About
We built this because we kept watching grant managers leave.
Most fund development tools are designed for the donor experience or the grantmaker experience. We're designing for the employee experience — the grants manager, the development director, the ED who's also the fundraiser also the program director. Their workflow is the design center.
A note from the founder
Vince Cain
Founder · Louisville
I built this because I kept watching grant managers leave. Inside Coach House — the studio that holds Bothy — we work closely with small Louisville nonprofits. Year after year, the same pattern: someone smart and committed gets hired into the grants seat, they fight a seven-tool patchwork for eighteen months, and they're gone.
The org spends fifty thousand dollars replacing them. The new hire spends three months reconstructing what the last person knew. The funding relationships go quiet during the gap. Repeat. It's a slow-motion crisis nobody is pricing into their org chart.
Bothy is the tool I wish my friends running these orgs had five years ago. It's small on purpose — designed for the person actually doing the work, not for a buyer's dashboard. If we do this right, fewer of those grant managers leave, and the orgs that depend on them get a decade of compounding mission impact instead of constant rebuild cycles.
We're early. Forty-two pilot nonprofits running on branded Bothy dashboards, no paid customers yet, rough edges in plenty of places. If you read this and recognize the problem, I'd rather hear from you now than after we've polished everything.
— Vince Cain
Founder, Coach House · Louisville, Kentucky
About the name
In the Scottish highlands, a bothy is a basic dwelling — a single stone-walled room with a roof, left unlocked for hikers, shepherds, and travelers who need shelter between stretches of hard work. It is not the main house. It is not for show. It exists for the person doing the work in the weather.
That's the product. And it's built by Coach House — both are working outbuildings, both serve the household's actual labor. The naming is intentional.
What we believe
Software should reduce tools, not add them. If a release doesn't let your team delete a spreadsheet, a notes doc, or a step, it shouldn't ship.
Sustainability of the org includes sustainability of the people. We measure ourselves by how long our customers' grants managers stay, not by how many features we ship.
Join the waitlist
We're onboarding the first 50 paid customers personally. First-50 customers get setup fees waived AND a custom opportunity build at signup.