn't stand the thought of cutting animals in the course of medical studies. Engineering was the route she chose.
She was interested in computer science. But there was another reason for coming to the United States for a master's degree: her boyfriend was coming, and she hoped the move would help their families agree to their marriage.
At USC, she fell in love with the networking side of engineering. She did well academically and landed her first job at Meta as a network software engineer, or production engineer in Meta's terminology.
She was thrilled. She was also anxious about working alongside engineers she saw as some of the best in the world while learning what a workplace even expected from her.
I asked whether her family was proud. They were. So were her friends.
She later worked at Cisco, which she described as a foundational company in the networking industry. The career had given her skills, income, and a place where people knew why they had hired her.
None of that automatically transferred to selling skincare.
The Sunday ritual didn't become a business overnight
After Aparna had her son, his scalp became dry and flaky. She later understood the problem as cradle cap. She tried different baby shampoos, but said the dryness kept getting worse and the hair growing in was dry and tangled too.
Then she remembered her mother oiling her hair on Sunday mornings.
Her mom would massage castor oil into her scalp and tap her head as part of the ritual. I asked whether that was common in India. Aparna said it was.
I'm going to India.
But remembering the ritual didn't immediately give her a finished formula. She tried coconut oil, castor oil, and other approaches. Things might look better for a week or two, then the dryness would return.
So she started reading about the oils and the ideas behind their use. She explained the traditional concepts of vata, pitta, and kapha through qualities associated with air and dryness, fire and digestion, and earth. Those were the beliefs and framework she was studying, rather than a medical diagnosis we established in the interview.
She began combining oils, including sesame, coconut, and olive oil. That became an early version of what she now calls Scalp Kalpa.
Aparna said that after about three weeks of regular use, her son's scalp looked more nourished, the flakiness had improved, and his hair was easier to comb. That is her account of what happened with her child, not evidence that the same blend will treat every baby's scalp condition.
I had a practical reason to keep asking. I've had a dry, flaky scalp for most of my life.
What, exactly, had she used?
Then we got onto postpartum hair loss
The formula's next development came from a second problem Aparna was experiencing: postpartum hair loss.
She described adding herbs and ingredients, including rosemary, with the aim of supporting regrowth. I asked whether she had actually seen her hair grow back. She said she had.
My wife had also experienced hair loss after having our baby, particularly at the sides. So I wanted to understand what Aparna thought had helped.
Her answer wasn't only an ingredient. She put emphasis on the massage itself and the ritual around it, including the chance to calm down during a stressful period of physical and hormonal changes.
I told her my wife would appreciate somebody telling me to massage her scalp to help her de-stress.
Aparna was very much in favor of that plan.
Her explanations of hair growth and scalp care were her product claims and personal experience. We weren't conducting a clinical comparison or establishing a treatment for postpartum hair loss. What I wanted to understand was how one mother's experience had developed into something she wanted to offer other families.
The customer feedback was wonderful. Then she checked the bank account.
Before we recorded, Aparna had mentioned the identity shift from a highly paid engineer to a founder starting from zero. I asked how that had been.
She said calling it good would be a lie. It had been a roller coaster.
At first, she loved owning the whole life cycle: developing something and seeing it reach a customer. Hearing somebody say a product had helped them felt different from a promotion in tech.
There was a real high in that.
Then six or eight months passed, and the finances were harder to ignore. Satisfaction didn't replace the income she'd been used to.
At an engineering company, people had hired her for her degree and skills. They already had a reason to respect the work she was there to do. In beauty, she didn't have a certification or degree that made a stranger automatically listen.
She believed in what she was making and had customer testimonials. But getting people to know her, much less trust her in a crowded market, was difficult.
That started turning into a question about herself. If the financial results didn't match the work she believed in, did that mean she wasn't good at it?
No. I told her I didn't think it meant that.
There was a business problem to solve. Making that problem a verdict on her worth wasn't going to solve it.
Encouragement doesn't arrive on the schedule you need
I told Aparna something I've noticed about entrepreneurship: the time you most need encouragement can be the time you're getting the least of it.
You're working toward something, starving for evidence that it can happen. Then, after you've achieved certain kinds of success, people start validating the thing you've already done.
You still appreciate it. But it isn't the same need you had while you were trying to get there.
Aparna recognized that immediately.
I used my own author career as an example. There was a time when having an Amazon bestseller felt like a distant goal. Later, I understood that process much better. Becoming a full-time children's author was another milestone that had once seemed far away.
I worked toward replacing my income from roughly 2014 to 2019. During the earlier years, money came in little spurts at different times of the year. It didn't immediately support a full-time living.
And even when you reach a milestone, there isn't some final arrival where you stop having goals that feel difficult.
One thing I try to hold on to is the story I'll be able to tell later. That gives me a reason to document the present honestly: the posts, pictures, and attempts from when I was working toward something and didn't yet know how it would turn out.
Someone else may need that part of the story. They might be struggling in the dark too, in the sense that nobody seems to be paying attention. I wasn't necessarily being quiet about my own attempts!
Aparna had started posting about the struggles while she was still going through them. She wanted somebody in the same position to know they weren't alone.
She also said how hard it was. Talking publicly about the difficult part before you can point to a happy ending is different from telling a polished origin story after you've made it.
The cost of an event wasn't just the booth fee
That led us into the personal and spiritual growth she felt entrepreneurship demanded.
Aparna hadn't originally approached the product as a business. It was something she cared about that had worked for her, and she wanted other people to have it. Once she embraced it as a business, there were numbers and growth questions to face.
She also found herself having to look inward.
For a while, she was doing in-person events whenever she could find them. Then she stepped back and asked whether that was working, including the emotional cost.
