Platform

People keep asking us for this. Amid a highly uncertain world, the demand here is extremely clear. It reminds me of starting OpenTent - I just had to say “Salesforce consulting” and people were like PLEASE HELP. At this point many teams have (mostly) figured out Salesforce, but synagogue admin staff are still in a PLEASE HELP moment. When my own synagogue director heard we were considering building this, she literally cornered me and demanded to know if they could be first in line.

Why so intense? The market has been dominated by Shulcloud, with roughly 50% of synagogues using it and the rest on a handful of much smaller options or duct-taping together tools not built for them. Shulcloud launched in 2011, was bought by private equity in 2018, and hasn’t been meaningfully updated since.

Sara said “it feels like a ‘ping’ from the universe telling us to just build this thing” and I said it feels more like a whack in the face than a ping!

It’s a super cool moment to build software. The code is now the easy and cheap part, freeing us up to focus on empathic interfaces and the adaptive challenges our customers face. The prototype we built in a week would have taken a team of developers a year in the olden times.²

In some ways this makes it scary - will the next new model render our work immediately obsolete? Perhaps! But in the meantime we think our domain knowledge and distribution ability will let us get a great product into the hands teams who are hungry for it and unlikely to try to build their own.³

We also get to design our product to be AI-native, or more specifically agent-native. From the beginning we know that we are creating a set of tools for both humans and agents to use, designing around a “human in the loop” way of working where AI handles the drudge work and takes generative actions on behalf of humans.

Here’s a compelling article about the opportunity for vertical software + AI if you want to go deeper!

We’re coming full circle. I called my business OpenTent as a biblical reference because I thought we’d work with synagogues, churches, and mosques on their software. It turned out that Salesforce is just not the right fit for 95% of synagogues - too expensive to customize and maintain. Without an option we could stand behind, we stopped working with that field (except for Central Synagogue, one of the biggest in the country so they can make it work).

But now we get to make our own tools, and the opportunity feels personal and poetic. The problems I set out to solve 11 years ago are still there, and in the meantime my team and I have learned a ton - about synagogue data models, software adoption, and how to run a healthy business. We’re ready to take another swing!