You can see screenshots at http://church.io.
Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN, but still, I'm proud, so wanted to post about it.
Keep inspiring HN!!!
My church uses The City [0] which charges anywhere from $20 to hundreds of dollars a month. It works well but I definitely think there's room for others. Also, Zondervan acquired The City from the developer/Mars Hill (he was an Amazon engineer too IIRC).
I also think it would be huge to let churches connect a Stripe account and add giving via cc.
Anyway, I think this is awesome and I respect your passion. If you ever need help with anything, drop me a line.
The problem for me, on a personal level, is that it's very hard to mix business and the church. On the one hand, the technology used in the church generally lags far behind what is available and there are real benefits to the church body by having tailored technology.
On the other hand, sometimes the new tech doesn't fit for cultural reasons. For example, it still feels unsavory to, say, pass a square credit card reader along with the offering plate.
Additionally, one has to be careful not to be in it merely for the money (which becomes harder as the organization scales). At the entrepreneur you're torn between fiduciary duty to your organization/employees/investors and the (greater) responsibility to God and his church.
It's really hard to keep that balance. Jesus did turn over the tables of the money changers, after all.
In an ideal world your employees/investors are aligned with your vision but in practice, it can get really cloudy. (And we haven't even talked about if you're willing to sell to other denominations yet which, presumably, are using your software as tool to spread an ideology you explicitly believe to be false.)
One model I think could work is for software engineers to found a non-profit and essentially raise funding/customer commitments from larger churches in order to build the software that they'll eventually use.
That said, it's hard enough to find engineers who are "good" in the industry at large, much less when you add in the qualification that they have to be so deeply ideologically in agreement with your vision.
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 just need to find someone smart like the OP here to help execute the vision.
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 don't mean to seem unscrupulous, but the process of raising money for a missionary is not unlike what is done by a sales rep or a realtor: you have to keep yourself at the top of people's minds or the money dries up.
In that regard, software like facebook and even contactually are invaluable.
But, it seems to me, there's even more work to be done around custom platforms.
That said, how are you going to make money? Take 30% off the top? 10%? People (rightly) want to make their money go as directly as possible and so often won't even pay by credit card because you lose 3% in fees.
These platforms do cost money to run and not every church has someone on staff qualified to host an open-source solution. So if someone doesn't create hosted services that are financially viable, everyone loses out.
I also know several genuinely good people who desire to go to seminary but simply aren't able to take 3 years off of work (because they have families etc.). Of course you always have the risk of folks taking advantage of the system, but in the success / genuine / majority case, I feel that a kickstarter for people who want to do domestic ministry is a real need right now.
If anyone is interested in working on (and working through) these kinds of problems, drop me a line. My email is in my profile.
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.
I'm curious what the percentage differences are in total donations.
Some churches use it specifically for 1-time giving w/o logging in and they see a much larger increase for that type.
I ask people to cancel if they don't see ROI in 3 months. Only 2 cancellations in 2 years.
They are met with blank stares. Doesn't seem like a felt need at this point.
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.
I doubt most of them would be comfortable launching a business that would exclusively support efforts to sustain and spread religion, though; I know I wouldn't.
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.
At the very least, you should offer a hosted version of this (borrowing the wordpress.com/wordpress.org model would seem the best plan) so that non-technical churches could click a button and just have it magically spin up a website and start billing their card every month.
Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few "church.io hosting" businesses spring up within a week if you don't build that option yourself.
But offering a completely optional hosted version is a good idea for churches with more money than technical prowess.
Per capita stats for the State of Vatican City really don't tell much even about the wealth of the Catholic Church as a church. Its kind of live judging the wealth of the United States by dividing the assets of the federal treasury by the number of people who live in the White House and the US Naval Observatory.
That said, it's open source - so anyone (including me!) is free to set this up.
edit: apparently at least someone is doing this: http://www.powerchurch.com/products/onebody/
> 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).
Here's the Sandstorm demo: https://demo.sandstorm.io
The Sandstorm easy-port guide: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide
And accompanying blog post: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-port.html
Hope this helps!
Jade
I also looked through the current offerings and thought the market was just not well served. It seems like a huge mistake on someone's part.
Do you have anyone using the software yet? I would be interested in finding out if we could. Super great work!
PS. Nice app.
PS I love the word bookkeeping and would love it even more if the "p" were doubled.
