About GavelUp

Who's behind GavelUp

Rasheed Bustamam speaking on stage to a large audience — Speaking to an audience of 700.

GavelUp is built by Rasheed Bustamam, a Toastmaster since 2012 and a Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM).

By day, I'm a software engineer at Salty, where I build tools that help drivers find better car insurance without the paperwork. I've been shipping software since 2016.

In Toastmasters, I chartered Simply the Best at Kaiser South Sacramento, served as an Area Director in 2014, and I'm chartering THR Speaking Club in Roseville, in District 206, right now.

As a VP Education, I ran sign-ups on a shared spreadsheet. Two people could claim the same role, nothing checked the entries, and I had no easy way to see who'd done which role or how the club was growing. The club software I tried wasn't much better: hard to use, and it signed me out constantly. Filling a role as Toastmaster meant clicking a name, finding a phone number in a pop-up, copying it into my messaging app and pasting in a message, once for every person.

So I built GavelUp to do that busywork: one sign-up sheet that can't double-book, role history at a glance, contact details one tap from a ready-to-send message, and the agenda and slide deck built for you. (I really don't like PowerPoint.) When I was VP Membership, I wanted every guest in one place, so inviting them back to the next meeting is easy.

What GavelUp won't do is talk to your members for you. Members still reach out to each other about roles; GavelUp just makes that quicker.

What happens to your club's data

GavelUp runs on Railway, and your club's data lives in a managed PostgreSQL database there.
You sign in with a link emailed to you, so GavelUp stores no passwords.
Members can claim roles from your club's shared sheet without creating an account.
When Claude looks up guests in GavelUp, their email addresses and phone numbers come back masked.
GavelUp loads no advertising or third-party analytics scripts.
GavelUp doesn't share your club's data with advertisers or data brokers.
GavelUp shares your club's data only with the services that run it: Railway (hosting), Resend (email), and Anthropic, if a member connects Claude.
Your club's data is used only to run GavelUp for your club.
Club admins can download the club's roster, meetings, roles, attendance, speeches, guests, awards, dues and action items as spreadsheets at any time.
If your club leaves GavelUp, we delete its data on request: the club, its meetings and guests, and the member records we hold only for that club. It is gone from our backups within 90 days.

Get in touch

GavelUp is invite-only for now. To bring it to your club or district, request access. For anything else, email us.