Entrepreneurship and Opportunity with Doola’s Arjun Mahadevan

The Urban Income Show

This episode, Doola’s Co-Founder, Arjun Mahadevan, talks about his immigrant background and how it led to creating Doola, the importance of content and consistency in building a successful business, and how to take advantage of asymmetric opportunities and plan for success.

Arjun Mahadevan is Co-founder and CEO at Doola, a trusted partner for confidently launching a US company from anywhere in the world.

Previously, he was Co-founder at Standups.io, and prior to that started on the Data & Analytics team at Dropbox before moving to Product Manager on the Growth team. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Urban Income:

• The entrepreneurial opportunities in America, and how living in America made it easier to start a business.
• The rising importance for businesses to have a digital presence.
• The importance of building a personal brand.
• How to create and grow social channels.
• Ways to reduce the amount of time a project takes with proper planning.
• Why everyone needs to have sales skills.
• What makes cold email campaigns successful or unsuccessful.

Resources:

• Doola
• Urban Income
• Growth Skills

Connecting with Arjun Mahadevan:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connecting with Lavall Chichester

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Quotables:

• 3:06 – “You completely uprooted your life and moved across the ocean to America. And my parents are both doctors, they had to redo their residencies. Right? And I don't know how much you know about residencies, but they're a grueling multi-year process. They have to redo those just to practice medicine. And I asked them why and they said, as cheesy as it sounds, it's the opportunity that America provides access to American jobs education, the unique cultural mixing pot that America provides that maybe nowhere in the world can truly come close to. Right. And American opportunity careers, jobs and entrepreneurship is a huge one too. This idea of the American dream.”
• 4:12 – “We think that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. And by making it click button easy for a founder from anywhere in the world to start their dream business, we're increasing that opportunity and helping everyone access American entrepreneurship.”
• 10:46 – “I genuinely believe everyone has some sort of side hustle or idea inside them. It, it doesn't mean you have to build rocket chips to go to Mars like Tesla or SpaceX or Tesla's cars bit SpaceX. You could sell t-shirts, you could maybe you like art and you wanna design coffee mugs there. There's so many different types of businesses and everyone has, I think that inner artist or that inner creator in them. And most of the businesses globally, they're not venture-backed C corps. They're not raising capital from investors. 99.999 add nine more 9% of companies out there or LLCs or S-corps. But someone who's just bootstrapping a business is a side hustle and that's how everything can start.”
• 11:33 – “You are the average of the people you spend time with. They've actually done studies on this. It's called the five chimps theorem. But if you look at five chimps in the zoo, you can pick any one of those chimps and predict very accurately it's behaviors. And what it'll do by looking at the other four we're we're influenced by the people around us. But what's cool about today I think is that, and this gets into content, I think the power of content is back in the day, and this is pre-internet, pre-social networks, literally the people around you is who you would see, right?”
• 16:44 – “But you can't just throw crap at the wall and hope it sticks too. You're testing and you're iterating. But if there's this slug where you're figuring out what works, what works and then every once in a while you get an inkling of something that works. But it's, it's, it's kind of like not death by a thousand cuts but like growth by a thousand cuts. You're just chipping away, chipping away, filling the bucket, filling the bucket, and then all of a sudden you look at it and you're like, oh it's working. But there's, there's always that pivotal moment.”