Announcing our Investment in Clubbles
On behalf of Genesis, I’m excited to announce our investment in Clubbles. Clubbles provides a web platform for school service organizations to streamline event and volunteer management.
The Problem
Service organizations must track and log millions of volunteer hours, specifically at the high school level. The process almost always requires heavy input of time and energy to manually track sign-ins and input information into spreadsheets. Clubbles makes managing clubs and events easier by logging member requirements and event tracking, helping officers eliminate their most time-intensive tasks and enabling organizations to minimize time spent on operations.
The Clubbles platform combines an intuitive UI with a sign-in system that allows club officers to easily verify and track member activity. Volunteers can submit hours with verification data that can be granted in bulk by officers. Additionally, an integrated sign-in platform allows for efficient onboarding and an extra level of volunteer hour verification.
Clubbles is currently free to use for high school chapters of service organizations and related clubs.
The Founders
Clubbles was founded by Marshall Brandt and Shazib Haseen.
Marshall Brandt — Marshall is a sophomore in the Computer Science Honors (Turing) Program at UT Austin. He gained his first web development experience at Bravo Reporting systems, and he then started his own company, Mediant Web Development (https://mediant.co), with friend and Clubbles co-founder Shazib. There, he designed and developed multiple business and e-commerce websites using a range of development languages like PHP, HTML, Javascript, and Liquid. Marshall’s responsibilities for Clubbles include development and tracking for the web platform and sign-in system.
Shazib Haseen — Shazib is a junior obtaining his Bachelor of Business Administration with a focus in finance and a Bachelor of Science with a focus in physics. He has experience running his own tutoring business and worked with Marshall to increase traffic and clients of Mediant by redesigning the website, AB testing various website components and acquiring new customers. Shazib’s responsibilities for Clubbles include front-end design, marketing, and leading iterative testing of the platform.
How’re They Doing?
Clubbles is already in use at over 20 high school service clubs in Texas, and the team is focused on scaling further in the future. Currently, they are developing an event sign-in verification system to greatly speed up club onboarding. Once their sign-in platform is fully integrated, Clubbles plans to expand to majority school use in target regions by March 2019.
Why I Led This Deal by Katherine Allen, Venture Partner, and Anuj Jajoo, Lead Analyst
When Marshall and Shazib pitched Clubbles to us, we were immediately struck with the enthusiasm and ability of the cofounders and the accessible UI of the platform. Besides the niche untapped market potential of schools, the founders showed considerable drive for learning and technical ability, with the entire initial platform developed internally over a period of under 2 months. Their initiative in immediately onboarding clubs and collecting tracking data was a huge plus point. Throughout the diligence process, their communication and receptiveness were stellar and confirmed our belief in this venture. The combination of a driven, technically skilled team, relatively untapped market, and intensive effort inspired Genesis to fund this venture.
