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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

#251

Post by bencollier49 »

timmorgan wrote: post #65
bencollier49 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!

It's used primarily by small groups that meet in homes or whatever - that way the church as a whole can engage with anyone who stops attending (sometimes sign of personal/life issues that the church should be there to help with).

Genuinely fascinated by this. Wouldn't the members of the small group notice that someone had stopped turning up and drop them a line?

Or does customer retention go up to corporate like a sort of Comcast "I want to cancel my contract" call?

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

#252

Post by lifeisstillgood »

mwcampbell wrote: post #179
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then can I suggest you find someone who can - otherwise one if us Atheists will host it and make money off your hard work ;-) 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.

I realize you may have been joking, but I wonder how most atheists and other nonreligious people here would feel about selling a product or service targeted specifically at religious people or churches. To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying, "I know that religions are false and even harmful, but I'm going to milk those less enlightened believers for all they're worth."

I was definitely joking :-)

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

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

#254

Post by lukeholder »

timmorgan wrote: post #230
peeters wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No love for the Apocrypha though it seems ;-). Not being Catholic, I don't know how much teaching is done out of those books, but this might reach a larger audience if the books to show were configurable.

OneBody is powered by another of my projects http://bible-api.com ( https://github.com/seven1m/bible_api ), which just needs a little bit of code to return verses from the Apocrypha. If there's interest, I'd be willing to make it happen or show someone where to get started!

do you have the book of mormon available on that api?

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

#255

Post by philipn »

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…

I just wanted to say that I've been following your work for a while now. I find it really fascinating! You've got a really active niche (if you can really even call it that!) and an interesting, polished, open-source project. Also, you seem to really care about design, which is an unfortunate rarity in the FLOSS world.

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!)

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

#256

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #207
beejiu wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except by cults, who don't need this kind of software to control you anyway. Religion is a cult, at least by the dictionary I am using. I don't really understand the entire religion/church environment, but of the few churches I have visited (I'm not religious) I was never asked to 'check in'; they keep no database of their attendees.

You just said you don't understand the market this software addresses. Maybe now's a good time to opt out of the conversation. Lots of other conversations are happening on the site, right now, and it looks like all of them are a better fit for you.

[deleted]

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

#257

Post by bartzon »

timmorgan wrote: post #231
boyaka wrote: post #218

I'm a complete Rails noob, can anybody help me understand why after installing this my app shows up without any formatting? http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG I did notice that there was a Warning regarding different versions of libxml used for Nekogiri: $ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.8.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8

Depends on how you installed it... if you're running on your local computer, then it sounds like you're running in "production" mode without first compiling assets with `rake assets:precompile`. (See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html for some more info.) Or just run it in development mode with `rails server`.

Concerning installing, you might want to try out Omnibus (https://github.com/opscode/omnibus). We've used it successfully to create a full-stack installer for our Rails project, Codem. See https://github.com/madebyhiro/codem-install.

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

#258

Post by zo1 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #179
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then can I suggest you find someone who can - otherwise one if us Atheists will host it and make money off your hard work ;-) 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.

I realize you may have been joking, but I wonder how most atheists and other nonreligious people here would feel about selling a product or service targeted specifically at religious people or churches. To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying, "I know that religions are false and even harmful, but I'm going to milk those less enlightened believers for all they're worth."

"To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying." It would be quite a few orders of magnitude less immoral than how immoral some of us Athiests consider the institution of church and how they "use" their followers. (For info, look at some of the big church networks and churches)

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.

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

#259

Post by qq66 »

jashmenn wrote: post #169
callmeed wrote: post #152

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…

Interesting. A complete atheist would be best able to run a church software business dispassionately, but wouldn't grasp the problem domain as well as an adherent of the faith. Perhaps this is a great place for complementary co-founders.

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

#260

Post by walterbell »

tbrooks wrote: post #233
jashmenn wrote: post #169

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…

Some US states have introduced a new corporate form for businesses which have both financial and social objectives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

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