Arda is the Chief Communications Officer of Roll Scooters, an e-scooter company operating in several cities across Canada. We talk about his experiences starting a company as an immigrant to Canada and all the lessons he had to learn along the way.

To learn more about Arda's company, visit www.rollscooters.com/

Arda also recommends these books to learn about entrepreneurship: Venture Deals, Running Lean, Obviously Awesome, and The Lean Startup.

And these websites when doing market research: CB Insights, Betakit, Crunchbase, and other companies' blogs.

P.S. Some fancy words Arda used:

  • Technical cofounder: in startups, the cofounder who creates the product (ex: programming software). Usually, not all cofounders will work on the product.

  • VC: Venture Capital. Venture capital companies invest directly in individual startups so that startups can access the money they need to build their business.

  • Angel. Angels are individual investors. They invest in startups at a very early stage (maybe even before a product is built).

  • Lean Startup Movement. A book called The Lean Startup gives very widely-used advice on how to start a business. The community of entrepreneurs who use the book's lessons are part of the Lean Startup Movement.

  • Techstars. This is one of the largest startup incubators in the US. Many companies will join a startup incubator, almost like a 'industry association.' They get benefits like access to advisors, funding, and more.

  • Heuristic Design. A design process where you create a checklist of criteria that your product must fulfill. For example, a criteria that a website takes under 3 seconds to load. Every time you change your design, you go back to this checklist and make sure you're meeting all criteria still.

  • User interview. A design process where you invite customers to try out a new product design before it's released to the public. You interview the user to get feedback on what to improve about your product.

Timeline

0:00 Intro

1:01 How did you start?

2:16 What is Roll Scooters?

3:43 Starting entrepreneurship

7:11 Challenges while scaling?

9:00 Lessons from failure?

12:24 How to measure success?

13:35 Doing everything at once

17:25 Value of mentors?

18:03 How to use customer data?

20:48 Dealing with competition

21:52 User interview/design tips

See All 12 Episodes of "How I Fixed It"