917 - Arjun Mahadevan (Doola) On Launching Your US Company From Anywhere In The World

Doola
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Mat Sherman: All right. How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders. We talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future, and how the two collide. Today, I'm very excited to be talking to Arjun Mahadevan, who's the founder of Doola. Welcome to the show. How's it going?

Arjun Mahadevan: Fantastic. Thanks so much for having me on, and let's Doola it.

Mat Sherman: , let's Doola it. I love it. Um, so let's dive right into it. If we're Dooling it, like, what are we Dooling? So the first question is, what is Doola? What are you working on?

Arjun Mahadevan: If you come to our website, Doola. com, you'll see form a U. S. company or form an LLC in all 50 states.

But if you zoom out, really what we do at Doola is we help people take their dream idea and turn it into their dream U. S. business. The vehicle to doing that is an entity. It's an LLC or a C corp. It's a tax identification number. It's a bank account that connects to a payment processor, but really at Doola, our mission is to democratize access to the U S financial ecosystem.

And I'm a firm, strong believer. I've seen this with my family. I've seen this with the thousands of customers we had on over 175 different countries. That talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. And by making it click button, easy, kind of like that staples, easy button to set up that company, get that tax number and get your banking stack set up.

You can help someone really launch that dream business in the States and really take and automate that mundane, unsexy, yet critical back office process and let founders focus on what they do best while Doola can handle the rest.

Mat Sherman: I love it. So let's say I am someone in an alternative universe. I just got a startup idea. I want to start a business. Can you kind of walk me through it? Unless it's quite literally a single button and that's it. But like if it's a little more complicated than that, walk us through how someone uses Doola, if they go to the website, how they go from nothing to having everything set up to actually run their company.

Arjun Mahadevan: Typically when a founder, and this could be a founder looking to raise venture capital, or 99% of the world is not, it's a side hustle or a bootstrap business. And they would form an LLC, a limited liability company. First, you go to the state's website. If you can navigate the migraine inducing information on Google to find the state's website, understand, should I form an LLC or a C corp, et cetera, once you get to the state's website, you then have to go through a form that looks like it was made in the pre AOL era, you navigate that, submit it with the state, you get your docs back.

You then have to navigate with a, not a company, but a group called the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service to believe it or not, submit a form online or fax a form to the IRS to get your tax number. That's called form SS4. Once you've done that, you then have to figure out which business bank account should I set up? Let me navigate the flow of applying. And if you don't live in the U S understand, can I even open an account and who should I use? And the final step would be, okay, let me connect to Stripe.

With Doola, instead, what you do is you come to our website, you click get started, we collect some basic information, your name, your email, information on your company, and then we have automated the rest of that process, which means forming the company with the state, interacting with the IRS, faxing forms automatically, and then either through Doola banking or through partner banks, getting that bank account set up.

Mat Sherman: Wow. What a, what a treasure for founders, right? What a great resource. It leads me to wonder, why did you start Doola? What's the origin story here in wanting to kind of, uh, you know, broaden entrepreneurship, allow more people to get into it, how'd you get started here?

Arjun Mahadevan: Before you go zero to one, you have to go zero to 0. And every single founder has that exact same pain point in journey. And as cheesy as it sounds, it really comes back to my family who was born and raised in India. They were both doctors. They moved to England to start practicing medicine. And when I was six years old. They decided to immigrate to the U. S. I don't remember much. I was quite young. I was six. But most of the journey for me was, oh, the cartoons changed. It maybe went from Cartoon Network to Spongebob and Clifford the Big Red Dog. But I've asked my parents now why they did it. And they said it was for access to American opportunity, jobs, career mobility, and the cultural mixing pot present in America.

And for Doola, a big reason why we're doing this is to help those founders from all over the world. Really have that opportunity to start that dream business. And the truth is that was us when we were starting this business as a non us based team, we went through this complex and expensive process where we spent tens of thousands of dollars getting the business off the ground and naively thought, wait a second.

Instead of having these 10 dots that you have to go through, oftentimes in the wrong order, what if you could connect those dots and sort of build this business in a box? And that's how we market ourselves. Customers came up with that. I can't take credit for it, but they said, you're this one stop shop.

You're this business in a box for LLCs. And that's what we try to provide that one point of contact, that one person who gives you peace of mind that you're going to be taking care of while you focus on the very hard task of building your business.

Mat Sherman: And I'm curious, as you're, you know, you're building your own, you're building Doola while Doola helps other companies. So as you're building, um, as you're building Doola, what are you spending your time on these days? Like, are you spending time working with customers? Are you fundraising? Are you hiring?

Like, what's a day in the life for you as you're, uh, as you're working on Doola?

Arjun Mahadevan: Day in the life at Doola often includes everything you just mentioned. There's some product work related, there's hiring. There's distribution or growth, there's marketing and there's people internally, but I think the largest focus is, and this is what I boil any startup down to is building product and talking to users are growing.

And I actually think most companies or startups don't die because they fail to build the product. They die because they fail to acquire customers, repeatedly acquire customers at a low enough customer acquisition cost. You can acquire them, but if you're paying a thousand to acquire them and they only give you a hundred, that's not a business.

So with that in mind, a huge focus of mine is always thinking. On the acquisition side, on the growth side, how are we going to get new customers in and how are we going to get them into the future? And then once they're into understanding what product and service can be delivered to them, that will only solve their needs now, but as the opportunity to grow with them going forward.

