I am undertaking a very difficult project. One that probably would seem (or should seem) impossible I am trying to build a profitable Church Management Software (CHMS) Company, more or less from scratch, in the next six months. Basically, I'm giving myself six months of super hard work to build Congregation Hub 2.0, launch it to the world and get it paying me.
The next iteration of Congregation Hub is going to have several changes and unique features:
75% of it will be free to use, and churches can sign up without a credit card.
It will have a way to manage a website.
It will be available worldwide.
It will have a native mobile app for iOS and Android.
It will be rock solid and simple.
It will become the hub for your church's project management and internal communication.
1. Why I'm doing this:
The reason why I'm doing this is because if it fails, it costs me almost nothing but time and a lot of learning, but if it succeeds it solves three pressing problems for me:
The Money Problem
I have five kids and pastor a smallish church in Mattoon, IL. Formerly, I was a partner in a software design company (which actually started as a hobby) and I made decent money. Both it and my church were growing, and I had to make a decision - and I chose to be a pastor. As part of my exit, I get a small amount that supplements my income from the church, and that runs out at the end of the year. So I need to figure out a way to make more money for my family that doesn't make me unavailable for my duties at church (the church cannot pay more) and I need to do it by the end of this year.
The Building Problem
One reason our church cannot afford to pay me more is because right now we are in dire need of a bigger building to meet in. We are in this odd catch-22 situation, where the church cannot grow unless we get more space, but doesn't have the money to afford more space (but are definitely large enough for a full time pastor). So, if my income (by far the church's largest expense) was supplemented or replaced by Congregation Hub, then the church could use that money to purchase or rent a larger building.
The Software Problem
The third problem I really want to address is the problem I see with the current church software market. The church software companies are focussed on larger churches (and often contemporary churches) because that is where the money is. But a church of 50 or 150 doesn't have the same needs as a church of 700 and I truly believe I have a unique set of skills and experiences that will enable me to make something that really helps a lot of churches.
2. How I'm doing this
It shouldn't seem possible to make a program like this, but I have been working a plan to get it done and have made a ton of progress already:
I'm working on it four hours a day.
Six days a week I am waking very early and working on Congregation Hub for four hours before I go for my run and move onto church work. I'm trying to treat this project like a job, logging my hours. At risk is my ability to help my kids with college, to take them to visit family, and to one day own a house. So I've been very passionate about this.
I'm building on years of similar projects.
Even though this is a new project, it's not a new project at all. I'm improving on what I already learned with Congregation Hub. I did most of the work on the sermon's tool five years ago. I built service planners and prayer request tools eight years ago. I've been working on church websites since Bush was running for reelection against John Kerry.
Add to that several years of experience running big projects for other entrepreneurs with my business. I'm not some kid who has a crazy idea - this is a crazy idea I haven't been able to shake for the better part of twenty years.
I'm keeping it as simple and streamlined as possible.
A project of this scale is huge! Just to signup, login and manage your subscriptions with a settings page requires me writing dozens of software methods. I haven't even started on the main stuff the app does yet and I already have 12 models and migrations. To keep myself from drowning in complexity I'm following these rules for myself:
Understand everything. No magic. No shortcuts. Besides the Laravel framework (which I've been working in for almost ten years) and Stripe (which I'm not going to try to replicate because that would be dumb) I'm writing everything myself.
Party like it's 2004. Everything I'm doing is based on tech that was running web apps 20 years ago. Routes hitting controllers which interact with models and render HTML. No JSON. No front end magic. I'm not even using a front end build step (like NPM). I'm writing my own CSS and using stimulus for what little Javascript I'm writing (which is a half step away from Vanilla JS)
Keeping it organized. Everything in the app is broken down into folders so it's easy to trace things.
Do things one way. No livewire on one page, vue on another. It's all simple server rendered HTML.
Plan for a hybrid mobile app. I'm planning this rewrite from the beginning to work towards a hybrid mobile app that will be mostly serving the same HTML that my web app is.
I'm getting a lot of help from AI.
In the past, I've worked with a team of developers or hired a freelancer to help. Even when I did the work myself, I worked with others to figure things out. But AI has made this unnecessary. I wouldn't be able to move as fast as I have without having ChatGPT available to ask questions and so far (knock on wood) I haven't gotten stuck. Not only is this a whole lot cheaper - it's probably a whole lot more effective than me hiring a freelancer at this point.
3. Help Me Out
One thing you can do to help me out is follow along and share ideas and feedback. I plan on sharing a lot as I build this, and you can go along on the journey with me. When the time comes, and Congregation Hub 2.0 is launched, hopefully it's compelling enough that you sign up and share it with others.