Sitting at a desk doing engineering work is a very different experience from standing at a stall while people walk past you. Their walking past isn't necessarily personal. It can still feel personal.
Why did she need their validation? Why was the experience affecting her so much? Those questions took her into difficult places, but she felt the process was also making her more resilient.
I offered another distinction. Salesmanship is one thing that can make a person a strong entrepreneur. It isn't the only thing.
You do have to figure out sales. There isn't a way around that. But somebody can also have real founder strength because they deeply care about making a product work.
The job is to find an effective way to sell it, rather than decide that a difficult afternoon at an event disqualifies you from building anything.
Thirty seconds is a different explanation
The events did teach Aparna something concrete about how customers encountered her products.
She wanted to explain why an ingredient worked, how the formula fit together, and the thinking underneath it. That was familiar territory for an engineer interested in mechanisms.
A person approaching the stall might simply want to smell the product, feel it, and see whether they liked it.
Those aren't the same conversation.
She had to work out what to communicate in thirty seconds or a minute without taking someone through every technical detail. Caring about the depth of the product didn't mean the customer needed all of that depth before deciding whether to try it.
I asked whether the events had helped her find a different approach to sales, beyond clarifying that she didn't want to spend every moment doing them.
One answer was bundling.
The obvious sales lesson that took me years too
Aparna had originally approached sales around individual products. She said creating bundles increased average order value and improved revenue.
Someone could hear that and say, of course.
It still took me years to make that change myself.
I used to go on tours selling a single product. Later, when I had three products, I offered a bundle. Roughly half my buyers would choose the single product and the other half would choose the bundle.
The opportunity had been sitting there. I just hadn't been making that offer.
Aparna recognized the same thing. She saw bundles whenever she shopped, but hadn't initially translated that into what she should offer her own customers. She had been focused on explaining how much one product could do.
She also saw the appeal of reducing decision fatigue. Instead of asking someone to work out a whole routine from a collection of separate choices, she could present a set they could understand and use.
That was a specific business change inside all the harder questions about confidence. She hadn't only learned to tolerate the events. She had learned something about the offer.
She thought she'd stepped down. Her friends saw something else.
Near the end, I returned to the respect she'd had as an engineer.
Did starting over feel like taking a step down in other people's eyes?
For a long time, it had felt that way to her. But when she actually talked to friends and people around her, she got a different answer.
They saw her making a decision they hadn't been able to make themselves. They saw someone giving a dream a chance.
That helped her reconsider what she had done. Ten years later, she didn't want to be asking what might have happened if she'd tried.
She described personal and spiritual lessons, including looking for an internal mindset block when something wasn't working. That was her way of understanding her experience, not a claim that every business obstacle is caused by the founder's mindset.
I could relate to the regret question. I had also wondered whether I wanted to reach the end of my life without having tried to make my own work succeed. I couldn't think of an amount of money that would make that regret worthwhile to me.
Aparna felt she could return to employment and earn money again. She couldn't recover the years she would have spent never giving the business a chance.
That doesn't make the financial questions imaginary. It changes what else belongs in the comparison.
Replacing a high salary isn't the only measure
Aparna had a particularly high benchmark for replacing her income.
I didn't know her exact engineering salary, and we didn't establish it. But she agreed that it had been high. That made it a demanding number to use as the sole measure of whether the new business mattered.
I told her I thought making a livable wage doing work she cared about could still be worthwhile. I also encouraged her about the possibility of eventually surpassing her old income. That was encouragement in a conversation, not a forecast or a guarantee.
She pointed to another kind of impact already happening. People had told her that seeing her decision had encouraged them to start a business or pursue a side interest themselves.
They weren't necessarily buying a product. They were seeing someone give an idea a real attempt and finding a little more permission to try their own.
Both kinds of evidence belonged in the story: the practical work of improving the business and the meaning she was finding in doing it.
What she invited people to try
Aparna explained the name Om Mamah through Om, the sound people may recognize from yoga, and the connection to mothers and mother nature. She wanted the brand to speak to families and new moms.
She invited listeners to the website and the @ommamahofficial social account. She also described Goddess Glow, a three-step skincare ritual, and pointed out that men could use it too.
At the time of our September 2026 conversation, she described an offer of $100 rather than $125. Check the company's current page for pricing and availability rather than treating an interview offer as a standing price.
I had one more question. I have eczema. Did she have something for that kind of skin?
She suggested the Coco & Spice body butter for very dry, eczema-prone skin and talked about dryness in fall and winter. That was her recommendation about her products, not a treatment result we verified. Her subsequent email identified the product and said it was temporarily out of stock at that time.
For the product details and current options, the company's own site is the place to start.
Questions to take back to your own work
- Are you confusing a hard sales problem with a verdict on yourself? Aparna's confidence and her route to customers were related, but they weren't the same question.
- What can a customer understand in thirty seconds? You may love the technical explanation more than the person deciding whether to try the product.
- Could a bundle make the decision easier? That changed the offer for both Aparna's products and my books.
- What are you counting when you compare the new work to the old job? Income matters. So do the work itself, the skills you're developing, and the regret you're trying to avoid.
- Are you documenting the part of the story someone else will need? It doesn't only become useful after you can call it a success.
If one of your offers is harder to sell than you expected, look at the specific moment where the customer has to decide. What do they need to understand? What can they try? What have you asked them to figure out that you could make simpler?
That's something you can work on while the bigger question still feels uncertain.
Watch and connect
Watch the full interview on YouTube
This article is based on Timmy Bauer's interview with Aparna Subbaraya, recorded September 10, 2026. Product experiences, business observations, and offers describe that conversation. Guest claims are attributed to her rather than presented as independently verified medical results.