Modern Church Leader
Hear pastors share what's working in their churches. Welcome to Modern Church Leader, a show for church leaders to learn business strategies, leadership skills, church tech tips, and generosity. Tune in for powerful interviews to help you grow your church to be more effective, efficient, and powerful for the kingdom of God. For more information, visit https://www.mclconference.com/
Modern Church Leader
Revolutionizing Ministry Networking with Faithly - guest Alicia Lee
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Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Modern Church Leader. Excited about today's talk, I'm all the way in San Diego and Alicia Lee is coming to us all the way from New York. So we are on the opposite sides right now, but we're going to talk about her great company Faithly, who has a great name. But, alicia, thanks for joining the show today.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Frank. And yeah, I'm in downtown Manhattan, although you wouldn't know it from this soundproof studio that I'm in, but I promise somewhere in the background are cobblestones and exposed brick and lots of, lots of New York city buildings.
Speaker 2:All the good New York stuff. I I've not spent a lot of like. I visited New York a handful of times and my wife and I have gone out there a couple of times just on weekend getaways. But I love the city. I love hanging out there. I'm not sure what it would be like to live there with a family, but it's always fun when we go visit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm from New Jersey. It's not that far from New York. In fact, it's close enough that you kind of grow up pretending like maybe you're from New York, up pretending like maybe you're from New York. But I moved here 20 years ago to work on Wall Street and never in my wildest dreams that I think I'd still be here 20 years later and raising three small children, no less. But the Lord has made it clear this is where he's called us to, it's our mission field. And so I mean I dream about moving to San Diego. I dream about moving to San Diego. I dream about moving to different places, but New York City is where I am. It's where I am.
Speaker 2:I mean, I, it's a cool spot. What does it tell us? Not the point of the show, but what? What's it like to raise kids in New York? Do you live in the city? Like, how do you? How do you do it? What's it like?
Speaker 1:I think it can be really hard. It can be really easy. We have a good setup because we've been here a long time, like we know the value of proximity, so we don't try to make life difficult for ourselves. Like, yeah, the best swim teacher might be uptown, but we don't need the best swim teacher, we just need a no case swim teacher, and the one next door is like that's pretty good. So we keep our life really proximate and so for us, like home, church, school, it's all within like a five-block radius.
Speaker 2:So from that standpoint, my life, is actually.
Speaker 1:yeah, it's actually easier, I think, in some ways, than being in the suburbs where you have to drive from place to place. But as wonderful as the energy of New York is and there's a unique energy like there's no energy, like New York City energy it's also it can be exhausting. Right Like at the end of every day you need your little corner of the city to retreat into your apartment to kind of huddle up with your family, and that's important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, I can imagine that. I mean, you're right about the energy. That's probably what everybody can agree on, right? Like New York City energy is like incredible. Like I love walking around, but, see, I don't do it every day, so it's like when we go visit, it's like this is amazing, this is awesome, let's go on the subway, let's do everything because it's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go on the subway, let's do everything, cause it's awesome, yeah, yeah, I mean if, if you love people and you love being around people, it's especially wonderful. Like I think, um, I counted like a thousand people on my way into work one day. Like, just, you know, you just walk a few blocks, like you go into the coffee shop, like you, you just run into a thousand people, you know, um, and you're barely an hour into your day. But, like I said, you need your corner of New York to retreat to at the end of the day, because it can be overwhelming.
Speaker 2:No, that makes sense. Well, you're here to talk about Faithly, but you've done some cool stuff in your past, so you spent a bunch of time working in the finance space. But you know you're a Christian and serving your church.
Speaker 1:So I'd love to hear just a little bit about kind of your story and how you got to this point. Yeah, yeah, Thanks, Um. So I moved to New York about 20 years ago to work at Goldman Sachs. Um, and I ended up working there for almost 20 years. Um, I didn't think I would. I didn't know what I would do, Um, but it just um. It still amazes me today that that's where the Lord had me for so long. Um, I think one of the reasons why I was at Goldman for a long time is because, um, you know, I was able to do different things.
Speaker 2:I didn't do just one job in the time that I was there so did you work in mostly, or like what, did you bounce around in one particular part or did you kind of go all over the place and do a bunch of different things?
Speaker 1:I kind of went all over the place, and I think that's one of the things that made it really cool and interesting for me. So in my first handful of years, I was an analyst. That's the entry level job for when you start at an investment bank. I was an analyst in the investment banking division, so that's where you do things like M&A and you help to underwrite financing offerings like IPOs or debt offerings. For a few years I worked in our capital markets business where we helped venture funds to raise money and invest, and then for the last many years gosh like eight, nine, 10, 11 years I worked on the trading floor.
