When Arjun Mahadevan, CEO of doola, offered me just 15 minutes for an interview, I was skeptical. How could we possibly unpack his founder-led content approach in such a short time?
Little did I know, I was about to experience ‘blitz-scaling’ firsthand — not just as a startup concept, but as an interview strategy.
Arjun raced me through his highly structured strategy for doing social content, touching on everything from the content pillars he uses to dealing with self-doubt.
Buckle up for a mind-bending sprint through Arjun’s world of rapid growth.
Editor’s note: We’ve lightly edited this interview for clarity and readability.
Tim: What’s your process for posting content on your personal account versus the brand account? And how do you divide your attention between all these different channels, including your podcast?
Arjun: The time split is definitely challenging. Across the three pillars for my account, I’m really trying to push this idea of the next gen founder — insights and life as a modern global entrepreneur. It’s also a mix of inspirational content and motivation for the founder psyche and mentality.
On the company account, we focus more on what we call “business matters” and “founder boosters.” The founder booster is doola-specific, and business matters is about businesses in general.
The overall strategy is to use my account, which has grown, as an amplifier or really another company channel. So, anything that comes up from the company, I amplify as much as I can. I also use it as a different way to acquire customers.
We’ve realized that there are lots of companies and, at the end of the day, people don’t buy from companies. They buy from people. Especially in our space where starting a company is a very personal, intimate, and stressful big decision. If you’re going to attach that to a person or know the people behind the company, that’s the reason why you choose a commodity offering at the end of the day.
What’s the most important aspect of your approach to content?
The biggest thing was just being really consistent. I didn’t miss a day for three or four months in a row. I posted every single day, weekends included, on LinkedIn and Twitter.
I would try to batch or create as much as I could in one sitting on the weekends and then post that. Now, I don’t do that as much, but I try to at least post one thing every single day, either amplifying the business posts going out or my own posts.
Do you ever get people saying they’re tired of the frequency of your posts, or does the algorithm sort that out?
There are definitely people who are like, “Hey, I want to see less content,” or I get roasted in a group chat with my friends. But I think that’s why, at the end of the day, ultimately, it’s stuff I’m interested in that I’m posting about. If you really are posting about stuff you’re not actually interested in, then you’re not going to be as motivated or interesting [to others].
Do you have a certain system or tool that you use to manage your content?
When you’re in the mindset of having to post every day, your mind is open to all these things. It goes from “Oh, what am I going to post?” to “I’m posting tomorrow. I need to be on the lookout for things.” So you’re more aware of things you could post about, and there’s more serendipity.
I would have this list in Things 3, my note-taking app. Anytime I saw or thought of something that could be an interesting topic, I would dump it there. Then, on the weekend, I would sit down and really get into this flow state. I would just go through and draft out the posts for at least a week. Two weeks was a bit cumbersome, but at least for one week.
During the week, every morning, for five to 15 minutes, I would just copy and paste it. I would sometimes use a tool called Typefully or Hypefury. Sometimes I would just do it in Notion, too. I would post it on Twitter, then post it on LinkedIn.
Now, outside of that intense sprint, when doola posts go out, we send them into our Slack channel called #amplify. When I see them, I’ll just quickly go and comment or repost.
For my own posts now it’s a bit more ad hoc. If there’s something that I do want to post or someone sends me an idea, I’ll just post it quickly. It’s more about amplifying doola content and one-off things that I do versus the longer, intense threads or LinkedIn posts.
How do you measure the success of your content? Do you have any strict metrics that you follow?
You can use tools like Typefully which shows you this for Twitter. You can export your posts or just sort by the most engaging posts and see what type of content works well.
Every month or two, I would just go through and look at what posts did the best and what didn’t do well. And then you say, “Okay, I’m going to do more of these types of posts.” Every month or so you test different styles too, and see what works there.
The caveat here is what does “work well” mean? Is it impressions, or is it paying customers? We want paying customers, but paying customers is hard to track.
Another trick someone told me, and it’s so true, is literally every 90 days, I’ll probably post the exact same thing. And you think to yourself, “Oh, I already did that. You can’t reuse it.” But most people never even saw it the first time.
So what you get from that intense sprint is this massive bank of content that just works well. And you can use it on kind of cruise control. So it’s a bit of a hack at this point, but you don’t get that hack without putting in that intense period where you’re really testing and committing to putting stuff out daily.
Do you literally put out the same thing, or do you make a little change to it?
I might tweak the caption because I realized that this might perform better, but literally the same thing.
