All-in-One Church Management System for Smaller Churches | Hacker News Reader

All-in-One Church Management System for Smaller Churches

3 pointsrcullins4 comments

I have an idea for a lean software-as-a-service offering for smaller Christian churches, packaged as a whole and priced based on church size. The app would be exclusively web-based, and pretty opinionated, geared toward quick setup and intelligent defaults, to help churches with few staff/volunteers manage things simply, without the complexity of a larger system like Planning Center.

At least initially, the system would include:

- Church website publishing - Sermon library - Event management - Service/Liturgy organization - Hymn/Song management

The idea would be to keep things simple and small wherever possible (team and scope), so that the price point could be low enough for small ministries.

Do you think there's a need for something like this, or is the market already too crowded?

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There are a number of church presentation systems that integrate with planning center to get data, like ProPresenter, EasyWorship, etc. You'd need to get them to update their software to support your system as well. The easy way for you to do that is to clone the planning center API worts and all, which means you're probably just building a planning center clone.

churchapps.org is competing in this space with open source software and the price of free for their hosted versions. I don't know what their adoption rate is.

The switching costs are large in terms of time and effort for small churches. It's often one or two persons leading the charge to switch. They may not fully understand how every person interacts with the system, but they would need to set up the new system and do a trial run, likely in parallel with the existing system. Then train staff and volunteers how to use their part of the system.

Thanks for this feedback. I wasn't aware of churchapps.org. There's a fair bit of overlap both in terms of scope and intended tech stack. I'd be curious to know their adoption rate, too.

> pretty opinionated, geared toward quick setup and intelligent defaults

This doesn't sound like it would fit the reality of the needs of small churches

> Do you think there's a need for something like this, or is the market already too crowded?

It sounds uninspiring, do you have a passion to market your services to churches after you've built it?

This kind of sounds like a nightmare to build out for what I'd expect would be very small license fees. It can't fail so it has to be reliable and fast even though many of your services will only be used 2-3 times a week all at the same time, you'll be working weekends & late Wednesday nights forever, and you'll learn that many churches are using a Microsoft Works template from 1998 to print things on a LaserJet from 2002 - tough customers to claim as your own.

Thanks for the feedback. I understand the challenges of a small volunteer team trying to deal with old technology. I also have 20+ years in SaaS, so I get the scalability and reliability concerns.

Marketing would be key. I'm thinking about this market because I know that as much as we'd like to think every church is unique, there's a lot of consistency in, say, conservative Baptist churches, so I think there's a place for a solution that attempts to guide congregations toward best practices through templating, intelligent defaults, automation, etc. so they can get up to speed quickly. The kind of churches I'm used to in rural New England (< 100 attendees) are often all volunteer, no one with real tech chops, and use something like Google Sites or Wordpress for a website. So having something that doesn't require managing hosting, design, etc for their website, and has straightforward all-in-one options for other tools (integrated with the church website) seems like it would be a good approach to begin, if the price point were right.

Marketing-wise, I'd likely start with my own pastor/church networks and go from there.

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