I just launched my first bootstrapped startup. What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

I just launched my first bootstrapped startup. What do you think?

churchpr.es

12 pointsthisisdallas10 comments

Very, very nice. I manage my church's website, but I don't have the time to constantly upgrade Drupal (or WP), and it looks bad. My only thing is that I have a small church, and while $25/mo seems reasonable to me, I doubt my church would go for it. They're looking for "as free as possible", to the point where I have to donate space on my own server. Also, we have an existing MX provider, but it seems like you're wanting to handle DNS (since you offer email and CDN). Do we still get access to set custom CNAME and MX records?

I guess what I'd also want in a service is something to guide me (or really, the pastors) on how to effectively use social media. We have the accounts, but they go unused because we cannot figure out what should and should not go there. I think a very valuable thing would be a portal that helps you post to those service and maybe gives you a prompt for what to do. Something like that might help justify the $25/mo for small churches. I'm thinking something like where the pastor can post a blog (devotional thoughts), and have the tool automatically prompt him to make a FB post about the blog, maybe asking a compelling question that will get you to interact. If it integrates with FB for commenting, that would be even better!

I guess my main point here is that there is a market for teaching small churches with older pastors how to properly integrate social media. The website management is a great start, but the social aspect is where we fail hard. If you can solve that problem for us in a way that integrates with the website functionality, we'd be a definite customer.

Edit: Oh yeah, the media aspect. Our church cannot afford to pay for custom graphics or images. I occasionally buy stock photography. If you had a library of images or graphics that could be used by the churches, that would be a major selling point.

Edit 2: I feel like an idiot. Just noticed you provide $50 social media training. Assuming this was comprehensive and geared to the completely non-technical, this might facilitate some of my thoughts above. Saw the banner before and thought it was training on how to work with the website.

Lots of great ideas, thanks!

My goal is to make a platform that offers everything a church would need but also removes any of the "technological" complexities. If a church has someone that is familiar with DNS than I won't have a problem letting them make any changes necessary but there is no menu setting or options panel in the website backend that would allow DNS changes to be made.

The social media aspect is something I try to cover by offering social media training but your idea is actually a lot better. Having, more or less, a guided tour or helping hand directly integrated into the backend itself. That is something I will definitely consider and look into.

Out of curiosity how is the application setup? I see you are using WHMCS to manage the domains and the orders, but after that are all the sites WP sites that have custom modules and are themed?

Congrats! How are you approaching the churches, and how has that process been? Any paying customers yet?

Hey thanks! So far, I have just sent out emails to a few churches. I want to take it pretty slow so I can easily adjust to what customers want and changes I need to make. I have a relatively long list of churches, blogs, church networks and ministers to contact. Locally speaking, I plan on going to several churches and making a pitch in person.

Technically, I launched a week ago today and I don't have any paying customers yet. I have several who registered for a free site though.

Def. a big/interesting market - what's your plan on reaching these churches? Would love to hear

Hey John thanks for the comment. I touched on your question a little bit in a previous comment. In short, I plan on contact a lot of churches, blogs and church networks. I also personally know several seminary professors and ministers that I will contact to see if they could pass along a recommendation to any churches they might know who are looking for a website.

Looks great. Good luck, and I've bookmarked the blog to keep up with it.

Wow, brave move! Good for you!

Know that one of your biggest hurdles is going to be the fact that every church has a "tech guy" who will "do the website" for free.

It's a big market, but probably not easiest hill to climb.

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