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Comment by el_don_almighty | Hacker News Reader

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el_don_almighty

This is a VERY crowded market. What are you bringing that makes your product unique and valuable? Videos?

Is the video content curated? By whom and how?

Are you charging the video suppliers? What's the model for you and for them?

If not, do you have copyright coverage for the videos?

This seems like a challenging app space for an independent developer

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Most of the apps in this space that are doing really well (Youversion, Abide, etc.) are geared more towards making the Bible quick and easy. This is great, but I believe people also need an easy way to learn on a deeper level. Videos are the starting point, but I hope to add more ways to accomplish this. My vision is to help "bridge the gap" between academia and the everyday Bible reader.

The video content is reviewed (currently by me via an admin portal). All the videos are publicly available (Youtube and Vimeo).

A real business model is TBD. It's currently more of a "passion project" but if I can gain enough traction I think there's some interesting ideas for monetization and partnerships.

Full disclosure, i haven't had a chance to look at your app yet, but I have a question. How does it compare to apps like Logos (Aka Verbum)? Specifically, can it compete with the logos PC and mobile integration and libraries?

Thanks, very interested to learn about your product.

While this could very well change as the app evolves, my current vision is that Spark Bible bridges the gap between a normal Bible app and more academic tools like Logos. I would like for people to experience the same ideas that a biblical scholar has via studying commentaries and Greek/Hebrew using Logos, but without having to go to seminary. Organizations like BibleProject and many seminaries are making some great educational content freely available online, which in large part gave birth to this idea.

Thank you for the info, I will download your app at some point.

As a (fellow?) Christian I'm curious how you imagine curation of videos would scale, especially like you mentioned somewhere, different viewpoints can be highly controversial even amongst the Christian community.

Ideally, Spark Bible would help overcome the embattlement that divides Christians by providing education that's more academic and explores differing viewpoints. But, I know that is probably over-idealistic thinking.

One idea I have is to build an ML model that could be used to personalize what content is presented to a given user. It should be pretty trivial to build & train.

From what I've seen of scripture, people are perfectly happy to donate to the project. I'm in one open source group and we've had people request to donate even though there's nothing left to spend the money on. Often they choose pay for things like hosting, so I think a Patreon would be a good enough business model. Or just a premium app with advanced features.

A video being publicly available doesn't mean you have permission to reuse it for free. If you do not have permission to use those videos you are stealing from those creators.

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