161–170 of 323 posts
If anything, I think you might be targeting too small of an audience with this. While I realize there's no incentive for you to make this change, I could easily see someone forking this and using it for any large-ish group of people united under any purpose, such as a PTA or soccer league.
> true # everyone can read bible verses! must be my favourite code comment ever. :) https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846ea...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you not charging money for this? 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 cle…
Glory to God! :-) It's just my passion. I really hope someone does build this as a slick hosted service. I don't do well dealing with customers :-)
Is a good software, I'm sure, but 500 points? Is this some sort of communal self-assurance humble-brag about being accepting of "religious software"? Or does everyone just really love ruby CMSs?
Hard to believe, but I've been working on this Rails app for over 7 years now! It started as a Rails 1.0 app waaayyy back when, and I've managed to bring it along through almost every major Rails version (still working on updating to Rails 4.1), which I'm pretty proud of. 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…
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.
Hard to believe, but I've been working on this Rails app for over 7 years now! It started as a Rails 1.0 app waaayyy back when, and I've managed to bring it along through almost every major Rails version (still working on updating to Rails 4.1), which I'm pretty proud of. 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…
Do you have any idea how many churches currently use the software? Are many of them based in Tulsa?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you not charging money for this? 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 cle…
Glory to God! :-) It's just my passion. I really hope someone does build this as a slick hosted service. I don't do well dealing with customers :-)
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.
Hard to believe, but I've been working on this Rails app for over 7 years now! It started as a Rails 1.0 app waaayyy back when, and I've managed to bring it along through almost every major Rails version (still working on updating to Rails 4.1), which I'm pretty proud of. 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…
Great job, Tim. Looks really solid. I really think you should team up with someone to offer hosted versions of this to churches (take the WordPress model). 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 th…
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.