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Ahryun Moon is CEO and Co-founder at GoodTime.io, a recruiting enablement platform that automates interview scheduling for companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Yelp, Thumbtack and more. She is a financial professional turned engineer! She taught herself how to code while building her first enterprise software at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., at which time she was a financial analyst. The software got adopted company wide.
Some interesting things about her:
1. She caught a thief using Twitter (check out http://bit.ly/2gmr5P4) - gone viral on Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube
2. Her team at GoodTime.io won 3 hackathons - Salesforce $1M, Toyota and Launch hackathons
3. Her team built Etch Keyboard which was featured on the App Store for 3 weeks.
4. She still has a CPA license in good standing
The Convo
Interviewer (ZP): What was the size of your first check?
Ahryun Moon (AM): $100 was the first check. What happened was right before Alchemist, I was down and depressed and going to a bunch of people asking for advice and feedback and money. I then went to Edith and she, after hearing me out, said, “Hey I'll be your first investor, here's your hundred dollar check. You can put me on Angel list.” With investors the very first check is important so you can put someone's name on your angellist. That’s hard to get. The very first person that wants to be on your investor roster is always challenging. She said to just use her name she’d give us the one hundred dollars. I have kept our hundred dollars even today. So that $100 is still on my cap table, as I really love the fact that she believed in me when no one did. So my first check was $100, and then the second check was 10k.
ZP: What about the first check over 25k or more?
AM: Oh 25k or more. The first time that a check was larger than 25K was 50k.
ZP: And when was the closing date you received it.
AM: We closed the check on the day of the demo day.
ZP: And it was just that simple?.
AM: He came up to me and said he was just ready to write the check.
ZP: What industry is your company in.
AM: HR and Recruiting.
ZP: Tell me about the process of closing that check and from start to finish. How you were introduced all the way through to actually having a check in hand or money in the bank.
AM: For the 50k check, he was in the audience at the demo day. He loved it. He came up to us and he was literally ready to write the check. I think we got the check within a few days or a week or so. He didn't have any other references. He just saw us at demo day and liked us. Sometimes you can really run into someone that just believes in you and gives you unconditional love for the product that you're making. So I am lucky with that. But I think you just get lucky sometimes.
ZP: So what was it like doing that to the first 10k check.
AM: The 10k check was when we were going negative, negative, negative, and we were about to break our 401k. It was one of the Alchemist Mentors and he liked our product from the beginning. We were so afraid of asking for money at the time.
ZP: How did you meet him?
AM: He was one of the mentors that we paired up with at one of the events, the CEO mentor event. We did speed dating, he was one of the three people there we met. He liked the idea and we never asked for money. We didn't know to ask for money at the time. We invited him over to our office and we talked for another hour or so after the event. That was after a month or two after we met for the first time. And then we mentioned, “Hey we are looking for investors”. And he simply said “How much”. We told him we were looking for 10k. And he's said, “OK. I don't have a check with me. I'll wire you the money as soon as I get back to my office.” He wired it within a few days.
ZP: Wow. Was there any back and forth between you or was it pretty straightforward?
AM: It was really straightforward. People who argue with you and nitpick on this or that and say “I want to see more proof”, they never work out. Investors that ended up giving us money, you can tell from the first meeting that they believe in you and will give you support. So I'll say my advice is this: it's the ones that give you bullshit excuses and say you’re too early, you're too late in the stage, you're pre-revenue you or your team is too small, move on to the next person. They will not give you money. They never gave me any money. People who said those things never gave me money.
ZP: Those things were just an afterthought when they just believe you.
AM: Yes. I think I took them extremely personally in the beginning and that made me really, really depressed. Whenever I get that kind of excuse next time I wouldn't too depressed. I will just say, “Ok fine. Next person.”
ZP: Is there anything else you'd like to share? Maybe something that stuck out with a new kind of angel fundraising process in general or specifically with all the checks that you're trying to close.
AM: Yeah. Everyone told me not to cold email. Everyone told me not to cold call investors. But I did. I closed our last 100k check with a cold call. So I wouldn't say cold calling is the worst thing you can do. Once you run out of referrals you have to cold call and sometimes you really meet the right person while doing that. So I would not advise against cold calling.
ZP: That's good advice. cold call. OK. Well that's really good thank you.