The Church Co
High Quality, low cost websites for churches & nonprofits.
This is devastating for me but having public numbers is starting to affect us. This will hardly be my last product though so I look forward to joining the ranks again and starting over. If anyone ever wants an update just send me a message. Happy to share how we are doing.
So about starting over.... that was much harder than I thought it would be. It seems like such a great idea until you realized just how much code you've written for version 1.
Here's my 6-month update.
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We have a working prototype of version two complete with Auth, emails, accounts, white-labeling, billing and media management.
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Instead of launching right now, we are going to spin up a smaller product in the same space to test the infrastructure and learn before we start the process of migrating people to version 2.
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There's still a lot more to be done. Up next is building a CRM into the product for better management of people.
Some lessons I've learned in the process.
There so much more to running a business than writing code. I try to code every day but typically get about 8 hours in a week of development. The rest is the day-to-day running of the business. I miss the coding but the business side is just as important and because of it we've grown $19k MRR since the last update.
I'll try and post more going forward. Love the IndieHackers community!
It's safe to say that this idea has been validated now. We have 1000 customers and $42k MRR. When we started we wanted to be the best website builder for churches. We used WordPress to get up and running quickly and put a ton of effort into custom functionality. Basically, you can't install a plugin and rebuild what we have currently done.
I went down the route of building a headless option for WordPress using React for a custom Admin Interface. It worked great but at the end of the day, it was still hacking WordPress to get it to do what we wanted.
A month ago, I decided to start fresh and give myself two weeks to build something custom. I focused on Authentication, Stripe Subscriptions, and a simple UI. It worked great! So well, that I can't imagine not using this moving forward.
Today, I forked my repo and started Version 2 of Version 2.
Wish me luck!
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very cool. keep going. churches need this.
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Are you moving away from WordPress completely, then?
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Yes. After I ran a test on a new system, the benefits we so clear. We aren't really using Wordpress now for anything more than Auth and a dashboard so moving away gives us more freedom to do more than websites.
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I'm curious, what did you move to instead of Wordpress? I'm new to the CMS space and there are so many
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It's completely custom. I'm using Node/React/Postgres to build a CMS from scratch.
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Nice! I've been contemplating that as well, looking at the CMS landscape it's either Wordpress/Drupal, newer but not quite as robust tools, or paid tools. Do you think you'd do this custom build without the 4+ years of exp with a CMS under your belt?
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If I had already had a custom CMS starting point to use, I would have used that. At the time, I was using Wordpress for most all the work I was doing. It let me move quickly and still write custom code. I'm glad I started this way. Now that we have enough customers and revenue we can afford to build the product I really want and that will let us run for the next 10 years.
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We did it! 1000 active customers. It took about 3.5 years since turning on payments. Here's a break down by year.
Year 1:
- 121 Customers
- $2,810 MRR
Year 2:
- 348 Customers
- $12,661 MRR
Year 3:
- 830 Customers
- $34,167 MRR
Today:
- 1013 Customers
- $42,629 MRR
My favorite part of this is that it is entirely word of mouth growth. We only spend a couple hundred a month on ads but happy customers tell their friends in the space. It just goes to show that if you do good work and value your customers, people take notice.
Be kind :)
We've officially doubled in revenue since I decided to go full time in December.
Letting go of control is hard but it's for the best.
Every time I hear Intercom beep, I have to stop myself from chatting back instantly to allow our staff member to do it. I thought this would get easier but it didn't so much so that I had to delete the app from my browser and phone. Turns out this was the best thing I could have done. Sales are up and he's becoming really comfortable talking potential customers through the sales process. It's also freed me up to continue work on v2.
We've just set a new goal of $45k to end the year. So far we are a few hundred overpaced.
Also, I just moved to Sydney so if there are any Sydney Indie Hackers, I'd love to connect!
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Great read! Would love to have a quick chat if you've got 30 mins free at some point as I've been playing with the idea of doing something similar in a different market (and different country) :)
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Nice! So there are limits of how much one can earn solo - congrats on having new employee! Hope it will propel growth a lot :)
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I think so. We could probably have continued to grow but I suspect the rate would have slowed.