The inner city churches I know all have food banks, clothing banks, free hot meals, or similar programs. The churches I know in Utah set up safe houses for women and children fleeing polygamy.
If you're connected to a church that operates as a business with the pastor taking home the profits, time to find a different church.
Not even the current "liberal hippie pope" is having much success changing the Catholic Church from within, so what makes you think anyone who's not its most powerful leader could ever possibly have any success? Anyone claiming they haven't resigned from the Catholic Church in disgrace because they want to remain inside to be an "agent of change" is totally full of it, and guilty of perpetuating the problem.
Does it actually impress you that the current pope wasn't personally the architect and prosecutor of officially covering up and perpetuating all the terrible widespread sexual abuse systematically perpetrated by the Catholic Church, who wrote and enforced the official church policy of protecting priests who rape children, and excommunicating anyone who speaks out about it? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/17/religion.childp... http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/europe/vatican/papal_evil.htm
If the pope's desire to cover up sexual abuse is what you mean by "paying more attention to sexual issues than is warranted", can you please justify why you think the Catholic Church should pay less attention to their longstanding issues of raping children and protecting the rapists from prosecution? And why you think it's a good thing that the current pope doesn't think it's such a big deal that requires much attention?
Having looked over your comment history, I believe you may need to reread the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Take particular note of:
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."
"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
Also note that you have already been asked to stop trolling by one of our moderators, dang, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7644504 .
In truth this seems to be the US mega-churches. Round here the pastors live a decent but modest life. Enough to raise a family not enough to buy a flashy car.
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.
If you go into any business harboring that level of disrespect for your customers then you're probably going to fail to provide a product they'll be willing to use. Although there is also an argument to be made for domain experience - if you're going to sell a service to religious groups wouldn't you be more likely to understand the market without having a bias against religion?
The code has been licensed under an Affero GPL v3 license so anybody using it in production must release any modifications done. So it's not really stealing the idea or the code, only the business model, which the OP apparently doesn't want to pursue anyway.
A non Affero license (or MIT, BSD, Apache) would have shut him off from his code (I can't decide if those using those licenses are masochists or just extremely kind). With this choice of the license the OP will get fixes and improvements and probably be happy with that. Furthermore he could be hired to do them, regardless of the license.
On the other hand, if you're emotionally invested in atheism, in the sense that you actively want to see religion gone (as opposed to just not believing as a personal choice), you're emotionally invested in religion by extension.
I know a large number of religious people who would consider themselves "emotionally invested in their religion" but I would never describe any of them as "actively wanting to see all other beliefs gone".
"New Atheism is a social and political movement in favour of atheism and secularism promoted by a collection of modern atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.""
I guess it is the difference between selling a bad product with the intent of exploiting people and just selling a good product to a market one has little affinity with.
As an atheist I do not feel contempt or superiority with anyone religious - indeed most religious people I know I respect greatly for their integrity and community minded committment. (Most religious people whom I disrespect I would disrespect if they were atheists too - it is I guess "by their actions you will know them")
Put it a different way - this project looks like an excellent product / saas to sell to the Mosque and Synagogue market as well as Protestant Church market. I expect there are some hard coded assumptions that would need pulling out to a config file, but just as I see common behaviour between religions as decent, honest, community minded and "good" I think the common needs of decent honest community minded organisations seem to be met by this product.
As an atheist I would have no qualms selling this to different markets. I suspect however that the story behind this (7 years, Christian coder) is too good for one market and a disability in the others. Would be interesting to know.
Anyway, good luck and I still suggest partnering with a hustler to build a non-profit org to sell saas on the back of this
But I have no moral qualms with it as long as no one is being scammed. If people knowingly want to part with their money, and you're not mis-representing things in order to convince them of it, then no amount of "moral" arguments will make what you're doing dirty or immoral. It's not up to you to make moral judgements about how other people wish to spend/throwaway their money.
It's the religious people who are looking forward to rapture and armageddon who are the sick dirty ones: http://www.raptureready.com http://www.raptureready.com/faq/faq11.html http://rr-bb.com/showthread.php?73593-Our-God-of-Israel-is-a... http://rr-bb.com/showthread.php?162998-Every-mans-challenge-... http://rr-bb.com/showthread.php?194237-Need-To-Edit-My-quot-...
http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/jesus-christs-return...
By the year 2050, 41% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ definitely (23%) or probably (18%) will have returned to earth.
http://magazine.good.is/articles/more-than-40-percent-of-ame...
