Discover the fusion of faith and technology with Corey Aldrin, a trailblazer who's bringing the digital revolution to the doorstep of the church.
The heart of our conversation beats with Corey's latest venture, SermonShots, a tool that empowers churches to embrace AI, magnifying their messages across the digital arena.
For more information on SermonShots visit https://sermonshots.com
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Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
#modernchurchleader #churchleadership #churchtech #churchmedia #sermonshots
#sermon
Discover the fusion of faith and technology with Corey Aldrin, a trailblazer who's bringing the digital revolution to the doorstep of the church.
The heart of our conversation beats with Corey's latest venture, SermonShots, a tool that empowers churches to embrace AI, magnifying their messages across the digital arena.
For more information on SermonShots visit https://sermonshots.com
--
Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
#modernchurchleader #churchleadership #churchtech #churchmedia #sermonshots
#sermon
Hey guys, frank here with another episode of Modern Church Leader. Here with my new friend doing cool stuff with AI in the church. Corey, what's going on, man? Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Corey Aldrin, like Buzz, it's like it's going to stick in my head forever now. Where are you at? Where are you actually located?
Speaker 1:I am just outside of Indianapolis.
Speaker 2:Oh, very cool. We got quite a few team members out in that area, so you guys will have to meet up one day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have you lived out there like born and raised, or did you make your way out there at some point?
Speaker 1:No, I've kind of been all over the Midwest, actually Born and raised in Iowa, lived in Chicago for a while, moved to Wisconsin and then moved here to Indianapolis six or seven years ago. Crazy.
Speaker 2:You like it out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, midwest is great. It's all I know, yeah, it's all in there. Yeah, Indianapolis is great like big city stuff, but it's just like a small big city, right yeah, so it's great. I lived like five miles outside of the like, not even five miles, a couple miles right outside of Indianapolis, but I've got cornfields all around me. So it's like what city can you live like right next to that?
Speaker 2:you also have like that sort of cornfield Right, like straight farms and cornfields, and yeah, that's cool, very cool. So you started Sermon Shots but that's we'll kind of let's go back a little bit, but you know we'll get to Sermon Shots and AI and all the cool things that you guys are doing right now. But yeah, give us a little bit of your you know background into you know into the church and how you started doing things like on the technology side, like you know, to help people with your story a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got my start in the online space 12, 15 years ago wanting to, wanting to quit my job and live the dream of being my own boss Various things that failed early on. Yeah, my first real success, I think, was probably early on in the Facebook days of pages starting I created. I created one of the first Christian Facebook pages to hit five million followers when that mattered too like nowadays you can't really do a whole lot with a follower anymore, right, you share something in like 1% of the page fans seeded things. But, yeah, got my start there being able to. I don't know when I posted something on there, my website would go down Like it was just like.
Speaker 1:So that's the impact that it had back then. So I guess yeah.
Speaker 2:What was the Facebook page? What?
Speaker 1:was it? It's still actually there. Everything quotesinfo is the website and that's the name of the Facebook page. The website actually came after the page, kind of.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 1:Well, it was just a daily quote on a picture.
Speaker 2:every day Some popular quote you've probably seen, and it just blew up like everyone joined and then you would send people to your website. Did you ever was it mainly just quotes, or did you ever evolve it into anything else? Did you turn it into any kind of business?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so it actually was one of the first things that helped me transition to being full time. Because, yeah, I turned it into selling like ad space early on, like created a website for it that like it had a daily devotional with it, so it was quote, and then the devotional was related to that quote, and then I could make ad money from all the ads around that and built an email list, sell the ad space there, and then on the Facebook page there'd be like a quote and I'd sell the bottom third of the image where somebody was like selling a book or something like that, and so those did really well early on.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, very cool. Okay. So Facebook page, so you grow up in the church or where's your connection just spiritually in your faith?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I grew up in the church, went to church every Sunday, wednesday growing up and still to this day I'm very involved in my church now to part of the leadership team, lead small groups and things like that. So I've been passionate about helping the church in different ways and so that we'll probably get into that at some point, about sermon shots as well. But yeah, that's been a big impact into why I am where I am right now Right, right, right, right.