So to answer directly, I think top focuses each day are mostly on the distribution side, whether that's sales and marketing. Thinking and making sure, Hey, we're executing on the product side. And then along that you have to be constantly thinking, Hey, is the team structured internally well, and what other roles or talent do we need to bring in the next three to six months?

Mat Sherman: And I have to, I have to ask the story around the, the name you have, like a, how'd you get the name Doola? I don't remember. Do you have like the. com? It's not like, how'd you figure out the domain? Like tell us about Doola and how you came up with that name.

Arjun Mahadevan: We used to be called start pack. And we were the starter pack or the start pack, quite literally start pack io to form your business. But from the get go, we realized, wait a second, customers don't want a way to form a company and then be thrown to the wolves. That was an exact quote we heard multiple times. They want a long term partner. Start pack was a little too transactional. We wanted something you could build a relationship or brand around too.

We went through an exercise. There were a lot of different names. Some were quite literal file fast, cut the tape, business filing formations. A couple other were way more out there in abstract things like Johnny Appleseed. com. Um, things like Paul Bunyan, the American folklore hero. And then one of the names that came up was Doola.

It was five letters. It was the dot com had two O's like Google and some folks said, Hey, it sounds like the word doula, D O U L A, who is someone who helps nurture, raise, and grow a child. And there is this, um, Adagio saying, you know, your business is your baby business is something that has to grow over time.

We like Doola though, again, cause it was a tech startup sounding name and had the. com and it was something which now today we can build a whole product suite around whether it's Doola formation, Doola taxes, Doola banking, and a lot more to come on that side too. I have to ask, you don't have to disclose if you don't want to, but I, was the.

Mat Sherman: com just available for 20 bucks or did you have, was there a story around getting, getting the actual website?

Arjun Mahadevan: It wasn't 20 bucks. I believe it was about 10, 000. So yeah, not 20 bucks, not 100, 000, but So far, so good with the name. I mean, we had that,

Mat Sherman: that's honestly, I mean, like it's, it's money for sure. But for five letters, easy, easy to sound out name. That's a pretty, that's not bad.

Arjun Mahadevan: Yeah. And now, and now we can say let's do it instead of let's do it. And then the other one I start saying too, is instead of see you soon, it's LLC you soon, so always finding ways to shill LLCs or the company Doola.

Mat Sherman: Yeah, that's awesome. So we talked a little bit about your day to day. We talked about where it came from. Let's kind of talk about where you're going for you to look out five years from now, 10 years from now. What does the world look like with Doola as a massive company? Or in other words, what's your big vision and what direction are you rowing in?

Arjun Mahadevan: Formation 1. 0, which is where I think the world is today as an individual will go to a company website or to a lawyer, submit the information to form a company. And then the company's formed, you get your documents back. It's a very one to one process. Formation 2. 0 to me is actually API infrastructure.

And what I mean by that is instead of going to an external platform, lawyer, CPA company, wherever it is in app, it's embedded. Let's say you're a real estate company and you're trying to buy a property or close on a house. Oftentimes you need an LLC for that. There should be a button in the app that says form LLC powered by doula.

Let's say you're a YouTuber launching a course. And in that course, you're going to be selling, you're teaching people how to do that. Those people need an LLC that YouTubers should be able to white label and use Doola. So it goes from something where you're sending people externally to the LLC button is everywhere.

It's honestly like that staples easy button, but anywhere you go, anywhere that needs an entity, EIN bank account or compliance, you can just do that powered by Doola.

Mat Sherman: I love that. And in order to make it happen, like you'll need some help, right? It takes a village to make a startup work and scale. So my question for you is how can the forward thinking founders community help? Are you hiring? Are you raising money? Are you looking for customers, partners to work with? Like, how can we assist?

Arjun Mahadevan: First of all, if you are looking to start that dream business, take that dream idea and turn it into that business. We're more than happy to help completely self serve flow online. We also offer free consultations with a CPA if needed to answer any questions you might have.

The second thing is biggest thing for us now is if, you know, communities or networks or companies that could use entity formation, we'd love to hear that could be an accelerator. It could be an incubator, could be a real estate company, whatever it might be. But I think the third one is this. There is no substitute to word of mouth.

Word of mouth is the strongest form of marketing. It's not tick tock. It's not Facebook. It's not threads. net, whatever it might be. It's word of mouth. So if you have a friend who's thinking about starting a business, it means the world, if you say, Hey, check out Doola. And then it's our job from there to show them that, Hey, we can help them not just start the business, but run and grow it too.

Mat Sherman: And for my last question, if someone wanted to learn more about Doola, or I wanted to share this with my friend, Um, where can someone find you online? Do you have a website? We talked about this, but do you have like a social media presence? Do you have an email address? Like, how can people connect with you on the internet?

Arjun Mahadevan: Check out Doola. com. We've got the dot com. D O O L A dot com. I'm also very active on social. I've actually transferred my socials to this nickname of sorts, Mr. LLC, where I'm really trying to become the world's expert in LLC. So I tweet a lot about LLCs, the stories of entrepreneurs getting their businesses off the ground and actually weaving in the progress of Doola trying to build in public as much as possible.

So follow me at Arjun Mahadevan on Twitter and on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active. I also write a weekly public newsletter. It's a sort of version of our investor update, which goes out to anyone interested in following along and getting a behind the scenes look of what it's like building .

Mat Sherman: Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Arjun Mahadevan: Thank you, Matt. Really appreciate it.