Camden, Maine-based Bookclubz Inc., which runs an app to manage book clubs, has raised $1.07 million as its co-founders led by CEO Anna Ford bid to turn a hobby into a business.

According to the Business Journal, Ford plans to actively raise funds and won’t close the funding round until September. The new tranche reportedly includes seven follow-on commitments from previous investors.

Ford started Bookclubz, now known as Bookclubs, in 2015 as the book club she started in Philadelphia struggled “with organization, attendance, and waning membership,” according to Forbes.

Campbell is a computer programmer with start-up and consulting experience. An alumnus of Harvard University and the Wharton School, he built the first version of Bookclubs and serves as the company’s chief technology officer. Four years after Bookclubs’ founding, Ford and Campbell married.

Bookclubs’ third co-founder, Nancy Brown, is based in Richmond, Va. The company participated in the Startup Virginia incubator and Richmond’s Lighthouse Labs accelerator, according to the Journal. She is an alumna of the University of Alabama with a BA in English Literature.

“I became our club’s de facto leader, scheduling meetings and tracking books through email,” Ford, an alumna of Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown University, once told an interviewer. “When our club ballooned to twenty members, our email threads got tangled. People were asking, when’s the next meeting? What book do we read next? As the logistics grew complicated, we met less often, attendance went down, our numbers dwindled.”

Ford joined her first book club in 2005, and started her first book club, called The Original, in Philadelphia in 2011.

“We designed Bookclubs for my wonderful club in Philadelphia. But within months,100 new book clubs had signed up! We realized we’d stumbled across real-life book club people who, like me, were looking for help. Over the next year, Ian and I listened to their feedback, adding tools that made Bookclubs even better,” Ford said in an interview published on Bookclubs’ blog. “Now 8,000 clubs with over 35,000 individual members rely on Bookclubs to organize meetings, vote on books, track discussions, even post recipes.

When Ford moved to Harvard for graduate study, she started another book club.

“We called ourselves Grad Students Finding Time for Fiction. We were four women and two men, studying government and public policy,” she recalled. “Our membership is international—with two from Spain, one from Costa Rica, one from Lebanon, and three Americans—so we decided to focus on women authors from around the world, often with feminist themes and perspectives.”

Today, Ford runs five book clubs besides managing Bookclubs.

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