Speaker 1:So I ran one of our sales desks on the equities trading floor where, before COVID, like we were the largest trading desk in the Tri-State area. We had 800 people on the floor. And so talk about being surrounded by people like a person, like an inch to your right and an inch to your left, like you can't you have to like kind of like, hold your ear to talk, because you know the people like kind of talking and shouting all around you. It is, um, there's nothing like it's. It's really exciting.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. So you did that for a long, long time and then one day you woke up and you're like I think I'm going to start a faith tech company. And now you're doing that Like what, how did you make the transition? Or what, what? What's the story behind Faithly?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, um, there are some days where it feels that abrupt because I did do something for so long and and you know, I've been um doing the new thing for, you know, less than a couple of years. Um, but as I look back on it, I can see how the Lord brought me to this place. Um, so, about 10 years ago, I started going to my local church it's called Lower Manhattan Community Church and, gosh, the Lord used my church to powerfully transform my life. Like the people in my church, they just they took my face and they turned it to the Lord, and my life has never been the same. And so I dove headfirst into serving my church. Whatever was asked of me, I always said yes. I treated it like God was asking me. So, run a Bible study, yes, you know. Help us to oversee the finances, sure, yes. Join the elder board, yes. And you know, join the teaching team, you know. Be one of the preachers, one of the teachers of this church, yes.
Speaker 1:And I was kind of doing this along one track of my life and then working at Goldman on the other track of my life, and a couple of years ago I really I sensed the Lord closing down the Goldman track of my life in the way that he does, you know, sort of slowly and gently, with closed doors and with sort of unrest, dissatisfaction. But he also gave me this strong sense that I was supposed to do something else. And as I was trying to figure out what that something else was and frankly I thought it was going to be in FinTech, just because I've worked in finance for so long I was recruited to be the CEO of a faith tech company. A friend of mine who had been in my network for a long time and knew how important my faith was to me, she said hey, we're incubating this faith tech startup within our venture studio. Would you come and run it? That's the only thing we're missing is a CEO.
Speaker 1:I really thought about it. I met with their advisors, I met with their developers, I met with their developers, I met with their whole team. But that wasn't the thing. But the moment I started to think along these lines, the moment where I started to imagine the two tracks of my life coming together, I just felt the Lord press this vision upon me. For faithly, for something that can bring together upon me. For faithly for something that can bring together those who serve the church and once I started to think about it, once I started to dream about it, I just I couldn't do anything else. There was just nothing that I could do. I wouldn't even, I couldn't even consider anything else. This is the only thing I wanted to spend any time or any energy thinking about. We're working on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, crazy. What's Faithly Like, I mean, I know, but for the audience, what is it and how long have you guys been at it and how's things going?
Speaker 1:So Faithly is, I think, best described as LinkedIn only for ministry.
Speaker 1:Now, there are a lot of ways in which we're different from LinkedIn and we're going to continue to be different from LinkedIn, but I think that's the best starting place for understanding faithfully, because it is a place for connection. It's a platform that is somewhere between a social and a professional network. It's like kind of that in-between, and so I think LinkedIn, because it sort of hones in on professional identity, I think it's the closest analogy for us. But you and I both know that ministry is not a profession right, it is in a sense, but it's still, I think, the best way to help people quickly understand what it is we're trying to do. We're trying to be a platform where folks who are pastors or church staff or lay leaders or volunteers of their churches, parachurches, christian nonprofits, any organization really that's serving the kingdom where they can come and create an authentic ministry identity, right, there's nowhere else in the digital space where you can do that. Once you do that, the potential to connect and create community and collaborate, I think really starts to open up for ministry.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, when you had the idea or what like. How did the idea shape up in your head when you first started thinking about it? Did you think LinkedIn for ministry staff or LinkedIn for pastors, or was it some other thing? And then eventually you're like, oh, this is kind of like LinkedIn for ministry folks.
Speaker 1:But my definition of pastor, I think, is broader than some people's definition of pastor, maybe because I've always been a volunteer at the church. I consider myself to be in ministry and I know that a lot of folks out there are doing it in that way right, they're bivocational or they're a volunteer, and so I've always thought about it for pastors, but with a very wide and very inclusive definition of pastor. And what I realized quickly and this isn't why I started it, but it became an important reference point for me, and this is what I mean, by the way, when I say yeah, it feels really sudden, but the Lord's been laying the groundwork.
