# I'm Aye Moah, CEO and Co-founder of Boomerang. AMA about building a profitable, bootstrapped category-creating company **URL:** \ **Category:** AMAs\ **Tags:** bootstrapping, co-founders, product-led-growth, operating-principles, founders-self\ **Created:** [March 16, 2022, 10:15pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/im-aye-moah-ceo-and-co-founder-of-boomerang-ama-about-building-a-profitable-bootstrapped-category-creating-company/710 "2022-03-16T22:15:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 14
**Author:** ![ayemoah](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/gorelay.co/ayemoah/32/558_2.png) [@ayemoah](https://gorelay.co/u/ayemoah)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 5:32pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/im-aye-moah-ceo-and-co-founder-of-boomerang-ama-about-building-a-profitable-bootstrapped-category-creating-company/710/14 "2022-03-31T17:32:33Z")
> [@puneet](#): > > What were your plans for the first $400k you raised? Our plans were to draw a minimal salary to pay rent and feed ourselves. At that point, we were on the verge of having to take on credit card debt. So that’s what we spent it on. After that, we also hired our first employee with that money. > [@puneet](#): > > In retrospect, could you have achieved all this without fundraising at all? Sadly no. We saved up money by moving into the suburbs halving our living costs a couple years before even starting the company. Both Alex and I didn’t come from money or didn’t have family around to fall back on. We had student loans. We started out with net negative net worth after graduating from MIT. --- _[View the full topic](https://gorelay.co/t/im-aye-moah-ceo-and-co-founder-of-boomerang-ama-about-building-a-profitable-bootstrapped-category-creating-company/710)._