Studios
An international membership organization had been running on a 1990s Visual Basic database for over four decades. The original developer was gone. The database hadn’t been backed up in three years and was one server reboot away from total data loss. Here’s how we rescued it, then rebuilt it from the ground up.
SASS is the worldwide rule-setting body for cowboy action shooting and wild bunch action shooting. Founded in 1986. They issue 115,000-plus memberships across 500-plus affiliated clubs, sanction national events, and certify the gear and ranges that members use to compete.
The membership system that ran the operation was built in the early 1990s by an early SASS member who happened to be a Silicon Valley legend. It worked. For nearly forty years. Until it didn’t.
The system was built on Visual Basic 6 with an Intersystems Cache database. It ran reliably for decades. But the original developer had moved on, parts of the application stopped working, and nobody in-house could safely modify what broke.
Pulling data out required Crystal Reports, then Excel, then wherever it needed to go next. Member-facing letters required the original developer’s involvement, and turnaround was measured in weeks.
The bigger issue was structural. The database hadn’t been backed up in over three years. And it had a configuration setting that would erase all data if the host machine was ever powered off.
Misty had been searching for a replacement for nearly fifteen years. Off-the-shelf membership platforms didn’t fit the niche. Offshore developers couldn’t understand the business. Sales cycles dragged six months and ended in it can’t meet our non-negotiables. The result was an organization running 115,000 memberships on a system nobody could safely touch.
“I’m an educated woman. I run a multi-million dollar company. I’m very efficient. But I don’t understand the jargon. I know what I need to do, but I can’t tell you what you need to do to get it to do that.”
— Misty Ebersole, CEO · SASS
The first thing we did wasn’t building. It was looking at how the existing database was housed.
Within a few weeks we discovered it hadn’t been backed up in three years and had a setting that would have deleted everything if the host machine was ever powered off. We stopped development, migrated forty years of data to AWS, and put proper backups in place. Several months passed before we wrote a line of new code.
Misty later said this was the moment she knew we weren’t there to sell software and walk away.
“You prioritized the stability of my company’s information over selling me the new software build. Adam said, ‘let’s get this secure before we do anything else.’”
— Misty Ebersole, CEO · SASS
Once the data was safe, we built a new system from scratch. Cloud-based. Modern stack. Designed around how SASS actually works, not how a generic membership platform thinks they should.
Membership management, club affiliations, sanctioned events, honors and certifications, products, and merchandise all live in one application now, reachable by staff without the round-trip through Crystal Reports and Excel.
AI-powered duplicate detection. Profanity filtering for member submissions. Full-text search across every member field including email, phone, and alias. Automated batch printing for renewal letters and membership cards. Designed for 115,000+ members and built to scale.
The build was scoped tight to phase-one fundamentals: the day-to-day operations Misty and her team needed to be functional. The foundation was designed to support a phase two that’s now in motion.
The new system launched in September 2025. We pushed the launch back a week or two when Misty’s internal team needed more time, not because we weren’t ready.
Eighteen days post-launch, SASS staff were saving an average of 30% of their day on tedious data-entry tasks that used to take hours. Quarterly reports that took eight to ten hours of manual work now take fifteen minutes. A 97% reduction.
Forty years of legacy data successfully migrated. Zero data loss. Phase two is in active development.
In an interview a few months after launch, Misty said the time savings on manual data entry had climbed to roughly 50%. The tedious work that used to consume her team’s days had compressed into a fraction of the time, and the tools were finally bending to fit how SASS actually runs, instead of the other way around.
“They made us feel valued and respected, with the intention of building a lasting partnership rather than just collecting a paycheck… Things are running so much more smoothly now. We’re spending about 50% less time on manual data entry.”
— Misty Ebersole, CEO · SASS
If your business is running on a Visual Basic application from the 1990s or 2000s, three things are usually true. The original developer is gone or unreachable. Backups are inconsistent or missing. And every new feature is harder to add than the last one.
The technology itself is stable. Modern Windows can still run Visual Basic 6 applications. But the support ecosystem has moved on, and the people who can safely modify those codebases are retiring faster than the next generation can learn.
The right move usually isn’t a like-for-like rebuild. It’s understanding what the system actually does, then building a modern equivalent that fits the business as it works today. Sometimes that’s a rebuild. Sometimes it’s a configured off-the-shelf platform with custom integrations. We’ll tell you which one fits before we ever write code.