Speaker 1:Not too many years ago, I helped to lead the distribution of an IPO for a company called Doximity, which is LinkedIn just for doctors, and I really got deep in this company, like was really focused on it. It was a really important IPO for my business at the time and I remember being like just blown away by the gross margins and the growth and just the power of collecting this niche audience. And you know I did that. I mean we did so many IPOs at Goldman right, like especially in the post-COVID period when there was this huge tech bubble and this huge IPO bubble. We did it and I quickly forgot about it. But here I arrived at this moment where the Lord placed this vision on my heart and very quickly I realized wait, I know this business, I've gotten my hands dirty with this business, and so that was a huge reference point for me. It kind of helped to validate for me that this can be a really thriving business model that can grow beyond just my two hands.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I've heard of that. It's called Doximity.
Speaker 1:Doximity, doximity, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I've heard of that one before on another podcast I listen to, and then we're talking about like niche communities and just the power that that has. So it totally makes sense to me. So you're a few years in. When did you guys launch officially?
Speaker 1:We launched a couple of years ago and we launched really small.
Speaker 1:We said we don't really know what LinkedIn for ministry looks like yet, so let's experiment in a really low risk way with a very specific niche within our niche.
Speaker 1:And we started out saying let's talk to children's ministers, let's try to create an environment where children's ministers feel really welcome and really connected. And we went to the Orange Conference in Atlanta and we talked to thousands of children ministers. We had lots of them join our platform and we had conversations with lots of them and we said you know what this, this is starting to make sense to us. And as we started to grow from 20 to 200 to in the thousands of members, we said it's time to open up our doors to a wider audience and start to look like the diverse community of those ministry that we want to be someday, like in in with scale. So so we started to do that at the beginning of this year. We started to sort of redesign and rebrand to welcome a larger audience. We went to some more events where we were meeting lead pastors and you know other layers of the church and and so you know we're out there doing that. You know we're out there doing that in this phase.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So kind of like, this year is your larger, larger scale launch to like the whole church, if you will like anybody in some sort of ministry role. Now you're out there and getting known and you are at. You said you were mentioning this at the beginning. You were at Catalyst and somehow by the Tithely booth or something like that, and people were tithely and faithfully, man, we've got good names.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we were at Exponential. We'd love to go to Catalyst at some point. I've heard great things about that conference, but we were at Exponential and it was awesome. I mean just awesome energy. We met thousands of pastors who came through this conference in Orlando and actually we were nowhere near the Tidely booth.
Speaker 2:Nowhere near. We're in a different building, oh no, no.
Speaker 1:But people came by our table and said hey, tidely is so great, we love Tidely. And we said so do we? But we're not Tidely Tidely. And we said so do we, but we're not tidely. But let us tell you about faithly.
Speaker 1:So you know, we, we are we are in those early days where people haven't heard of us yet, and so it's actually really exciting to tell people about who we are and what we're trying to do, and I think we're going to be in that phase for a while.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that, um, one of the things that we've learned over the past couple of years, is that when you're trying to build something in the ministry space, it moves at the pace of relationship Right, like ministry, where it's about getting face to face with people, you know, shaking their hand and telling them you know who you are, finding out who they are and growing in that way.
Speaker 1:And you sort of add on top of that that we're trying to start a network, right, and any network. There's this huge, like sort of chicken and egg, like you got to get the flywheel moving, and we just know for us that this is going to have to be a really patient build, Like this is not a hey, like we're going to. We're going to market this for a couple of years and boom, we're going to be what we're supposed to be. And no, this is going to be like in 10 years when I talked to you, Frank, you're going to be. Hey, Alicia, remember when we talked 10 years ago and now you're a little bit bigger and you look more like what you thought you were going to be. That kind of an effort, I think.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, I mean it's an interesting. I'm sure LinkedIn took a long time to grow. Social networks are, like it's a different thing, you're right. Like operating in the church, like you know it's highly relational. People want to know who you are and kind of what you're all about and what the business is all about. And then, yeah, you got to get you know what's the incentive for people to come and be part of the platform before there's a network and you know how do you create that and all that. So it's going to be fun to watch you guys go after it, for you know, the next, who knows 10, 20 years? So it's pretty cool though, like what have you seen in the early days? Like what you seen in the early days? Like what you know, what kind of feedback are you getting and what kind of? You know churches or ministry professionals are kind of finding value in it. Uh, in the current, you know, a couple of years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, um, well, we've learned a couple of things. Um, we have learned that actually we are building something that is quite unique in the faith tech, christian tech space. There's a lot that's been built, that's being built. That is awesome, but that is way more sort of intra-church focused, like how can I help the church, be the church and serve its congregation and maybe grow its congregation?
