FaithStreet Progress Report: November 14, 2011

**The past few months have been an exciting time for FaithStreet, and we have made a lot of quiet progress towards our goal of building a platform that helps New Yorkers (and visitors) find and connect with any church in NYC.                        **

 *The FaithStreet Team: Hard at work at FaithStreet World Headquarters, Williamsburg, Brooklyn*

- CTO/ co-founder Glenn Ericksen joined the team - Re-launching new and improved FaithStreet platform in early December - 120 NYC Churches have signed up for FaithStreet - Working with Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Entrepreneurship Initiative - Brought on 3 fantastic interns - 480 Facebook likes—Help us get to 500! - Helped start and sponsor NYC Faith+Tech Meetup (70 members in first two months) - Won Ultra Light Startups August Pitch Contest

Over the past 15 years, many powerful and transformative web services have been created using the power of the internet, but (incredibly), no one has succeeded in building a web service around the idea of uniting churches and Christians on a single platform.  That is what FaithStreet is trying to do.  

We believe that ours is a huge and immensely important vision, but we are more confident than ever that we are going to succeed in building a world-class web service that helps people looking for a church find and connect with churches in their city, and that helps ALL Christian churches harness the power of the internet and online social networks to do effective online outreach.  Building a vibrant, city-wide Christian community around the FaithStreet platform is essential to accomplishing those goals, and we are very hopeful that we can achieve that.  Beyond those things—Who knows?

We started working on building FaithStreet in May of 2010, which means we have been working on executing on our vision for more than a year and a half.  It has been a lot of hard, yet deeply rewarding WORK, and it has often felt like pushing a very large rock uphill.  If you have been checking in on our website ([www.faithstreet.com](http://www.faithstreet.com)) over the past 6 months, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that we have been doing much, because so much of our progress has been about LEARNING, building relationships, and finding the right technical partner who believes in our vision and who has the talents and drive to help us fulfill it.

But, visible progress is going to appear soon.  Within the next month, FaithStreet will be launching a completely new and redesigned website that is going to be vastly superior to our current platform.  We will also, for the first time, be completely in control of our technology.  We are building the new platform ourselves, as opposed to having a 3rd party developer to build it—as is the case with our current site.  This is going to be a fundamental change for us, and will enable us to continuously build and test new features.  We are really, really excited about that.  Stay tuned!

**Here are some other things that we have done recently:**

-As of today, we have 480 facebook “likes.”  Would you please help us get to 500 by [“LIKING” our page on Facebook?](http://www.facebook.com/faithstreet)  We would love you forever…and ever.

-In October, we welcomed aboard our CTO/Co-Founder Glenn Ericksen.  This was a HUGE step for FaithStreet, and we are all pretty excited about it.  With the addition of Glenn, we now have 3 full-time employees.  Here’s our blog post announcing Glenn’s addition to the team: [http://blog.faithstreet.com/say-hello-to-the-new-faithstreet-cto](http://blog.faithstreet.com/say-hello-to-the-new-faithstreet-cto)

-With Glenn onboard, we’ve been working on hard on building the new platform (in Rails) for about two months.  We started from SCRATCH, and we are adding some really interesting functionality that is going to empower church communities to do outreach on behalf of their churches, and provide much more useful and interesting information for people looking for churches.

-We have 120 churches in NYC who are now managing their church’s FaithStreet profile.  These churches are an extremely diverse group, which is exactly what we want FaithStreet to be all about.  These churches include Catholic churches, Episcopal churches, Presbyterian churches, Non-Denominational churches, Baptist churches, historic churches, church plants, French-speaking churches, Spanish-speaking churches, large churches, tiny churches, churches in all five boroughs, and everything in between.  It’s amazing.

-We started an internship program, and this fall we have had three awesome interns that have been doing great work for us.  Here’s our blog post on our interns: [http://blog.faithstreet.com/meet-the-faithstreet-interns](http://blog.faithstreet.com/meet-the-faithstreet-interns)

-We’ve been participating in Redeemer Church’s [Entrepreneurship Initiative](http://www.faithandwork.org/ei), which has already been hugely helpful to us.  We are learning a lot from the director of Ei, Calvin Chin, and we’re looking forward to learning a lot more.  Learn more about [Ei’s Business Plan Competition here](http://www.faithandwork.org/the_competition_page1234.php).

-In September, we help start and sponsored the [NYC Faith+Tech Meetup Group](http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Faith-Tech/) to gather together people who have an interest in the intersection of faith and technology.  We now have more than 70 members in the group.  We just had our first meetup (at Grace Church on Broadway and 10th—Thank you Grace Church!) in October, and [our next meetup is tomorrow.](http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Faith-Tech/events/39521652/)  We are expecting at least 30  people.  All are welcome!

-In August, we won the [Ultra Light Startups pitch event](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/%3Chttp://ultralightstartups.com/2011/august-2011-feedback-forum-and-pitch-showdown/%3E), which was pretty exciting and great for developing relationships in the NYC Tech Community.

If you made it this far, Thanks!  And thanks for all of your support.  

The FaithStreet Team: Sean, Ryan and Glenn