Speaker 2:So Facebook page, and then what's next? Like, fill in the journey up to sermon shots.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Facebook pages took a dive at some point, like you know it used to be. If I shared something, half the people would see it. So I share something to five million people, two million people would see it. Right Nowadays it's like 100,000 people will see it and so like it.
Speaker 1:Just you know, it was trickling down and so I really just started evaluating what else I wanted to do and I just just by chance I think I decided I wanted to do software, helping build something. I guess the chance part was helping somebody an author, friend do some stuff. And I got into helping authors and software built something Top myself out of code because I had a hard time finding developers to do things like follow through, mostly because now, thinking back, it's mostly because I didn't have the developer mind, I didn't really know how to like interact as well with them, but through that I taught myself how to code and my first coding project became what now is a book brush and it's a really popular software for authors to create images and all their marketing images and things like that.
Speaker 2:Oh, very cool.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I taught myself how to code and do all that through that, that business I have a partner with. And after I think it's like year seven at this point, which was a couple of years ago it just it didn't need two owners in it anymore and my business partner and I wanted to get back into like helping the church. That book brush thing kind of diverted us away from that by chance again, but it was a thing that we wanted to get back to. So I put on my market research hat this was before Christian quotes. I had a market research. I was doing market research at a pharmaceutical company, so I had that sort of mindset.
Speaker 1:So I started talking to churches and they just kept telling me that basically it was clips was a thing that they really wanted to know how to do better. This was about two and a half years ago when I probably had my first call and I was like, great, this looks pretty clear, this is what churches want. So I was fortunate to have a good head start on that, because book brush had a video component and so I was able to kind of use that technology that we had built over the few years, yeah. And so about two years ago we launched sermon shots and all along the way it's in helping churches, and so we're what I'm doing now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just so that everyone watching cause I don't assume everyone actually knows tell us what clips are like. Give us a little more context clips and what you're talking about and then give us kind of what's what's sermon shots, like what does it do and how is it helping churches?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so clips are like. So think the Instagram reels and Facebook reels, tiktok, you know the popular 30, 60 second vertical format. It's churches taking their sermon and converting that into those 30, 60 second like amen moments, the viral, more viral moments. That's what a clip is, and so sermon shots generally helps churches turn their sermon into other content, repurpose it primarily. Clips is what people use it for, got it.
Speaker 2:So they'll take an hour sermon or their 30 minute sermon or whatever it is. They upload it somewhere and then sermon shots is going to take it and automatically create a handful of clips from that for them, and then they'll take it and go out and post it on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or wherever they want to put it.
Speaker 1:Yep, exactly, you upload your sermon. It runs through some different AI stuff and spits out some things for you like here's a good one, here's a good one, you like it, and then you can edit it. It takes like what used to take probably an hour or more to do down to about five minutes if you want something really quick, right, right, yeah, no, I could see that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I would say, yeah, like at least an hour, because you have to like watch the whole sermon and you may have been there on Sunday and seen it, but to do this you have to kind of sit there, watch the whole thing. You have to like mark the spots you want to go grab something from, you got to cut it and then you probably are doing all the cool like overlay with text and other images and all this kind of stuff. So, yeah, I could see it taking at least an hour. And that's for somebody that knows how to use video editing software and like has some of those skills which you're already kind of limiting down the universe right there.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I hear all the time from churches. I don't have a video person on staff or my video person is doing these other things. I can't ask them to do this too and right, or outsource it. It's expensive, so yeah that's exactly it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, when you were doing the market research, was it as simple as people were just like, yeah, these social media shorts or clips or a thing I don't know how to do them, but I want to because I hear they're all the rage, like that's what's happening. You're seeing it happen on all the platforms. Was it like as simple as that when you were talking to churches?
