Interesting to see new entrants to the church market. I built a similar product marketed specifically to churches - https://simpledonation.com
Here are some of the things I've learned:
Building the technology is the easy part. Stripe/Balanced (and all the other payments APIs) have made it easy to do a payment startup.
Customer acquisition and sales is the hard part.
1) Decisions are made by committee and for normal sized churches (< 500 attendance) the decision maker is not on staff. Therefore repeatable, cost-effective customer acquisition is really, really hard. Only a few channels are available.
2) The buyers are generally not business thinkers. I've tested different sales pitches, asking "would you rather have a service grow your top line by 10% OR cut costs by 15%?" Most say "cut costs" which is actually a net loss. Meaning: sales is consultative and educational and you have to sell it to over and over to every person on the committee.
3) Churches have a tough time justifying $50/mo for a SaaS service. The margins are too thin to make a lot of money in transaction rev. e.g. I processed $30k last month and made ~$300. You need a ton of volume for the math to make sense.
There are churches like Newspring (hi Joshua!) that are run differently and understand the values of technology. Most of the 300,000 evangelical churches in the US are not like that.
Here are some of the things I've learned:
Building the technology is the easy part. Stripe/Balanced (and all the other payments APIs) have made it easy to do a payment startup.
Customer acquisition and sales is the hard part.
1) Decisions are made by committee and for normal sized churches (< 500 attendance) the decision maker is not on staff. Therefore repeatable, cost-effective customer acquisition is really, really hard. Only a few channels are available.
2) The buyers are generally not business thinkers. I've tested different sales pitches, asking "would you rather have a service grow your top line by 10% OR cut costs by 15%?" Most say "cut costs" which is actually a net loss. Meaning: sales is consultative and educational and you have to sell it to over and over to every person on the committee.
3) Churches have a tough time justifying $50/mo for a SaaS service. The margins are too thin to make a lot of money in transaction rev. e.g. I processed $30k last month and made ~$300. You need a ton of volume for the math to make sense.
There are churches like Newspring (hi Joshua!) that are run differently and understand the values of technology. Most of the 300,000 evangelical churches in the US are not like that.