Built for the neighborhood association down the street.
We built MemberRun for professional associations. GetNeighbor is what we wished existed for the volunteer board running the picnic, the AGM, and the dues collection on a Tuesday evening.
A self-managed HOA chair told us they were quoted $8,400 a year for a property management company to handle dues and records. They paid the quote. They quit the board the next year.
That conversation happened in mid-2024 while we were building MemberRun, our association management platform for professional associations and trade groups. The pain shapes were familiar: dues, events, communications, board records. But the price point was wrong. Professional associations pay $300 to $2,000 a month for a platform because they have full-time staff and budgets. Volunteer boards have neither.
We spent the next year on the wrong fix. We tried discounting MemberRun, repackaging tiers, building a “lite” version. Nothing worked because the problem wasn't the software, it was the framing. Volunteer boards don't want an “association management platform.” They want dues collected without paper checks, the AGM packet sent without a Sunday afternoon at Kinko's, and the records to survive every January when the board hands off.
GetNeighbor is what we built when we stopped trying to squeeze MemberRun into a community-league shape. Same backend, same six operational engines, different door. The whole product is shaped around what a volunteer treasurer does on a Tuesday evening, not what a $400K-budget professional association needs at their AGM.
“We don't need a platform. We need the picnic flyer to arrive in 230 mailboxes by Friday and the dues to clear by month-end.”
That sentence shaped the entire product. We dropped feature parity with MemberRun, kept the operational backbone, and built the surface from scratch around four jobs: dues, events, volunteers, board management. Every product decision since then has been measured against that one chair's Friday deadline.
Four principles, load-bearing.
These aren't slogans. They're the constraints we apply when deciding what to ship and what to cut. When we get it wrong, board chairs tell us in the support inbox, and we course-correct.
Self-serve by default.
If a board has to book a call to start, we lost. The free tier ships in 5 minutes, no card, no salesperson. The only tier that touches a human is Federation, because multi-league portfolios need a real conversation.
Records survive the handoff.
Every January, the board hands off to a new set of volunteers. Without records, the new board re-asks "who's a member?" Core is sticky because it survives turnover. That's the whole product hypothesis.
0% on dues. Ever.
We don't skim dues. Members pay via Stripe direct to your bank, Stripe takes 2.9% + 30¢, we take 0%. We make money from Core subscriptions, not by extracting a tax from the work the board does.
Photos, not features.
The work is photos: residents at the picnic, volunteers at cleanup day, the front-yard the board chair walks every Saturday. The product surfaces the work, not the feature matrix. If we ever start leading with feature lists, push back.
Same backend. Different door.
GetNeighbor is a sub-brand of MemberRun, our association management platform. Same six operational engines (member core, revenue, learning, events, communications, web), same engineering team, same database. Different positioning, different pricing, different ICP.
Why two brands? MemberRun is built for professional associations, trade groups, and chambers of commerce. The pricing assumes staff and budget. GetNeighbor is built for volunteer-run community organizations. The pricing assumes neither. The two ICPs evaluate platforms differently, so they get two different stores.
MemberRun
Association management for professional groups, trade associations, chambers, AMCs.
One operator, shipping daily.
GetNeighbor is built and shipped by Ken at Zerrow. Solo operator, with a small extended team for design and ops. Every product decision is one conversation away from the person who'll ship it.
Ken
Solo founder at Zerrow. Builds MemberRun, GetNeighbor, and a handful of other products for membership-driven organizations. Lives in Calgary, runs the support inbox, ships the code, answers the Slack pings.
What that means for you: the person who decides what GetNeighbor builds is the same person who reads your support email. Course-corrections happen in days, not quarters.
Talk to the person who builds it.
Federation tier? Press inquiry? Partnership idea? Press the right button and the message lands in Ken's inbox. We answer in plain English, usually within a day.