Speaker 1:That simple. Maybe not quite that simple, but it was like it was coming up a lot, right, and so I kind of summarized that until, like, that was probably a two month process or so. So I probably summarized that really quickly. But, yeah, it was a combination of talking to pastors, uh, in churches, and hearing that more than anything, like it wasn't everybody was saying it, but it was like we were hearing it a lot, uh.
Speaker 1:And then the other thing that was happening was so, when we were reaching out to people to try to just get them on a call, we were using various ways, like I was testing out what's getting people to respond to me, and so, like, hey, I'll make this for you or this for you, just jump on a call, I'll talk to you about, like and um, every time I said something about clips, I'll make a couple clips where you just joined a call with me. It was like every other person was replying to that, right, yeah, make me those two free clips, make me those two free clips. And so it was like it was you know, putting all that data together, was it was it was pretty clear that it was like a missing thing in the church taste, right, right.
Speaker 2:And so that insight. But then you're like you. It's not like you had the software over there doing some video stuff. Was that tool using AI at that point?
Speaker 1:Nope, it wasn't, it was really the. What we had built is probably still to this day, one of the more complicated videos. Complicated, right. One of the complicated things is basically turning all your sort of custom stuff into a video that looks like what you're making, right, that that's what we had and so we just had to be like okay, we've got this and we got to do this. Other stuff, which was the first AI thing that we put, was fully transcribing your sermon. Okay, yeah, so that you could search it. Like, still to this day, we have this feature where you just like I remember the pastor said this moment type it in and it goes right to that spot in the video. So the AI was like automatically transcribing the whole thing for you, right, that was early on before.
Speaker 2:Like the AI term we didn't use that term because it wasn't really like a term Two years ago, nobody was talking to you about AI, right, but now, like in the last six months, it's all about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so since then, when we release these other features, we will use the term AI in some of our features, because now it makes sense to people, right, right?
Speaker 2:So when you first kind of you had talked to a bunch of church to do the market research, you figured it out. What were the early days like, when you kind of like launched the software or launched the business? Was it like an immediate hit where you're like people are just it's working?
Speaker 1:So yes, although maybe it depends on what you mean by immediate hit. Yeah, I think yes, in the early days, as you can probably imagine, we kicked something off pretty quick. It didn't work, awesome Right, we pushed it out and there was bugs and stuff. And one of the early indicators that like it was kind of a hit to me was people were staying with it and like continuing to use it, even though, like in the very early days, it was kind of like sometimes it didn't work.
Speaker 2:That's huge, yeah. So yeah, all the software guys know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:So, but they were staying with us at a pretty high percent, even though, like, there were times where it just wasn't working well for them, right, and so that was just like there is a huge, there wasn't anywhere else to go, was the thing is like, okay, but what do I do if I, you know, in the early days, there wasn't an alternative?
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, yeah, so that was that to me was like, even though the numbers weren't huge, like at the time we were, you know, we had just launched people willing to stay with us during that time made it feel like an immediate hit for me, right, right, it probably took, you know, just launching a product Isn't the last thing the whole marketing side to the business to took some time. Learning, like the terminology, to use the marketing messages and things like that took a little bit of time. But once we, once we figured that out and started advertising it, it took a big jump. So, starting at about the January of 2023, when we started advertising it, we took a huge jump and it just didn't grow in sense.
Speaker 2:Right, right, just then. So yeah, Immediate hit. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, I was just gonna reiterate what I was saying, like was it an immediate hit? Yes and no, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know you get it. You get the sense of the question like, yeah, you didn't have I'm sure you didn't have 10,000 users on day one, but you kind of you got the sense of like, yep, this people want this because they're sticking around, despite you know the issues with the software and whatnot. So yeah, and so like, how many users are you up to today? Like, how many churches are you know making clips on summer jobs?
