About Us

Hey, we're Michael Lepinay and Trevor Gehman, the founders of Clearstream. Here's a short version of our story...

Back in 2009, Trevor and I met for the first time and immediately clicked. We were both running our own small one-man businesses at that time, but quickly realized we wanted to build something together, but weren't sure what that something was. In those early years, we did a number of things – website design, live streaming for churches (hence the name Clearstream), marketing services for businesses – anything to get revenue in the door.

A couple years in, we got into texting. We quickly saw that the options for businesses and organizations wanting to use texting were less than ideal. Terrible is probably the right word. Everything was ugly, slow, and bloated with unnecessary features. So we started building the antithesis of that – something well-designed, fast, and intuitive. We released the first version in 2013.

By 2016, Clearstream was being used by a few hundred small businesses, and even a couple Fortune 500 companies. But we had no passion for what we were offering: a text message marketing platform. However, we had a few churches as customers. They were easy to work with, and loved using Clearstream (we didn't realize back then that it was a great 'product/market fit'). Beyond that, both of us grew up in the church, and strongly believe in the local church.

We found that providing our software to churches gave us a satisfaction in our work that wasn't there before (not that all work or jobs need to be completely satisfying). So, around 2016 we pivoted to only building software for churches and haven't looked back.

We've come a long way since 2010, but that drive to create something exceptional hasn't changed. We take what we do seriously — building powerful, beautiful software for the church.

Fun fact - Trevor married Michael's sister three years after the company was started. To this day they remain brothers-in-law, business partners, and mortal enemies.