Speaker 1:We have not really seen anything that's more of an inter-church platform, right, which allows for connection between pastors of different churches, between churches, between denominations. And we're really excited by that, because if there's one scripture that lit us up when we first started faithfully, it was Acts, chapter 2, verse 1. On the day of Pentecost, they were all together in one place. Like we know that there's just this massive power in bringing believers together. What kind of power can be unlocked if we bring the leaders together, right, those who are serving the church? And so this opportunity really to bring churches and denominations and church leaders together like we are on fire for that bring churches and denominations and church leaders together, like we are on fire for that. So we saw right away that once we got to know the space, so to speak, like wow, no one's really doing this Right. So that's number one.
Speaker 1:Number two we thought we were building a community for pastors to join and we are. But very quickly we heard that the ministry need they have yes, they want to be a part of a community, but they're all trying to build their own community. Everyone's community building needs was their. That was their number one need. And so we quickly realized like if we're going to attract people to faithfully, we've got to give them actual tools, like practical tools, to build the community they want to build. I'll give you a couple of examples, like when we were working very early on with children's ministers. What we heard from almost every children's minister we talked to was my most pressing need is I've got VBS coming up.
Speaker 2:And the best way.
Speaker 1:The best and really the only way to put on like the best VBS for my community is to give those who are running it and leading it a sense that they're doing it together, to create a community across the staff and the volunteers who are doing the VBS. And they said, well, if only we had a digital tool that helped us to sort of collaborate and connect around that. So, like that was the first like need that we heard and from as we started to talk to those across other layers of the church, we heard similar things about this need to create community. Like I really feel pressed upon by the Lord to bring together the lead pastors of like all the lead pastors within my zip code. But you know there's not a great way to do that. People will talk about different technology that they kind of cobble together, patch together to do ministry, but there's not one thing that really serves all of their digital needs.
Speaker 1:So that's how Faithly Groups was born. We created a tool that's kind of like Facebook groups, but just for ministry. Like you're not going to find a prayer board in Facebook groups, you're not going to find like those, or you're not going to find like a drive, the way that we've set it up to be so flexible. So if you're running a missions trip and you're uploading a map, like that works. If you're uploading, you know, a contact list, that works. We've set it up uniquely based on thousands of conversations we've had with ministry leaders about what do you need a faith-led group for no-transcript, so that's a very long way of telling you that that's.
Speaker 1:another big learning for us over the last couple of years is, yes, we're creating a community, but we're giving our members the tools they need to create their own community. I would say another learning that we've had, that we're building for is and I think this is how we're going to be very uniquely different from a Facebook or a LinkedIn In the ministry world, you can't create a platform with, I think, the goal of keeping everyone on the platform right. Like Facebook, LinkedIn, it's all about keeping people on the platform.
Speaker 2:Oh, you want to buy something.
Speaker 1:Buy something on my platform. You want to connect with someone? Do it on the platform For ministry. The ability to go from offline to online, online to offline seamlessly is really important when you're talking about connection and community and ministry, and so the way that we're expressing that is through faithly events. It's kind of like Eventbrite you can do registration and ticketing for ministry events and it's something that we, you know we're really excited about. We've seen people start to use and be excited about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very cool. Have you seen, just from the kind of core I guess, like having a profile, connecting with other people, like what's that dynamic been like? Are you seeing church leaders from kind of all over? I'm not sure if you're global yet or if it mostly US based so far, or kind of how you're doing it, but are you seeing those kind of connections in that activity, like early signs of that activity being a real thing, versus people doing it on, like you said, facebook or you know anywhere else?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I love that question. We've seen it. It is incredibly exciting. You know it's why we're doing what we're doing and every time we hear a story about it or you know, someone throws us a tidbit like we're having a celebration because it's working.
Speaker 1:Like we've seen a lot of early points of validation around the greater potential to connect from a ministry identity. So, first of all, we've seen people create more authentic digital profiles on Faithly Like. We will sometimes look, oh, like this is like so-and-so pastor from Texas and we'll pull up their LinkedIn and we'll see, oh, they're actually sharing their call to ministry in their Faithly profile. Like they're sharing like their dad was a pastor and that's how they got introduced to it. Like they're not sharing that on LinkedIn, right, we'll look at someone else's LinkedIn profile who's on faithly and gosh on their LinkedIn profile. It'll say that they're maybe a creative director. It won't even say that they're a pastor and I don't think anyone's in hiding. But when you are on a platform like LinkedIn, you start to follow the cues there and you start to blend a little bit.
