(You can read more of our original ideas in our archive. You can order a business plan of this idea here.)
Problem: 84% of the world has faith in a religion according to the Washington Times. However, most religious enablement platforms are low-tech or not updated with the same rigor as traditional apps and platforms. As Romeen Sheth describes,
The top 4 religions alone constitute ~6B individuals. Christianity - 2.3B Islam - 1.8B Hinduism - 1.1B Buddhism - 500M Even "smaller" religions like Shinto and Sikhism have 100M and 30M followers respectively.
Solution: This business would invest in building out the technology infrastructure that allows people to practice their religion of choice. It would focus on 4 major areas:
Scriptures: Allowing any religious person to access the core text of their religion on demand. The core competitors in this space include Bible.com which created The Bible App (which has more than 450 million downloads).
Tithing: A core tenant of many religions is giving back to the institution. The business would build out tools and platforms for existing congregations and institutions to tithe through every possible medium: Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay, PayPal, and others.
Communing: Similar to how Meetup.com allowed individuals to “discover events for all the things you love”; this branch of the business would allow those of the same religion to meet with one another at their own cadence. Since many churches meet once a week, this would allow a high number of weekly active users and could also provide daily active engagement as well.
Streaming: Given the remote economy, another branch of this business could optimize streaming for churches, mosques, synagogues, mandirs, temples, houses of worship, and more in order to engage their membership despite being hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Post-event Engagement: A core part of faith is prayer and other post-event engagement on a weekly basis. Pray.com is an example of one platform that has tapped into this before. Annually, they charge $80/year for a family plan. This business would do the same or something similar through personalized prayers or AI prayers like GPT-3.
Competitors (as reported by Pitchbook) include Ministry Brands, which “was acquired by Genstar Capital last year and has received additional backing from Providence Equity Partners and Ares Capital, is seeking to sell itself for at least $1.5 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The company offers software to churches and other places of worship to streamline financial accounting, background screening, online giving and other services.” It’s rumored to have been acquired by the Vatican.
Broadly, online religious communities have become an object of study in academia and are even seen as one of the major buds of growth for the next generation of religion. In her 2019 paper Contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies, Heidi A. Campbell and Giulia Evolvi write that
Digital religion studies specifically investigates how online and offline religious spaces and practices have become bridged, blended, and blurred as religious groups and practitioners seek to integrate their religious lives with technology use within different aspects of digital culture.
…
This provides an overview of how different religious actors and groups have negotiated their relationships, spiritual activities, and technology uses within online, offline, and online–offline intersecting areas of their lives. Overall, the article will provide a critical assessment of the current state of digital religion studies.
Given the number of people who practice a religion, we can estimate that the market size would be amongst one of the largest. BBC Future, an analysis of future tech trends have commented about the rise of religious tech since 2017 and corroborate just how large the market could be. In fact, “one in five people who identify as Catholics and one in four Protestants seldom or never attend organised services, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre.” A major industry in the next decade will be at the intersection of religion, technology, access, and any of the 5 areas written above.
Monetization: Variable depending on business model: perhaps subscription by churches, or payments by end-users or consumers.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)