Speaker 1:We have had come through at some varying level of plans. We've had a free plan at various times, yeah, we've had about 9,000 churches use it at some point and but we have 1500 that are consistently using it on one of the paid plans. Very cool.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Yeah, that's great man, congratulations. Like super, super cool to build a business and see it working. Let's talk AI for a little bit, because, you know, ai is all the rage. Every church on the planet is probably hearing about it and all that and wrestling with it.
Speaker 2:But you guys are building a tool that is actually using some version of AI or something related to AI in a way that's like makes total sense, like there's no, you don't have to get worried about the AI bots, you know, taking over the world in this particular use case, right Like? You're using it? I don't think so. Yeah, you're using it to help churches produce content at scale, replicate their sermon into lots of pieces of content, which, like, just makes absolute sense. And churches have been hearing about that idea for years now. Right, like, that concept isn't new. It's been going on for years and you've built a tool that's helping them do it. So, how are you using AI? Like, kind of, go, try to dumb it down a little bit, maybe, but gotta get into the weeds on. Like, how is sermon shots using AI Beyond transcription? Right, you talk transcription, which is cool, but, like, what else have you done over the last couple of years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the ways that we're currently using it in the tool for users.
Speaker 1:Two of the biggest ways.
Speaker 1:One is basically using it to save some more time for the user of like pick out the moment so you might not have thought about this moment, or maybe you only watched half the sermon or you didn't watch sermon that like what are the good moments at, and so when you upload, it runs through some various AI algorithms and it picks out five to 15 good like 30 to 60 second moments for you Got it and yeah, so then you can just download it as is, or one of the ways that we think about it internally at least, I do a lot is AI does some awesome stuff and can get you a good final product, but you probably need to edit it still.
Speaker 1:Like all of the different stuff out there, it's getting good, but, like if you really want it to be your own especially like, I guess, just putting it in the church space, like if you wanted to do your church's voice or your like church's thing you still have to edit it a little bit. So what we are kind of guiding with AI has been help the church save time, but like allow them to make changes to it as well, because it's AI is not, is not. It's not a church staff member, I guess. So when it comes to clips and all the other repurposing stuff we do, we give you the ability to edit it as well. So if it picked a good moment but it's like didn't quite end the way that we would like to end it.
Speaker 1:You can go down and add a couple sentences if you want into it and it puts it together for you, right, right, then start, right, the way you liked it. You can change that.
Speaker 2:Just the it makes sense like help them save some time, automatically pick the shots. Do you have you like? I guess I would love to know like, what kind of AI are you running it through? Like, how have you built the back end? Not like built it, but you know. Are you running it through like open AI's models? Are you running it through Google's models? Did you build your own thing based on all the content that people are putting in? You know, like how. And then, how are you tuning it? Is it getting better? Are you seeing like the hit rate? It's creating 10 clips and when I first started it, you know two of the clips were getting used, because you know eight of them were really bad. They just picked bad sections of the sermon and you've tuned it over time and now you're seeing churches use six or seven of the clips, versus you know two back in the day. So you know, just geeking out a little bit here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I can share a lot Some of it's a little bit of our like secret sauce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, they'll share everything, yeah absolutely Sure, sure, I can share things so it changes. So, as you know, the AI is changing, changes quite quickly. Yeah, a lot of the tools out there, a lot of, and so, like we've used various models to certain degrees, one that does something really well and another one that does a different thing well, got it, and so it changes a little bit over time. But basically, open AI, chat, gpt, open AI, the you know that's definitely a big one. They're really good at what they do and so we utilize that a lot. We do our own sort of fine tuning for sure, because the church like kicking moments for a church is different than like taking a good marketing message, whatever podcast right. So there's things we've had to tweak there, different models getting better at things. I guess one thing you have to think about too is some of these models are really expensive to use on a one hour, two hour sermon, so you got to kind of play with that as well.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, because you're cost to do it and I think that's a good point about that Cause, like you have to chart, it seems kind of like this weird thing, like oh, you're doing this thing, it should be cheap, but no, you're actually running it through. These models that can be pretty expensive to just run hour, hour and a half long sermons through, you know, mid weeks it's a lot of content.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep. And then but sometimes open AI will announce hey, we're producing like everything's getting cheaper. But then we also released this other plan that now is more expensive or you know all those different things. So, uh, open AI definitely, definitely part of it. Uh, filtering it through. I'd say some of the things that have gotten really good or better over time is understanding timing a little bit better, like how long is this clip or how you know, uh, open AI, out of the box, does a little bit of a better job of that.