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Awesome to read about your progress.
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So proud of you Paul! Congratulations! Always exciting to hear about your journey.
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Thanks, I'll update that as we do have a contractor now.
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The last two months have been crazy. I never realized how many people just didn't have websites before or hadn't touched their site in years. We've done around 200 new customers in two months which has led us to make a few changes.
- We've made our first full-time hire!
- We've brought on someone to manage ads and marketing.
- I'm moving into a higher-level role managing the code and partnerships.
All of these changes have freed us up to start working on v2!
Excited for the future!
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Congrats! In this church market, what marketing tactic works the best for you guys? Straight sales?
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WTF! This is amazing! Amen 🙏
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Thanks!
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Woohoo!
Congratulations! 🙌
The first full-time hire is a big milestone!-
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Scary and fun at the same time!
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Hey Paul, this is amazing!
This is probably not the right place to ask, but I'd love to hear how you mange setting up custom domains and SSLs for each of the websites you run. I've been really struggling with this!
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For a long time we required Cloudflare but we recently used Fly.io to build an SSL proxy and add a caching layer. They have been great to work with!
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Thanks for getting back to me! I've come across Fly.io before, but never really understood what it did. Are you still able to host elsewhere and have Fly proxy requests through?
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Yep! That's exactly what we do. Fly is just the proxy issuing certs and caching the sites. We've been with them for about 2 months now and they have been great. Their support team is incredible as well.
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Congratulations. What a great Business!
How many employees do you have?-
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We just hired out first. I'm running the business and writing all of the code. The new person is doing all of the website builds and handling customer support.
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Congrats!!
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Thanks!
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This is great, congrats! Can you explain how you’re managing all the content on the sites? I saw a comment about WordPress, does that mean you’re managing a bunch of WP multisite?
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Yes, we started with WP Multisite. We are currently in the process of rebuilding the admin section in react and building a customer API to talk to the DB.
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Jesus saves, churches pay - or so it would seem.
Good for you. Tell us how you did it.
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I worked for a church for a while and noticed that so many churches have just terrible websites. A lot of that has to do with every website platform saying "You should build your own website". We let people do that if they want but we also build them the first version of the site for free. People have been pretty happy about that and tell their friends.
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Such a nice goal to hit!, congratulations
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Thanks!
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Hey Paul, this looks fantastic!
Do your clients collect donations on their site?
I'm run simplefunnel.io and i think it could really help.
I can even waive much of the fee for non-profits.
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Congrats! What plans do most of these non profits / churches go for? I assume the $200 /month plan?
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haha if only. Most people are on the $20 plan. We put a lot of the time-saving features into the $50 plan in the hopes of upgrades. The $199 plan is more about having our team manage the website on-going for them. They never have to log into the product just shoot us an email instead.
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Ah ya, congrats!!!!!
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Thanks!
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Awesome Work!
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Thank you!
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Congrats man, this is awesome!
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Thanks!
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Congrats!
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Thanks!
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Impressive. Congrats.
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@pauljosephcox Dude, amazing! Big congrats to you, especially hiring your first folks and moving into a more high-level role. Scary but necessary as you grow.
I remember my first hire like it was yesterday. Now we're 20+. Sounds like you're on your way!
I run WP Buffs. If you're working with a lot of clients on WordPress, let's chat. Would love to find an opportunity to team up!
Hit me up or hop into livechat anytime :)
P.S. Our COO is out of New York too. Things seem a bit crazy up there! Hope you're safe and healthy, man.
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Thanks! I just sent you an email. Let's connect for sure.
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Love it! The power of a good niche.
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Brilliant. Any plans to re-create a church like experience online? e.g. online sermons?
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Yep! We launched this a few weeks back. https://thechurchco.com/church-online
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Congrats Paul! Are these 200 new customers all churches? If it's okay to ask – how'd you outreach to all of them in 2 months and convert them into sales?