Speaker 2:You're trying to use more generic language and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, cause you want it to make sense to people Like what. You don't want to use language or titles or you know a role that will only make sense to people in the church Like you want to. You want to get out there, so. But so we're seeing people create authentic profiles. We're also seeing people connect and we've heard stories from people of oh, like I have a Zoom scheduled with so-and-so who reached out to me saying, like I have something to offer you on. You know this thing that I think could really help you in this church that you're in. So that is really cool. We've seen people. We saw someone at one of the conferences we went to who said, hey, I met this person on Faithly and I never met them in real life and now I'm meeting them at the conference and so, like I said, like when we hear these tidbits and hear these stories, we're like wow, it's working, like people are connecting and that connection is happening on the basis of authentic ministry identity.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I love that. Well, it's super cool.
Speaker 1:I mean, what do you guys? What's next for you guys? Like, where are you headed with the platform? How are you trying to get the word out? You know, I mean people's connections in their community, right, like we've seen that the things that we've built can do it. And it's just like you said, frank, it's like if you want to create a network that's valuable to people, the scale really does matter. Like the bigger we get, the more valuable it will be to our members, the more they can reach into our platform and find things that will help them in their ministry. And so our biggest focus is getting the word out there about ourselves.
Speaker 1:Like you said, going to conferences, trying to talk to people on podcasts like yours, frank, where you know we know that your community, that you've built here, and that your audience, they're all ministry minded and we really believe that we can add value to what they're doing. And you know we've learned that this moves at the pace of relationships. So we are not in a hurry. You know we're not going to. You know we're not going to be out there sending thousands of cold emails to people hoping that they click on and we just it's not going to, it's not going to look like what you know, sort of typical tech software marketing, but but yeah, we're, we're experimenting with all of that and I'm very excited to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, very cool. What? What's the team look like right now? Like how many team members you have and what roles. Is it mostly engineers? What's all that look like?
Speaker 1:So right now it's basically me and my co-founder. Like we are starting very lean. We don't want to build until we really know what we're building. And so my co-founder he is my technical co-founder, meaning he's the full stack software engineer that has written every line of code on Faithly. He's actually a former pastor, so he went to seminary, was a pastor for 10 years, got kind of burnt out and said I think I'm going to be doing something else for a while. I think I'm going to come back to ministry, but for now I got to pay my seminary loans and so I'm going to go to App Academy retrain as a software engineer. And he did that, worked at startups for a couple of years before he and I actually met on AngelList. Have you, have you been on AngelList, frank?
Speaker 1:I think it's called something else now. I think it's called WellFound now. But I mean, that's another example of a LinkedIn for a niche community. Right, it's LinkedIn just for startups. Well, when I started, faithly, I put out a call for a technical co -founder and I met and talked to a lot of people, but he was the only one I met who was a pastor and a software engineer, oh, and lives in New York city and oh, like, like, has always dreamed about putting all those things together to build something for the kingdom. So, I mean, we were the from the first conversation, we were off to the races and, um, you know, we have, we have a board of advisors, we have, um, we have three guys who are like New York city and we have a built in New York mentality. And we have three guys who are, you know, pastors, ministry leaders, who've been doing it for a long time, who are all New York city guys who are doing this along with us. And so, yeah, we're, we're excited to grow.
Speaker 2:We want to grow our team but, um, but I think for us it's all about that patient build. Yeah, yeah, no rush. You want to figure out, as they say, product market fit right. You're in that stage of trying to figure out how to make that happen. But it sounds like you're getting good feedback and like you're getting to some shows and talking to pastors and church leaders and ministry folks and it's a cool product, like it's really cool that you guys are out doing what you're doing. So we will help spread the word for sure over on the Tithely side.
Speaker 1:Cool. Thank you, frank, really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Where should folks go Like what's the website? How do people go create a profile? What do you want folks to do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so go to our site. It's faithly F-A-I-T-H-L-Yco, not com co. It turns out that M stands for money. It was just way too expensive for us, so we're faithlyco, at least for now.
Speaker 2:Totally, we understand. We went with tithely for the same reason. Very cool. So, faithlyco, go check it out. Guys and Alicia, it was great to have you on. It's great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you, frank, great to meet you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, love it. Well, guys, definitely go check out Faithly and we will see you next week on another episode of Modern Church Leader, see ya.