As I posted a few weeks ago, I have a second job with a start-up technology company, which we are hoping will help us personally keep afloat to continue the ministry, and also to help with certain things that TEN3 needs. Our first contract is doing the tech support for a school in western New York. Our second venture has been developing an app. It's just taking the idea of a student info system that has been available for a long time and making it accessible to a huge market that heretofore hasn't even considered it an option, adding a few features that they find valuable. We so far have 50 institutions interested in it, each of which we estimate, if they sign on, would bring us about 300 customers each. And if all goes well, that will be just the beginning.
Programming, testing, tweaking, and writing help for the app has taken a huge chunk of time. We are a few weeks behind when we hoped to release the first version, but today we announced the first release. There will certainly be tweaks to be made and bugs to iron out, and we have a long list of things we want to improve for the next version.
I'm kind of nervous. Will this side business, with the money and attraction it brings, and the example it makes of GUTS, be the last piece that we need to see our ministry reach as many people with the long-term impact we've always prayed for? Will it be yet another scrap in our pile of failed opportunities? Will it change the direction of our ministry, for good or ill?
Stay tuned.
