Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

My church as a whole is actually using http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ as a directory and it's not that fun to use, although some ministries within the church are more effective with it than others.

I lead the digital video & post production team at my church and we are using a mix mash of Church Community Builder, Facebook group, Google mass email thread and an ugly spreadsheet to keep track of our volunteers attendance, schedule them and communicate the serving opportunities each week. How does the attendance tracking work in your app and would it work for something like this to track volunteers and schedule them to serve?

One reason we have not moved off the CCB platform yet is they have a built in way for the church body to easily send online tithes & donations. Do you have any plans to work that in to your app?

On a side note - I know Hillsong NYC is using this site http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ for scheduling & announcements, and https://pushpay.com/ for payments.

Thanks and again, great job with this!

When I was IT guy at APC I called a bunch of local churches and talked to their IT folks. Was interesting to see all the variety. And of course McClean Pres was the most professional of the bunch, makes sense because they have like 25 people on staff, they have a campus of buildings to maintain, etc.

  > I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option
  > ...
  > Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need 
  > someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves.

I guess one tricky part of such infrastructure would be maintenance. Optimally, a user could spin up a "church.io"-drop (or e.g. "smtp/imap stack + $antispam + mailpile"-drop) and never have to care about any updates. providers can offer subscriptions for regular (curated) updates of each "drop".

With such infrastructure in place, the curch-community could click said button, follow through some dialogs, enter a CC and 5 minutes later have their own instance + domain. timmorgan gets paid per install by the infrastructure provider (who profits on the long run through subscription-fees).

I think the concepts of unikernels and clive[1] fit well into this picture, by exposing a more concise resource/environment API to the developer and easing deployment (which would be a nice thing, even without the picture painted above).

[0] https://sandstorm.io/

[1] http://lsub.org/ls/clive.html

PS. Nice app.

Seriously, a simple hosted package, a non-profit org and I think you could find you have built a vehicle for doing some good elsewhere.

You are a good man--

> Her smile tilted. “Mark, you don’t pay back your parents. You can’t. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It’s a sort of entailment. Or if you don’t have children of the body, it’s left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.”

- from "A Civil Campagaign"(The Vorkosigan Saga Series) by Lois Bujold

Tim could choose look at it not as "I'm getting rich!", and instead as "This is a way for me to sustainably build something I love and ensure that my users can get reliable updates, because I can do this for my career instead of working at {CompanyX}."

One could likely even charter it as a business where outside a regular salary, the remainder of any profits get donated back (or costs reduced).

It's __certainly__ more trouble than giving it away for free, as you'd need an accountant and worry about taxes. On the other hand, if this is a service that you feel every church deserves good access to if they want it, being able to work full-time on it might make it happen more easily.

As for the churches, I'm sure that many of them pay for services that they feel are worth it. Landscaping, maintenance, etc, are not always something that every church can do in-house, and this service sounds like it falls into the bin of "things people would pay for".

You touch on some good points on how to monetize and build a for profit company that is theologically sound. I have this idea that I'm considering for my next venture.

The idea is to build a self-funded startup with a mix of talented developers, designers, and product people. The company would not ever take outside investment so that the focus is never on dollars and return. Instead the focus is to build awesome software that makes a difference (inside and outside the church), grow our craft, and enjoy life. Nobody will earn millions, but we'll sure have fun making a living to support our families.

I actually built an MVP for a "Kickstarter for Missionaries" crowdfunding project a couple years ago. I thought (and still do, to some degree), it could be a good way for churches and missionaries to get steady/predictable support (which has always been a problem for my friends who do it).

But, the same dilemmas exist. Figuring out a business model I was comfortable with seemed hard. And, like you said, the more open you are about other faiths/sects using your platform, the more likely you are to tick off hardline people.

I have by no means figured it all out, but it's been an area in which I've sought counseling and grown considerably. A constant fear I have is being seen as a moneychanger or profiteer.

Ultimately, I've chosen to run Simple Donation as a business. There are so many bad examples of software that churches use and I think having a profitable business gives me the best shot at serving those churches well with great software.

Hopefully that wouldn't be an issue, just like it hopefully isn't an issue for a mechanic from denomination A to work on a bus owned by denomination B or a lineman from denomination A to maintain power lines powering a campus of denomination B. There's nothing particularly theological or beliefs-specific about the product other than "Sunday school" and "prayer request," both of which could probably fit the vast majority of organized religions with a simple title change.

Some of the activities they perform may be, but that requires a relatively complex separation of accounts where one "business" is deductible, but the other is not.

It can be done, but my experience is that most churches don't bother since the administrative burden exceeds the value.

OTOH, you can look at it this way - 'self hosted social network for X' is the sort of thing the HN crowd seems to enjoy - and you're just a relatively unusual value of X :)

So, what exactly does Sandstorm do for me? Does it turn web applications into SaaS with individual instances of software per user without the user having to install it on their own hosting themselves? But there's a price to pay for that: each application has to be specifically ported to work with Sandstorm. Right? Where is the catalog of currently ported apps, then?

You're much more right than I am, though. Certainly, non-Christian faiths in the US don't use the term "church" by default.

Yes, there are certain groups that object to that for etymological reasons because "church" also is the English word for the body of believers, and who don't use the word that way, but that doesn't make it any less a normal (and, in fact, the primary) meaning the word has in English.

But...

> there are even groups of Christians who object to

That proves nothing though. For any X you can find a group calling themselves Christian who strongly object to X, many Christians think they "own" the word and concept of marriage and have the right to define exactly what it means, and so forth...

However, I don't think a little bit of self/community introspection about its popularity would hurt. Might learn an important lesson or two.

Broadly, I haven't figured out when criticism/cynicism (if you want to call it that) is or is not beneficial. You and I would probably concur that modern culture is all to quick to tear down the good and pure with cynic blasts. Yet criticism at even seemingly happy things, like the upvoting of this post, can be beneficial.

Also, if I had built OneBody using PHP I certainly would not have lasted this long in keeping it going. Ruby is great language that I really enjoy using every day.