Yornest is a mass communication app for member-based communities, like congregations, country clubs, real estate broker groups, and any other group that charges members a fee to join.

Even when they have 10,000 members or more, these groups still use email as their primary form of mass communication. What they really need is multi-way communication to and among community members.

We realized we could make the user experience so much better for these community managers and members. That’s why we founded Yornest.

I started Yornest as a senior in college in 2020. As a member of large campus clubs, fraternities, and friend groups, the group chats I was in ranged from 50 to 5,000 people. No matter the size, we struggled with group communication, our options being GroupMe, Slack, or email.

That was the seed of our original idea, which we raised funding on Wefunder for in 2022. Thanks to that community round, we were able to stay in business long enough to pivot to the B2B product we have now, which is seeing much better traction and product-market fit.

Early on, we raised a $150,000 pre-seed round with a couple of angel investors in Louisville. Eventually, we burned that out and needed more cash to keep things running. Our priority was to raise cash fast, and we knew that angel investors or sophisticated institutional capital would take too long and involve too much process.

One of our previous angel investors recommended Wefunder. Once we started digging into Wefunder, we realized how fast the process could be, if we could sell enough people on Yornest’s vision. On top of that, just a day before we opened the round, we learned about Render Capital’s $20,000 Match.

We opened our round in April 2022 and closed on our funds in less than a month. Wefunder really was the fastest and most efficient way to open and close a funding round.

Then, it took only three days from when we learned about Render to when we received their $20,000 in matching funds. We had already raised $50,000 from Keyhorse Capital, another venture capital firm in Louisville, so we reached out to Render. All Render wants to see is that you’ve already raised $20,000 from your own community, and they’ll match it.

Once they wired the $20,000 in, we were boosted to $70,000. Having that amount on our campaign page out the gate created the trust and momentum to raise our smaller checks down the line.

Honestly, I was blown away by how fast Render’s $20,000 Match was. We had pitched Render in the past through their formal channels and gotten rejected by the end of a long process. But with the $20,000 Match, it was like an overnight money drop. They truly want any founder in Louisville to be able to say, “I raised $20,000 already from my community,” and then receive the $20,000 in matching funds with no further questions asked.

The most amazing thing about Render’s $20,000 Match was the trust and credibility it built in our campaign. If someone sees a Wefunder campaign trying to raise $150,000 but has only raised $20,000 so far, then potential investors might hesitate to invest. But if they see a company already halfway to their goal in the first few days of launching, they’ll be more confident about chipping in. It makes the whole process so much easier.

Follow-on funding: We raised $150,000 before Wefunder and around $100,000 on Wefunder. On the heels of our community round, we raised $750,000 in follow-on funding from other angel investors, bringing us to $1M raised in total. The successful Wefunder raise definitely helped us raise the follow-on funding. It’s proof that you can get a lot of people to connect to your vision, which future investors see as traction.

Valuable connections: Through Wefunder, we met angel investors who’ve helped us beyond just funding. For example, one of our investors, Mark Baxter, has been able to introduce us to a lot of country clubs and congregations, which are among our target customers. Being able to get introductions and advice from our community of angel investors has been the most supportive impact of our round.

Runway! As early stage founders, this funding allowed us to extend our runway enough to make the pivot from serving a market of college students who didn’t feel the pain badly enough, to the HOA, apartment complex, and congregation market where we already have paying customers and enthusiastic users. Without Wefunder and Render Capital’s match, we wouldn’t have been able to keep that dream alive.