241–250 of 323 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our church also uses The City and I'd say it's fine but not great. There's a lot of room for another startup in this space - I've considered it more than once. 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 tec…
As someone who owns a business that sells exclusively to churches ( https://simpledonation.com ), I know what that uneasiness can feel like -- the seemingly diametrical goals of building a business to return shareholder capital and serving a market need. And also the denominational thing... 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…
I'm curious what the percentage differences are in total donations.
Quick question: have you thought about porting this to sandstorm.io? Having a one-click "app-like" install would help out many less-technical church folks.
I looked at Sandstorm, but it seems it's in "closed alpha" - how do you recommend I use it?
Although targeted at churches, your application is essentially a mini as of isle network, and would thus be a very interesting test case for sandstorm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our church also uses The City and I'd say it's fine but not great. There's a lot of room for another startup in this space - I've considered it more than once. 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 tec…
As someone who owns a business that sells exclusively to churches ( https://simpledonation.com ), I know what that uneasiness can feel like -- the seemingly diametrical goals of building a business to return shareholder capital and serving a market need. And also the denominational thing... 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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Our church also uses The City and I'd say it's fine but not great. There's a lot of room for another startup in this space - I've considered it more than once. 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 tec…
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.
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What difference would it make? Religious institutions, writers, horse-traders, scuba divers - a market is a market. 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…
This is actually startlingly true - it would make a lot of sense for someone to steal OP's idea and capitalize on it. I hope, however, that no one does. It's a great thing he's done.
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.