

I just launched my first bootstrapped startup. What do you think? - thisisdallas
http://churchpr.es

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drharris
Very, very nice. I manage my church's website, but I don't have the time to
constantly upgrade Drupal (or WP), and it looks bad. My only thing is that I
have a small church, and while $25/mo seems reasonable to me, I doubt my
church would go for it. They're looking for "as free as possible", to the
point where I have to donate space on my own server. Also, we have an existing
MX provider, but it seems like you're wanting to handle DNS (since you offer
email and CDN). Do we still get access to set custom CNAME and MX records?

I guess what I'd also want in a service is something to guide me (or really,
the pastors) on how to effectively use social media. We have the accounts, but
they go unused because we cannot figure out what should and should not go
there. I think a very valuable thing would be a portal that helps you post to
those service and maybe gives you a prompt for what to do. Something like that
might help justify the $25/mo for small churches. I'm thinking something like
where the pastor can post a blog (devotional thoughts), and have the tool
automatically prompt him to make a FB post about the blog, maybe asking a
compelling question that will get you to interact. If it integrates with FB
for commenting, that would be even better!

I guess my main point here is that there is a market for teaching small
churches with older pastors how to properly integrate social media. The
website management is a great start, but the social aspect is where we fail
hard. If you can solve that problem for us in a way that integrates with the
website functionality, we'd be a definite customer.

Edit: Oh yeah, the media aspect. Our church cannot afford to pay for custom
graphics or images. I occasionally buy stock photography. If you had a library
of images or graphics that could be used by the churches, that would be a
major selling point.

Edit 2: I feel like an idiot. Just noticed you provide $50 social media
training. Assuming this was comprehensive and geared to the completely non-
technical, this might facilitate some of my thoughts above. Saw the banner
before and thought it was training on how to work with the website.

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thisisdallas
Lots of great ideas, thanks!

My goal is to make a platform that offers everything a church would need but
also removes any of the "technological" complexities. If a church has someone
that is familiar with DNS than I won't have a problem letting them make any
changes necessary but there is no menu setting or options panel in the website
backend that would allow DNS changes to be made.

The social media aspect is something I try to cover by offering social media
training but your idea is actually a lot better. Having, more or less, a
guided tour or helping hand directly integrated into the backend itself. That
is something I will definitely consider and look into.

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thedangler
Out of curiosity how is the application setup? I see you are using WHMCS to
manage the domains and the orders, but after that are all the sites WP sites
that have custom modules and are themed?

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forgingahead
Congrats! How are you approaching the churches, and how has that process been?
Any paying customers yet?

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thisisdallas
Hey thanks! So far, I have just sent out emails to a few churches. I want to
take it pretty slow so I can easily adjust to what customers want and changes
I need to make. I have a relatively long list of churches, blogs, church
networks and ministers to contact. Locally speaking, I plan on going to
several churches and making a pitch in person.

Technically, I launched a week ago today and I don't have any paying customers
yet. I have several who registered for a free site though.

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johnmurch
Def. a big/interesting market - what's your plan on reaching these churches?
Would love to hear

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thisisdallas
Hey John thanks for the comment. I touched on your question a little bit in a
previous comment. In short, I plan on contact a lot of churches, blogs and
church networks. I also personally know several seminary professors and
ministers that I will contact to see if they could pass along a recommendation
to any churches they might know who are looking for a website.

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canadev
Looks great. Good luck, and I've bookmarked the blog to keep up with it.

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mike_mcgrail
Wow, brave move! Good for you!

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programminggeek
Know that one of your biggest hurdles is going to be the fact that every
church has a "tech guy" who will "do the website" for free.

It's a big market, but probably not easiest hill to climb.

