Kimmy and Nathan

Kimmy, one of the founders of Manage My Co-op, left her career in professional fundraising to become a stay at home mom in 2012. Since this was a large pay cut for the family she began searching for ways to save money yet still buy local organic foods. She joined a Facebook group of local like minded mamas and together they learned they could order produce from the local organic produce distributor but the catch was they had to buy in full cases. No one needed a box of 70 apples or 50 pounds of potatoes so they set up a system to divide up the cases ahead of time using Google Docs. The first order took two weeks start to finish, involved about 30 families, and was about $1000.

Currently this Eugene, Oregon 1800 member buying club is managing a weekly buy of over $4000 of produce, dairy, and other groceries through that same cumbersome and error prone Google Docs Spreadsheet. Members can accidentally delete other members orders and formulas are frequently inadvertently altered so that order totals are no longer correct. The group administrators spend hours balancing orders each week and rectifying errors that have occurred throughout the process. Member balances have to be manually tracked eating up hours of time each week. Not to mention the hours they have spent re-creating their ordering sheets every few months as the group grew to its current size.

Manage My Co-op, based in Eugene Oregon, is software for cooperatives and buying clubs that will directly solve all these issues. It will support the administration of online grocery and retail group pre ordering, such as the kind done by this Eugene group. Users will easily be able to place their order and see what needs to be added to fulfil ordering requirements. To make the process easier for administrators there is an auto balancing tool that makes hours of work happen instantaneously from ranges pre selected by members. The software is also scalable and easily will grow with a group. Functionality is the same if you have 10 or 10,000 members. Features to be added include reporting, recurring orders, internal messaging, payments integration, and vendor uploading. Oh, and we are mobile accessible.

Manage My Co-op is founder run and owned. Nathan Gustafson has over 8 years of experience designing and developing information management systems. A self taught programer with a business degree in entrepreneurship, he tackles all the programing and business development. Kimmy Gustafson has worked for nearly 10 years as a professional fundraiser, event planner, and writer. She manages operations, marketing and sales. Additionally they have a deep bench of advisors and mentors in finance, business start ups, graphic design, software development, and co-op management.