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

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

#91

Post by bduerst »

JPKab wrote: post #82
timmorgan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Good for you man. But just realize that sadly, many churches operate as businesses where the pastor and his family just pocket tithes for their lifestyle and build fancy LED signs instead of giving to the poor......

I think this is a common misconception. While I am sure there are outliers as with any normalized distribution, the mean salary for clergy is about $45k/yr (according to the US BLS).

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

#94

Post by sushimako »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #58
jasonkester wrote: post #48

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…

While I don't think he needs to sell it, the hosted option is definitely something to look into. I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option and thought "Oh cool, they'll provision a DO droplet and install this for you!" Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves. That said, it's open source - so anyone (including me!) is free to set thi…

  > 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 thought it would be awesome if that button would actually (eventually) result in setting up a droplet and installing the software for me. I think sandstorm[0] is going into that direction.

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

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

timmorgan wrote: post #61
jasonkester wrote: post #48

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 :-)

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by shortformblog »

timmorgan wrote: post #2

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…

As someone with a lot of experience in the nonprofit space, I should point out that you would be able to take this over to membership groups that aren't specifically churches very easily. There are companies in the space that sell products like this to associations for tens of thousands of dollars.

I realize your goals here are more altruistic in nature, and that's to be greatly respected, but it's certainly worth pointing out.

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