Last year I built a ride sharing request tool for our church.
Last year I built a ride sharing request tool for our church. Another church wanted the same thing but not to overhead so I built it as a SaaS and chariotapp.co was born. My skills lie mainly in front end development but I've had fun digging into PHP framework, Laravel, for side projects.
I have 2 customers right now and I'm looking to onboard 1 church per month over the next year.
I've joined IH for some like minded folks to bounce ideas off and help grow Chariot subscriptions.
#hello-world
Hi Steven! Very cool idea 👍. Few questions:
Thanks.
My own church are part of a global church planting network so my personal connections there have given me an "in". I had a call this past week with a Romanian church who will be coming on board but I need translation in place for them before they sign up. I have another call with a church in Barbados this week as well to demo the app. These 2 expressed an interest during the beta.
At present, there's only a single price point of $20 per month. Ultimately this will change I think. Currently a church can have 6 drivers. When a request is received, Chariot generates between 3 and 9 SMS messages for driver and user alerts (this is why I was using Slack for push notifications). I'll need some real data to make an informed decision on pricing longer term and I've explained that to those who have signed up so far. Thankfully those I've spoken with and the single customer I do have are happy with that.
I think for most churches that $20 will be enough but I guess for mega churches, it'll likely be more.
Thanks for the reply Steven. If you add a church a month at $20, your revenues for the year will be less than $200 for the year. So yes you will have to try playing with different pricing options to see what is viable. At the $20 price, you will have to sign up a large number of churches.
A popular model I have seen from companies targeting similar niches is the freemium model where they provide a basic service for free and then the business pays for more advanced features, larger number of users etc down the line.
Yeah. Not expecting massive returns but there are a lot of potential users out there. Freemium is a non-starter because of the SMS costs incurred.
Okay got it. I had not considered the SMS costs. Thanks.