More Than 40 Percent of Americans Believe the Rapture Is Coming
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/01/christ-second-comin...
How Many U.S. Christians Believe Christ's 'Second Coming' Will Happen Soon? More Than You May Think (SURVEY)
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/05/world-ending-...
Hurry Up And Wait for the Rapture
In the South, a full 52 percent of those polled predicted that JC's return is imminent. Those figures come from a June 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center for People & the Press.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/think_only_a_few...
Think Only a Few Fools Believe in the Rapture? Think Again.
In other words, a substantial portion of the American public—more than 4 out of 10—disagrees with the May 21 Rapture freaks only with respect to the date and some of the details of Jesus’ return. Think of that stat the next time you’re assured by some liberal theologian that the arguments of contemporary atheists are directed against targets that no longer exist.
There were some methodological flaws including asking children in groups what were their experiences of crime.
Turns out kids like to maintain social standing with over kids through exaggeration.
Who knew.
Yes there are morons out there who think God is personally going to save them first as they will be closest to the altar. But most of my problem with religion is not religion - it's lying and power grabbing and manipulation and deceit and murder and social entrapment and the inertia of crowds.
Religion corrals this behaviour but it's humans not religion that does it. If you want to convert others beware of your own motivations. They won't be different to those of religion. Because you aren't different. And that's my point.
Sounds like a job for the Church of Subgenius.
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
Building something that fits your needs and releasing it to others as open source rather than setting up a business to sell it is, if "silly", a common form of silliness without which there wouldn't be much open source software at all.
Just because we're posting in a temple of Mammon doesn't mean everybody has to bow at that altar.
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".
I probably should highlight more of that stuff on the site... thanks!
[EDIT: https://us.ccli.com/licenses-and-services/church-copyright-l... ]
Or does customer retention go up to corporate like a sort of Comcast "I want to cancel my contract" call?
We have an "Involvement Minister" who watches churn rate so to speak, so hopefully he can help organize better/different small groups or help improve existing ones.
attendance tracking would be good for "care" ("hey - it's been a while, is everything ok?"), for decision-making ("we average 35 people at 8am but 400 at 10:30am, what should we do?").
unfortunately, i can also see it used to target "marketing" messages for donations.
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!
As for scheduling volunteer and such, you should definitely check out Planning Center Services app (that's what I work on for my day job) - it is by far the best app for that sort of thing.
OneBody doesn't have any scheduling or giving stuff yet, sorry!
About the only thing OneBody might do for you in your situation would be to help with emailing all your volunteers. You could put them in separate "Groups" (per time, service, whatever) and then email that group at once. Then you could track attendance in that after the fact.
I realize your goals here are more altruistic in nature, and that's to be greatly respected, but it's certainly worth pointing out.
In this case, I believe you are the inspiration. Keep up the great work!
Echoing zerokarmaleft, this time you are the inspiration.
http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/06/09/reorganizing-a-data-...
Church-related IT is an interesting challenge - not a lot of money to be spent, and what money there is usually gets directed towards tracking contributions. I was the IT guy for http://www.alexandriapres.org/ for a few years (mostly running backups and such) and we certainly had a grab bag of solutions to the problems that church.io is solving nicely.
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.
Reach out to me if you'd like to discuss ideas back and forth -- we might be able to help you, and you might be able to help us.
About charging or not charging, I would say this ... even open source projects need resources to attract others to the community, and especially to gain adoption. You still have to do sales in Churches, and market to them. Churches, just like other organizations, are run by people who are averse to just trying anything they come across, and you need to have a good onboarding process.
In any case, if interested, you'll find my email at http://qbix.com/about (I'm Greg on there)
I agree with the folks saying you should start a SaSS service. Even if it's extremely un-optimized (e.g. you spin up a new EC2 instance per-order), I think many, many churches would be interested. Hosting is a huge liability, time-sink, and all-around pain in the ass, and I think you'd do well enough to at cover your costs (at the very least!)
Plus it's refreshing to see something seven years in the making and testing posted here. News and speculation are always interesting, but this project has some weight to it. Thanks for posting.
My only thought is that small to mid-sized churches may not have a Rails specialist, so a hosted option would probably be very popular.
Hope you are well!
Do you have any idea how many churches currently use the software? Are many of them based in Tulsa?
I should have installed a tracking pixel or something ;-)
After a huge pile of upvotes and comments, do you still want to believe that HN has some kind of anti-Christian bias?
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 :)