Bibleflare

This took up a lot of my brain space for quite some time. At a high level these are my takeaways, what I am most proud to have accomplished, and the most important lessons that I learned.

Lessons Learned

Talk to potential customers before designing anything or writing a line of code.
Timing is extremely important. Sometimes the timing of the idea and willingness to be accepted by the market is not right.
It is extremely hard to reach escape velocity building and designing a consumer application, particularly with a two sided marketplace.
The quality bar when building a consumer application is extremely high.
Software is not the best solution to all problems and sometimes the problem is in itself a structural or cultural one.

What I'm Most Proud Of

The Design

Over the course of building Bibleflare, I can look back and see how my frontend and design skills improved significantly. I learned how to use Figma. I learned how to use Storybook. I created a UI Library for the project with a complete set of reusable components. Overall, the design is clean, modern, and feels very close to what I'd look for in a production application.

Technical Learnings

I learned so much from building this because I started working on it from absolute scratch, minus running rails new bibleflare --database=postgresql to spin up a new Rails app. I owned the product design, frontend, backend, API design, security considerations, databases, deployments, monitoring, and every aspect of the platform. I think there is a blog post that is needed to outline everything I learned, but for now I'll say I'm extremely proud of how much I stretched myself building this out.

Status

Bibleflare was shut down in August 2025, and is no longer available online. I may pick it back up in the future, and if there's any interest in the product please contact me.

The Initial Concept

The beginnings of Bibleflare started during my time in college. It was a side project in my mind and it morphed and changed a lot since then.

I was in a text group with some people in various walks of life who would read the same book of the Bible each month and share their takeaway in the text group every day. I found so much value in this that I wanted to extend it and turn it into a product – make it easier to collectively read the Bible with others. I coined the idea "Scripture Together" and purchased the domain scripturetogether.com in a hurry! If you visited that link, you would be redirected to bibleflare.com. All this being said, I didn't understand at the time how hard it is to actually build something of value. I didn't know anything about software unit economics, or the effort it takes to build a software company. I also hadn't built anything or developed the necessary skillet yet in order to pull off something of value either.

The Current Cultural Moment

Where I am today spiritually is very different than my college days. You may glean some insight about that from my reviews of Holy Hurt and Better Ways to Read the Bible.

After thinking through the problem space more and talking to potential users, I saw the indication that people did not want this as much as I thought. Most people I talked with, specifically more evangelistic protestant denominations/traditions, viewed their faith more through the lens of hyper-individualism than collectivistic means. Culturally, this group of Christians in America seem to just want to be told what to believe and share, versus the desire to perform the hard work of being introspective, meditative, and thinking for themselves.

Speaking of the current cultural and political moment we're living in, that has made it even more challenging for me to pursue the idea in its original form. There is too much potential for increase of division among us, not to mention the inadvertent creation of an echo chamber, and that is not what the world needs in our current moment especially from Christians. It's important to recognize that applications of technology can have unintentional negative consequences in the world, of which social technologies in particular have undeniably participated. Social media has become tightly integrated into the fabric of our culture and the world has experienced the resulting collective division, cultural splintering, and ideological fracturing.

I still believe there is a need for beautiful and intentionally designed technology to aid Christians in healthy spiritual formation. But the world does not need another unremarkable Bible app, and evangelical protestant Christians especially don't need another social app to sow division and hurt.

Call to Action

Christians need to get off their devices, go out into the world, and make amends where harm, hurt, and brokenness have been sown in their relationships and the world.

There is so much work to be done to:

Heal where there has been hurt
Mend where there has been harm done
Make reconciliation where there is brokenness in relationships

This mending of brokenness with our neighbors starts with showing up and listening to the grief of those people who have been hurt and harmed by Christians. For evangelical protestant Christians in the United States, I plead with you to sit down with the people who have experienced grief and hurt from dogmatic and corrupt religious institutions, narcissistic leaders, and abusive relationships. Listen to their stories.

Christians, you do not need to win an argument or be "correct" using the Bible as a weapon against the people whom you are trying to be winsome. Jesus being the tangible living expression of how you should be replicating and modeling after, take a hard look at how he honored all people, including women, the widow, the marginalized, the poor, and the immigrant.

More than anything right now, evangelical protestant Christians need to practice the way and teachings of Jesus through bearing witness to the grief of those who are holding it.