Speaker 1:At times we have to tweak it, we have to filter it through because it knows words but it doesn't always know length very well. We do a thing over here, send it back. Do a thing here, send it back. It's some back and forth but Open AI has gotten better about that. The other thing is on the clips, like categorizing things. Early on it it picked up a lot on prayers or things like that. That in a transcription, if you're reading it out of the context of a prayer, sounds great. Sometimes some people can have great powerful prayers but maybe not always the greatest clip to post because once you see, like Pastor Seds down or whatever, yeah, totally that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So we've had to figure out ways around that as well, but those are the types of things that I think are getting better as we can tweak the well. Here's a scenario we didn't think about, and how do we adapt it if that scenario happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Are you seeing, based on what you've been doing over two years, do you see more of the clips getting used Like, as it pre-decides, here's 10 great clips or 20 great clips. Are you getting? Do you track that? Even I know I'm probably asking about something.
Speaker 1:Maybe you don't even track yet, but Well, not exactly, because I'm not sure how many people are. I can see how many people are downloading, but I can't see how many people are actually sharing. I guess you can kind of assume that they're being shared.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I also don't know necessarily the metric of like, depending on what your metric is of success, which is probably views. I also don't know necessarily that Right. Months a month, weeks a week, yeah yeah, my metric, I guess, is number of downloads that are happening per user and number of customers coming in hearing about this, and those seem to be good metrics Growing yeah, no, it's cool stuff, man.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe we just spent a few minutes on what do you think what's the future Like? Where are you guys headed and what are churches? How are they using it in different ways? And you're like, oh that's you know, I didn't realize they would do that. So now I think we should build this set of things. Or you know, what's the future of sermon shots and kind of, how are you going to keep growing it beyond where you're at today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I've briefly mentioned that there's other things in sermon shots of like repurposing, right? I think that's really where sermon shots is going to be moving to is how can we do like we just help the church do this one thing really well from their sermon? A lot of the underlying code and technology that we built can actually be applied in lots of different ways, so why not help them create images and recaps and things that church is already doing with AI that we're like we could turn this on for users, like discussion guides and summaries that you can share on social media social media, you know all that. So that's really where we're going to be moving towards more in the next three to six months, right, yeah, and actually I don't know when this is going to be posted, but today we actually released a big update related to that moving forward.
Speaker 2:Nice, and today is where we are February 29th, so it'll get released and we'll leave it to the folks that you know published the podcast, but today is the 29th, so you released something big today. That's kind of moving in that direction of just more repurposing of the sermon into various media types. Yep, yeah, yeah, very cool, man. Well, it's so cool what you're up to. I mean I appreciate you coming on the podcast. This is awesome.
Speaker 1:Thanks.
Speaker 2:Where should like just give people a quick like how to go check out sermon shots, where should they go?
Speaker 1:Simple sermonshotscom. It's where you can see everything that we're doing.
Speaker 2:Easy.
Speaker 1:You can also connect with me if you want on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to chat at any point If anybody has questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. And you said is there a free plan today? Can people check it out, or is it? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every one of our plans has 14 days for free. You can try it out. Everything's unlimited use during that 14 day time period. So you can see it all in action.
Speaker 2:Go, get as many free clips as you can in 14 days and hopefully you'll fall in love. Very cool. Well thanks, corey man. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. We'll do a follow up, I'm sure, maybe in 12, 18 months, because AI will have gone crazy in that amount of time and we'll see where you guys are at then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, love it, man. All right guys. Well, thanks for listening today. We'll come back next week with another episode of Modern Church Leader. See you, guys.