Built for the person holding the whole festival together.

It started with Christine.

Several years ago, at one of her community events, I met Christine — someone whose whole focus is building conscious, high-vibe community. That calling became New Earth Fest: an alcohol-free, all-ages music-and-arts gathering on a lake outside St. Louis, with a mission to heal and uplift with music, and bring people together as a community. It's the kind of event that's really a hundred events at once — stages and live art, somatic workshops, healing and wellness vendors, food, camping and glamping. When Christine talked about what it actually took to pull all of that together, one thing stuck with me: there was never enough time, and to make every deadline, something always had to give. That conversation is where FestRunner started — not from a gap in a market, but from watching someone brilliant at the work get buried by the logistics of it.

Nobody should have to be the single point of failure.

Talk to enough festival organizers and you hear the same thing. There's never enough time. The list is always longer than the hours. And when the date won't move, something gets sacrificed — the vendor nobody chased for insurance, the shift that never got confirmed, the payment that slipped a week. Not because these are careless people. Because they're one person doing the work of ten, holding a hundred moving parts across a dozen spreadsheets and their own memory.

We didn't think that was a personal failing. We thought it was a tooling failure. Every other complex, physical-world operation — restaurants, logistics, home services — eventually got software built for how it actually works. Festivals never really did. So they run on general-purpose tools bent into shape, and the organizer becomes the glue holding it all together. FestRunner exists to be that glue instead.

A festival is really just four things.

Instead of a tool per department, FestRunner models a festival the way it actually is: the people and organizations involved, the places on the site, the schedule that puts them together, and the work to be done. Everyone — vendors, artists, volunteers, medical, security, sponsors, presenters, your own team — lives in one system, with the documents, payments, and deadlines that follow them.

Then it goes a step further than tracking. FestRunner watches every deadline and document and does the chasing itself — nudging when something slips, escalating when it's ignored, surfacing the handful of things that actually need a decision from you. The aim is the thing today's tools never deliver: your whole festival handled, not just the parts that are on fire.

Opinionated about festivals. On purpose.

The easy path would have been to build another flexible, configure-it-yourself work tool. We deliberately didn't. FestRunner has real opinions about how festivals run — insurance expiry that hard-blocks, coverage gaps, capacity caps, tier windows, load-in — because that domain knowledge is the product. During load-in week you don't want configuration options. You want speed, clarity, and a tool that already understands your world.

That's also why FestRunner stays fast and focused instead of sprawling. One system, a handful of clear sections, and a single screen that answers the only question that matters when the event is bearing down: what needs me right now?

A product built to prove a model.

FestRunner is made by Good Minded, a nonprofit technology studio, and was founded by Alex — who started from the same observation that opens this page: the people running festivals are extraordinary at the work and buried by the logistics. That's not a footnote — it's built into how FestRunner is priced: small and community festivals can run it free, and larger events pay. The plan is simple — bigger festivals fund free access for the smaller ones — so the same do-well-to-do-good model Good Minded runs on is built right into the product. A first-year community festival can get the same system built for a 40,000-person event, at no cost. That's the model, by design.