SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 4, 2007 -- MyChurch.org is focused on helping churches start their own social networks. Here's my interview with Joe Suh, CEO and Founder of MyChurch. - Mark Brooks
What is the founding story of MyChurch?
MyChurch was created out of personal needs. My wife and I had been going to our church for a couple of years and, despite it being a fairly large church, we only knew a handful of people there. We met a lot of individuals, but we didn’t really have any strong connections with them. We really felt an online community could strengthen some of those loose connections we were making every Sunday.
We also never visited our own church’s website. We felt that church websites were really geared towards visitors and not necessarily members. As a member, I would like to have an interactive incentive to visit. I would like to not just download content, but also create my own content, write a blog, share photos, organize my small group events, and interact with my friends. Those are the two personal needs that led to the creation of MyChurch.
How does your service work?
We like to think of it as a Facebook for churches where both individuals and churches have profiles. We provide churches with tools that cater specifically to church communities. For example, we give them a group blog, a resource-sharing board (kind of like a classifieds board), a space for their sermons (audio or video files), and other interactive and collaborative tools.
Who inspired you? Who are your competitors?
We were initially inspired by some of the other more generic social networks. I remember being in love with Friendster back in 2003 and thinking that a church could really take advantage of such functionality. Then, I started seeing churches appearing in places like MySpace in 2004 and 2005. Churches were naturally adapting and gravitating towards social networks and I realized there had to be a better tool to cater specifically to them.
As far as competitors, a lot of the larger social networks have church communities. For example, there are about 130,000 religious groups on MySpace. We don’t necessarily view MySpace and Facebook as competitors, but there are certainly a lot of church communities that exist on those types of sites already. And there are also some direct competitors. There are a number of generic social Christian networks that are trying to be the Christian alternative to MySpace. They’re sort of indirect competitors, though, because our service is focused on the church and not just Christianity in general. So, while other Christian social networks might be gathering Christians together, we’re trying to gather them for a specific purpose and that is to bridge their offline church community with an online one.
Have you thought about starting sites for other faiths?
We’re a part of the Christian church community – it’s our culture and it’s what we know best. We know how to foster communities for Christians. We’ve been approached by those of other faiths – Jewish people, Mormons, Muslims – and we’ve considered licensing our software out, but we haven’t personally considered creating communities for different faiths.
How does MyChurch make money at this stage?
There are two models. The first is your regular advertising model where we try to find relevant advertising for our Christian community. And the other is a subscription-based one. Our service is free, but churches can upgrade to take advantage of extra features and more disk space. Monthly charges for a church are $12 for the extended feature set and $25 for the premium one.
As time goes on, we’re seeing more and more churches jumping onto the subscription model. In fact, our subscription revenue is rivaling our advertisement revenue, which is new and good for us. We’d rather have a site that’s a service as opposed to one that’s just full of ads.
As far as revenue generated, I don’t want to disclose any exact numbers, but it’s a four-digit figure per month, which is enough for us to cover our costs and consider ourselves profitable.
How many employees do you have?
There are just four of us and we’re all full-time. What’s interesting about our site, though, is that we also have this collection of volunteers. They’re members of the site who really want to be involved. They do everything from moderating content to watching out for spammers and scammers to handling church submissions.
There are 300,000 Christian churches in the United States, but we only accept those that adhere to the Nicene Creed and the concept of the Trinity. Most Christian churches accept the Nicene Creed, but some reject it and it’s these latter churches that we don’t want. So, we research the churches that want a page and make sure they’re in agreement with the Christian culture that we’re trying to foster. For that, we need a lot of manual labor to regulate and moderate lists and make sure that the churches that are being added are good churches, real churches with people who we want to invite on our site.
How did you initially promote and seed MyChurch?
We did a lot of things. In the early days, we did a lot of PR. We reached out to bloggers and journalists and we also did an email marketing campaign targeting pastors. We purchased a list and contacted the pastors and said, “Hey we’re creating a space for your church here. Would you like to get started on it?” I think PR was the main vehicle that really drove the growth of our site. The initial buzz generated our first wave of early adopters and we’ve mostly relied on organic growth since.
How fast is the site growing now?
Now, we get about 400 new members and about 50 new churches a day. We have about 35,000 members right now, but we’re hitting a point where we should be getting into the six-digit member registration fairly soon.
In terms of traffic, we get about 3 million page views per month and about 200,000 unique visitors per month.
What are your goals for 2007 through 2008?
By the end of the year, we hope to eclipse 100,000 registered members. We also hope to be in the 10,000 churches range. With some 300,000 Christian churches in the United States, getting 10,000 of them is by no means a majority, but it’s a good threshold to strive for. We just want to continue growing, continue making the service available to more and more churches and more and more people, and just continue on this path of profitability. We’ve been self-funded to this point and we think we can continue that. Hopefully, with the number of both subscriptions and advertisement inquiries increasing, we can continue to be a profitable company in ’07 and ’08.
