Iron Yard Demo Day Preview: Greenville Startup: MoonClerk

Iron Yard Labs is a 13 week accelerator program in Greenville South Carolina. It’s part of the Global Accelerator Network which was founded by Boulder Colorado based TechStars. The Global Accelerator Network affiliation gives the startup teams participating in the Iron Yard Labs session access to top shelf business benefits like free hosting, legal services, accounting services and more.

The inaugural class at Iron Yard will graduate next week on August 29th with a demo day in Greenville. In the week leading up to demo day we will have interviews with some of the exciting startups accelerating in the program.

We got to kick off this special section with Greenville ride sharing startup Ridepost you can read that interview here.  You can also see our interview with Spent here.

Next up is: MoonClerk.

Sure it has a cute name but MoonClerk is a powerful platform making it easy for anyone to immediately and inexpensively set up branded, embeddable, and linkable recurring online payment forms with no technical skills required. It’s easier than creating PayPal payment forms and is perfect for anyone with any kind of service, product, digital product or even recurring donations.

While MoonClerk is a cute sounding name, Dodd Caldwell, co-founder of MoonClerk says in our interview below that there is a real meaning behind the name. First off they wanted to use the word clerk because it dealt with payments without having to say payment. Then, the team went with moon because it’s a satellite on a recurring orbit. Pretty smart huh?

Check out the rest of our interview with Caldwell, below:

What is MoonClerk?

MoonClerk lets anyone immediately and inexpensively set up branded, embeddable, and linkable recurring online payment forms without any technical skills or coding required.

MoonClerk is designed to be used to accept payments for the following target markets:

1) Services – Property Managers, Daycares, Exterminators, Lawn Care Services, Etc.

2) Physical Products – Of-the-Month Clubs

3) Digital Products – Musicians, Newsletters, Membership Sites, Writers, Etc.

4) Donations – Child Sponsorship Programs, Church Tithing, Etc.

MoonClerk gives our customers three basic advantages:

1) Easy Setup – It takes 5 minutes to start accepting payments, there’s no coding required, and we take care of all security issues

2) Flexibility – Allow recurring or one-time payments, gather information from customers, charge fees, set recurring frequency, set the duration of payments, establish the charge date for the credit card, etc.

3) Branding – Choose from pre-designed themes, design custom themes without coding, have complete CSS design control, embed forms on your site, link to forms from anywhere even if you don’t have a website, send custom receipts, etc.

MoonClerk charges tiered banded pricing starting at $9 for up to $1,000/month in transactions, $15 for up to $2,000/month in transactions, etc. Customers pay 2.9% + $.30 per transaction to our third party credit card processor.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds

Dodd Caldwell – CEO (http://doddcaldwell.com)

Dodd has started and run a SaaS company (Bellstrike http://bellstrike.com), founded a successful e-commerce business (Loft Resumes http://loftresumes.com), run a 501c3 nonprofit (http://ricebowls.org), and started and run a real estate development firm in Panama, Central America. He graduated with a degree in business from Furman University.

Ryan Wood – CTO (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwood)

Ryan has been developing web applications for over 13 years. He has been a Ruby developer since shortly after Rails was released to the public in 2005. He has implemented multiple recurring billing solutions and worked in environments ranging from startups to enterprise. Ryan graduated with degrees in Philosophy and Theology from Wheaton University.

Where are you based?

We’re based in beautiful Greenville, SC.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

It feels like it’s in the early days of its adolescence – nascent but growing. I work out a Cowork Greenville (http://coworkgreenville.com/) which is a collaborative work space filled with startups, freelance developers, freelance designers, and even nonprofits and architects and others. It’s been an incredible environment that breeds creativity. We’re also involved in The Iron yard, which is an accelerator program based out of The NEXT Center, another very creative office space for tech companies. The community is really supportive of the startup culture and I’m always surprised at the talent that’s moving to Greenville or that has already been here for a while. The downtown area of Greenville is so cool and provides such an awesome standard of living that it’s really drawing people in.

What problem does your startup solve?

Currently, if you’re not a programmer or don’t have the money to hire one, there are no great options to effectively accept recurring payments. One of the only options available is PayPal. PayPal checkouts have low conversion rates and offer a poor user experience for business owners. If PayPal is not an option, the alternative requires many steps, high costs, and paying a developer thousands of dollars to implement everything. Those steps include setting up and paying for a merchant account, contracting with an paying for a payment gateway, purchasing an SSL certificate, ensuring PCI Compliance, paying for recurring software, paying a programmer to implement everything.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

The biggest thing for me is actually shipping. I’ve done previous startups and actually shipping a product or software or whatever is incredible challenging. It’s easy to start projects but very difficult to actually get them out to the public. It feels nice to have a couple projects out in the wild that let me know that I can do it. I’ve learned a great deal from my previous startups and we’ll be getting MoonClerk to launch a lot sooner than some of my others, from start to finish. I’ve learned it’s really easy to look at other people’s startups and be able to pinpoint what their minimum viable product is. But, when it’s your own startup, it’s very difficult to see what you should launch with. It always seems incomplete. It’s not only difficult to figure out what to cut out of your startup in order to launch, it’s actually emotionally painful because you may not know if by removing certain features you’re dooming your company. It helps getting feedback from potential customers but it still comes down to making a smart decision that may or may not pan out.

Who are your mentors and role models?

No question about it, my Dad. (Dodd speaking). He’s an entrepreneur and I grew up in that environment since I was a little kid. Sitting around the kitchen table, it seemed like work and business and entrepreneurship were just normal conversations. I’ve always admired my Dad’s drive and wisdom and his ability to balance philanthropic work with his “for profit” work. It’s almost like he saw them as one and the same. I want to emulate that. Whenever I have business stress or decisions to make, I always ask him for advise. Even though his background is in manufacturing and not technology, I know he’s still been through the same things I’m going through – except he’s usually done it under way more pressure.

Whats one thing the world doesn’t know about you or your startup?

A lot of people wonder where our name comes from. We liked the idea of using the word “clerk” because it allows us to deal with payments without having to say “pay” or “payments” in our name like most other payment related web based startups. Because we’re dealing with recurring payments, we liked the idea of the moon, as it’s a satellite that consistently revolves around the earth and causes tides – it’s basically an instigator for recurrences that we find in nature. We also found that it was fairly easy to remember and the domain name, trademark, and all social media accounts were available.

What’s next for your startup?

Currently, we’re letting people sing up to be some of our first beta users. We’re in development so the the next big step for us is launching. We’re getting close.

Linkage:

Check out MoonClerk here

Check Out Iron Yard here

and more startups from “everywhere else” here

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