That's really incredible.
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Congratulations Paul! I wanted to ask you, how do you organize and manage your projects with your clients? Slack, Trello? Thank you!
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Since we do them in one week we don't do a lot of project managing. We have them fill out a form and then we have the site back to them in one week.
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I must say that the pricing page is so easy to understand and yet so clean. Loved that 😍
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Thanks!
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Congratulations 🍾
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Thanks!
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Congrats, sir! Way to ride the wave.
EDIT: JFYI it's not loading in Safari for me, but loaded in Chrome just fine.
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Thanks! What wasn't loading for you? I'll look into it.
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The entire page. I had the page's title load correctly but otherwise had a blank browser window. Whatever was broken, it appears to be fixed this morning.
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PS - I do analytics at high scale in the day job. Maybe you'd benefit from having your data in an excellent state as you start to grow? I sent you an email.
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Love this success story! It's proof that niching down really does work.
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Awesome update and congrats! I imagine when you first started the company, you were going to customers to sign them up.
At what point and what happened for the tables to turn--where customers started coming to you?
For example, did somebody find out about you and wrote about your service in a large publication? Did SEO start picking up? Word of mouth? (just some examples to job your memory).
Thanks!
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Dude this is so cool on multiple levels. Congrats! Love the name and branding. As a Christian I never thought of making money in my own "niche" (if you can call a couple billion a niche 😅)
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It was never the goal to make money or I definitely would have charged more than $20 a month. I just got so tired of seeing terrible church websites and wanted to make it easy for people to have good ones. It worked!
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amazing dude, so cool to see your success. all the best with it and will follow your journey!
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This is awesome work, well done!
Question, did this come out of a necessity to build a website for your own church? Or did you see a market for this?-
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Funny story... a friend asked me to build a website for their church and then never paid me. That became version 0.0.1 :)
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Amazing work! I love the website design too, especially the buttons! Its so simple and elegant.
How does this work? Are you guys doing full customized websites? I'm amazed how you can dish out 10 - 30 page websites for free, in just a week!
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We have 6 themes that are interchangeable that we have built. We take people's existing website and place it into our templates via a lot of manual copy and paste. It takes us about 2-3 hours to do a 30 page website. A lot of that is having done about 1000 of them so we can do them very quickly now.
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Thanks for the explanation Paul! Amazing work.
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Thanks!
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The rush to move everyone online has made March the largest month we've ever had. We doubled our new customers, lowered churn and upgrades are up 400%. We're pretty much working around the clock to keep up with demand. Looking to bring on more support next week.
Let's see what these servers can handle. Now that gatherings of more than 100 in some places have been canceled. Churches have turned to their websites to host their services. There's no way to know what amount of traffic we will get today so I bumped everything up multiple tiers and scaled to multiple servers. We'll see if that was enough. I'm ready to keep scaling all day.
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Congratulations. I really like your business. You carved a niche out a competitive SAAS market. I'm curious, what marketing and sales channels you found effective in acquiring customers. Was it word of mouth? Blogging? or straight cold calls?
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Thanks! I haven't marketed at all actually. A few sponsored instagram posts and a retargeting ad. What has been huge for me is Facebook Groups. There are several large groups for church communicators. They ask questions and I help answer them. People slowly worked out that I have a product and they signed up. Now when anyone asks a website question 10-15 people post a link to my product without me doing anything. I've grown entirely from that.
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hi paul - enjoyed reading through all your updates and milestones just now. your story and presence here on IH is awesome as we try to build a product serving the same community. it's encouraging that you found a community to serve that has become an integral part of your own community and customer base.
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The situation is still just as problematic for meetings with a more significant number of people. I hope everything returns to normal because I really miss meeting people at church without a mask and fear. Until then, you did an excellent job because you scaled everything to multiple servers. Now I will watch the activity of several https://firstchurchlove.com as churches portland and feel close to God. Regardless of how I attend a religious service, I feel the warmth of people who believe in holy things.
