I love the “New Year’s” season. I don’t know about you, but I always enjoy looking back and evaluating if I’m any different than the person I was 1 year ago. Sometimes that rear-view mirror leaves a lot to be desired. And other years, I can’t believe the different person I’ve become.
Each year, Leah and I take some time to look back on the year that’s been and pray through where the Lord is leading us for the year to come. We’re just about to enter that process now, both personally and as a ministry. We’re not done yet, but I wanted to share a few highlights so far about the year from a ministry perspective:
Where we started in 2022: LOTS of Questions
“How do we structure this new ministry?”
“How do we communicate our vision in a way people can understand?”
“How do we balance all that we dream of doing? Where do we get started?”
“What kind of product should we build in the digital discipleship space?”
Where we ended in 2022: Clarity and Direction
Focused our efforts on building and getting our first product in people’s hands, rather than the details of our ministry structure (yet)
Clarified our vision of both the ministry and product, via a 5 min product pitch (post a comment if you’d like to see it, and I’ll follow-up with you directly)
Established a 3-year plan/vision of where we’re going that we pray through regularly
Clarity on the product we’re building: dship.
Deeper understanding of our target users with real data / validation of their problems
Positive feedback on initial product wireframes / concepts (with a few rounds of iterations)
Built a functional prototype, tested with real users, learned a lot, and revised the direction.
Renewed vision for a prototype we’re testing this spring
Since it’s been a bit since I’ve posted, I thought I would share a quick summary of Lightworks and our first product:
Lightworks
The greatest identity-shaping force in the world today is digital, for better or for worse. And we believe we can use digital to shape and form people in the way of Jesus. So we created Lightworks, a missional product organization dedicated to harnessing the power of digital to make disciples. We build innovative digital experiences (i.e. websites and apps) and ministry networks that support the full spiritual journey, from never having heard the name of Jesus to walking fully in His ways. We envision a day when every person with internet access has the opportunity to be a disciple who walks fully in the ways of Jesus.
First Product
The first digital experience we’re building is called dship. It’s an online community dedicated to helping new believers walk in the Way of Jesus. It leverages a scalable, digital-first model we call micro-discipleship that distills the critical ingredients for spiritual growth and formation into a peer-to-peer learning environment, and in bite-sized and deeply personalized formats that meet you in the moment and lead to transformation. Our immediate focus in the new year is to build and release an early MVP of the dship. platform.
Lessons Learned
There’s probably a lot more I could share, but here’s a few lessons from 2022 that are top of mind:
Phases and Stages — The journey of building a startup can be FULL of questions. Early in the year, we spent too much time trying to answer “stage 4” questions in “stage 1”, which slowed us down. But we’ve learned that not all our questions have to be answered immediately. This was huge for giving us focus to move things forward. See this post for more.
Just try something — It’s hard (for us), but critical to move from researching in the garage to testing things in the real world. We learned we can’t wait until it’s “perfect” before putting it in the wild - whatever it is will always change once it comes face-to-face with real users.
Number of “Decimal Points” — How much data or detail do you need before you’re willing to act? In ‘22, we saw that sometimes we can seek more detail than is necessary before moving forward (like when we had 4,500+ stickie notes for one test early in the year). Asking ourselves, “Is this a 1 decimal point decision or 4?” has been a helpful way to evaluate if we have enough information to move forward or not.
Bring others into the process — We’ve been learning the limits of our own abilities this year, and we’ve been growing in inviting others to contribute to the work. It’s a lot easier for me to think “I can figure it out” or try to muscle through it to save time – but the reality is there are some amazingly talented people who could be willing / interested in helping, and they could save us a ton of time/energy in the long-run. This has especially been an area of growth for me, personally.
Speaking of which, we’ll be posting another Captain’s Log with more details on exactly where we’re at in the product journey soon. Be on the lookout there for ways to get involved – we need your help!
Thanks for following along with the journey of creating this new digital ministry. There’s a lot we have to learn, and I’m so glad to have you along for the journey. We’ll be aiming to post here much more frequently in the new year - so keep an eye out for more updates of our work, what we’re learning, and stories of how God is at work using digital for His Kingdom. I know the Lord has a lot in store for 2023 – and I’m excited to share it with you as it happens.
YES. These are all critical and I definitely need to check over some of my own work in light of this wisdom. Appreciate you guys and excited to see what you build this year!