And what about measuring paying customers?
I will get DMs on LinkedIn or Twitter saying, “Hey, I’d like to start a company.” And I know that they saw one of my posts — you can tell when something just came out or because they’ll literally mention they saw the post.
We do use UTM tracking on our posts from the company account. And even I try to use UTM tracking when I’m linking from my post to doola. The very tough thing, though, is that the journey is so complex. Did they form a company because of the post or was the post the seventh reminder? And then they’re like, “Okay, I’m actually going to go start a company.”
What I’ve realized is that the absence of doing it doesn’t help, but spending a hundred percent of the time on it is probably not effective either. So there’s some happy medium in between where I know doing it is effective.
It’s about asking, “Can we be as focused as possible?” I’ve broken it down to where, with content, there are three funnels. There’s user acquisition, investor acquisition, and then talent acquisition.
Talent’s always looking. Would you rather join a company where you actively see what’s happening at the company, or one that’s completely silent? People will say “Hey, I’ve been following your content for months,” or “Hey, I wasn’t looking, but I’ve been following, and then all of a sudden I realized this actually looks interesting.” So that’s talent.
Investors, they’re always looking too. This is like a cool way to stay top of mind, especially on Twitter.
And then for customer acquisition, yeah, people aren’t actively searching like they would be on Google when they’re on Twitter or LinkedIn to form a company, but passively in the back of their head, they’re seeing it, they’re seeing it, and then I get DMs there.
So that’s the three funnels I think about. I know that the content is effective for all three. So it’s really about just balancing time. Because it can quickly turn into a full-time job and there’s already a full-time job with the company itself. And then you have to maintain this as well.
What is your favorite post ever?
It’s probably the first post I did that really blew up. It was on asymmetric upside. That was a concept I saw. I thought it was really interesting and I consolidated a few examples I liked, and it really resonated.
Could you see why it went viral or why it got a lot of engagement?
I think it had everything around it, like a catchy hook: “A concept I learned at 28, I wish I learned at 18.” So right away, everyone’s thinking “Oh, okay what do you wish you learned 10 years ago?”
And it gave a bunch of examples, which quote tweeted other bigger names too. So it included other people, gave examples, and had a little bit of an inspirational message or takeaway. And it just felt very shareable. So people were like, “Whoa, this is a cool concept. I want to share it with people.”
Now I can look at other posts and they all follow a similar structure. Like catchy hook, some insight that either entertains or educates or has a shock factor. And then some takeaway where it hits you and you’re like, “Whoa, I want to share that with someone.”
For other founders who are thinking, “I’m not used to marketing or talking on social media,” what would you tell them?
This image is my Twitter banner and my LinkedIn banner.
It’s this image of someone climbing a mountain and you see all the naysayers and you see the land of cool. It’s called cringe mountain. And then on the other side is the land of cool.
The hardest thing is just overcoming that initial cringe mountain, that cringe or that initial bump. This is the case for anyone I’ve heard who has amassed followers on social or anywhere — when you start, you’re always down here.
I would get roasted in my group chat for posts I would do, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And you know what’s funny is at a certain point — maybe it’s 10,000 followers or 1,000 — you literally go from people saying, “Oh, that’s cringe” to “Oh, that’s okay to post because they have this many followers,” which is completely backwards. It doesn’t make sense.
The insight’s the insight, but there’s this social proof all of a sudden of having that follower count. I guess this is how the world works; we’re status-seeking monkeys.
So, how do you deal with that? How do you stay motivated to get over cringe mountain?
Yeah, I think one thing which is tough is you obviously have many other things that you need to take care of as well [as a founder]. So doing something when you might not have the metrics yet, but you believe it can work — that’s always the hardest thing because you get pushback from everyone.
It’s like, “Why are you spending time on that thing? Shouldn’t you be doing this thing?” And all of that is so crushing to your psyche. Because you’re like, “Yeah, they’re actually right.” But you just believe in it and know it can work at some point. And the only way to get through that is to fight through that period.
It’s similar to if you tell yourself, “Hey, I’m going to go exercise every day.” I’d say more than 50 percent of the time, you don’t want to on those days. But if you get up and do it anyway when you didn’t get much sleep or whatever, you build the identity that you’re doing it, and then you’re actually guaranteed to see the results. Guaranteed.
So I think it’s the same thing for the content where you make that agreement with yourself, and you don’t break it, and you just keep pushing on it, then you will see the results, too.
Follow Arjun on LinkedIn or Twitter, and make sure to check out his company, doola.
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