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Hey Paul, great project you got going here. I’m using Wordpress Multisite to build sites for clients but I’m quite new to it. I use the subdirectory method for the subsites but when I map a domain to subsite it takes it to the main site rather than the mainsite.com/subsite.
So i mapped domain1.com to show content of mainsite.com/subsite, but instead it shows mainsite.com content.
I thought you must’ve had some experience with this when you first started - any advice would be much appreciated. There is zero I could find online on this specific issue.
Thanks!!
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Amazing milestone @pauljosephcox - Would you be able to share if you're using a custom CMS? I'm asking because I have a niche I want to test a similar idea (not related to churches at all). Thank you!
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No worries! We are currently on Wordpress Multisite to handle the accounts. Most of the functionality is custom built by me though so it's not just a wordpress instance. It's a great way to get started quickly though.
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Keep us updated man! We met for church today online in people houses and it was incredible! So I think there's a huge opportunity for you right now!
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Congrats on your success so far! So how did today go with the expected spike in volume? Did you see a significant increase, and if so, how'd things scale?
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We doubled in volume this weekend compared to the average for the last year. Typically see about 30,000 people and saw 60,000 on Sunday.
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Pretty cool product! I added it That App Show and added some feedback. And yea - bunch of churches are online only right now; watched my on YouTube live this morning. ;-)
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Great feedback. Thanks for that!
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It took about three full weeks of solid dev to clear the backlog. Now I'm strategizing about the best way to market and grow the platform. My goal is to hit 1000 active customers by the end of the year.
Things that I've noticed since being full time:
- Churn hurts way worse when this is your only income.
- Client demos and phone calls aren't nearly as fruitful as I thought they would be.
- New features don't drive sales but they reduce support tickets so that's still a win.
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Client demos and phone calls aren't nearly as fruitful as I thought they would be.
Why?
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With our market, we would spend an hour on a phone call or demo, and then if they bought they would buy the lowest package. The numbers just don't add up to make that worth it right now. Even if they stayed 5 years at $20 a month it would be a slim profit after we've build the website for the. We may change it but for now we aren't really offering them.
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Don't you think the learnings and feedback could be built into your product, the benefits of which would scale enormously across all future customers?
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Finally.
This was long overdue and I'm so excited to be here! To wake up at a normal time, work during the day, and spend time with my family in the evening is incredible!
Here's the journey I took to get here.
2015
I started writing code as a hobby to help me with various client work.
2016
I took on a few free customers and kept improving the product. I worked on the platform for about 5 hours a month.
2017
I started taking payments in July and had half my customers quit the same day. We ended the year at $900 MRR. I was working roughly 10 hours a month on the product.
2018
I started to get involved in Facebook groups and helping people with website questions and this resulted in a lot of growth. We did around 150 customers that year. I was working 5-10 hours a week. We ended the year around $6000 MRR.
2019
The growth caught up to me. I was working 10-20 hours a week in addition to my regular day job. We did 338 customers this year. I rarely slept more than 5 hours a day and was always awake and working by 6:30 AM every day. We ended the year at around $19,000 MRR.
2020
I put in notice, quit my job and am full time as of this week. We've done 50 customers already this year and are growing rapidly. We are currently at $21,000 MRR and adding around $1500 a month.
The future is bright! I can't wait to update this in a year.
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Congrats @pauljosephcox! Your journey is similar to ours... it takes a long time! Kudos for sticking with it and providing such a great service for churches.
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Congrats man, excited to follow the progress! (this is the asian guy you spoke to last yr at a holiday party)
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Congratulation! Paul, And I think we should appreciate the people who work hard for themselves.
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Thanks!
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Amazing progression. Congrats @pauljosephcox!
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Thanks!
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3 Comments
Hey Paul, hope all is well - keep up the good work.
Het Paul, I was following your updates since long. Hope everything is fine and you guys are doing great :)
Sent you dm on Twitter :)
Sad to hear! How is it affecting you?