How Equity Crowdfunding Led to 21,900% Growth / Business Funding / with Arjun Rai

Starting Advantage - Practical tips on how to start a business for the new entrepreneur

Finding opportunities to help your business grow can be strongly influenced by your chosen mindset.

Founder, Arjun Rai, has successfully used mindset and equity crowdfunding to grow his business quickly. He is an NYC-based entrepreneur who is on a mission to support small businesses with the power of visualized data science and artificial intelligence for digital marketing at HelloWoofy.com. A firm believer that every SMB should have an unfair advantage to compete against unlimited marketing budgets. He has raised from professional investors and personally invested nearly $500,000 in pre-seed VC funding as well as obtained corporate partners (including Fortune 500 companies, such as Microsoft and Google) resulting in over $135,000 in strategic resources.

HelloWoofy is an AI-enabled digital marketing tool that helps you save time and optimize your social media strategy using visual data science.

"One of the things that we've been allowing our customers to do is actually invest in the company. So while we have a goal to build the biggest company in the world, helping the smallest, something new that I encourage every founder and every entrepreneur take a look at is equity crowdfunding ... to build a company for your customer, with the customer itself, beyond just having a discovery group or a customer discovery group and feedback loop, actually bringing them in and saying here, come on our Cap Table, own a piece of our company as a thank you to believing in us early on. " - Arjun Rai

In this episode with Arjun:

• When Arjun first decided to make it his mission to make data-driven technology affordable. (5:57)
• How Arjun had entrepreneurial goals from a young age. (8:25)
• Why you should double down and let everyone else around you know if you believe your calling is to be an entrepreneur. (9:51)
• How your mindset can help you to build a company for your customer with your customer & why Arjun recommends that every founder looks into equity crowdfunding. (12:10)
• How to think about building your confidence as a new entrepreneur. (14:28)
• What Arjun believes is the key to HelloWoofy’s success. (15:07)
• How to build a strong company culture if you’ve got a global team. (16:03)
• How listening and being obsessed with your customers' needs and wants can lead to building a successful MVP. (16:50)
• How HelloWoofy was able to build the world's first smart speaker scheduler. (18:24)
• How to avoid scope creep when building your MVP. (19:10)
• Find out if there’s a real dog on which the brand name HelloWoofy is based. (19:49)
• Arjun’s prediction for the future of digital and content marketing and how to have a competitive advantage. (20:55)
• Why you should include emojis in your social media marketing. 😀👌🔥 (22:47)
• How to communicate with authenticity with your customers. (26:46)
• Why Arjun includes himself as a real person within his business’ brand online. (28:17)
• What it means to have values-driven marketing. (29:14)
• How Arjun creates a work-life balance. (31:55)
• The mindset Arjun believes everyone should have. (34:26)

Full show notes, the transcript, resources, and how you can connect with Arjun, can be found here: https://www.startingadvantage.com/36/

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