Yellowstone Technologies is the leading provider of mobile apps for unions and membership organizations. Apps powered by the Yellowstone platform have reached tens of millions of members across the United States and Canada for organizations like the Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, among others.
I served as the co-founder and CEO of Yellowstone, overseeing the company's design, marketing, and interface-related roles. I named the startup, designed the entire brand and identity system, and managed the brand while continuing to fulfill my CEO responsibilities.
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Yellowstone was started as a codename for a project built by Velocity Strategies (where I was President and Head of Design) and was named for the National Park. When Apple launched the iPhone app store, clients began asking Velocity to build them apps. Many were one-off apps, but Velocity's union clients needed something more robust with a backend and did not want to worry about the front end. Yellowstone– both the platform and the company– was born from that idea.
The abstract bison profile silhouette comes from my time in Yellowstone National Park, experiencing the herds of bison (relativity) up close. As a lover of the outdoors, national parks, and bison, this logo made sense to me. Also, we named him "Strike" as a bit of a pun: unions go on strike, and bison strike each other.
Strike, The Bison was inspired by this photo of a lone bison I had taken on a then-recent trip to Yellowstone National Park.
While Yellowstone was a remote-first company, a few of us kept physical offices in co-working locations, including this one in Arlington, VA.
While born from work with unions, the Yellowstone platform would work for any organization that wanted to engage with their members on an app they owned. Yellowstone would work for churches, professional associations, clubs, political parties, campaigns, and more.
Yellowstone would launch multiple sub-brands over the years, including Fusely, a B2C version of the Yellowstone platform that provided all the same mobile app tools as the white-label version but was accessible through only the Fusely mobile app. Individual "communities" could launch on Fusely without ever talking to a member of the Yellowstone sales team. The name and branding was specifically designed to be abstract and to be separate from the parent brand.
Rally was another purpose-built mobile events app that focused on Yellowstone's industry-leading events tools. Political campaigns and causes distributed their events through Rally, while users could use Rally to find volunteer opportunities, protests, town halls, and other political events. The robust backend made data capture for campaigns easy, and gave users control over what data they shared. The name and brand were designed to invoke the energy of a campaign.
