Joe Suh is a co-founder of MyChurch, a social networking service for church communities. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Visit the team blog here.

What inspired you to create MyChurch?

I’ve been going to my own church, The River in San Jose, for a couple years. But I only knew a handful of people out of the 800 members in our church community. I felt there was a dimension of online communication and networking that wasn’t addressed by static church webpages and mailing lists. Social networking was already popular, but Myspace started running into its problems. So I wanted to create a trusted social network, where your community is based on regular face-to-face interaction and centered around a real offline community.

I also saw a lot of churches with really bad webpages. Church congregants had no incentive to visit their own webpage, and potential visitors couldn’t find church webpages due to poor SEO. Some churches even started to maintain Myspace profiles which were arguably better for both community-building and visitor visibility. I felt there had to be better tools to incorporate social networking and increase exposure. Giving the church its own space while letting individuals also have profiles was a natural evolution.

How is the service funded. and what is your business model?

We’re funded through a single angel investor currently. We are starting to talk to some institutional investors and interested companies and organizations for further funding. Our revenue will be from advertisements and subscriptions. Subscriptions let churches turn off ads and enjoy more disk space and extra features.

And due to frequent inquiries, we are also considering co-branding or private labeling our software for large churches that want their own standalone social network.

How many people are working on development, and what programming languages and technologies do you use?

There are 4 of us on the team. We all have computer science degrees (from UC Berkeley) so we can all code. We use PHP and MySQL (LAMP for life!) and use Javascript in appropriate places.

What are some current facts and figures for MyChurch?

6500 members have joined since our launch in Sept 2006. And 1700 churches have started forming communities. We generate about 1M pageviews/month. Some church communities have their MyChurch profiles show up on Google search results ahead of their main church webpage.

Do you plan on sticking with the domain name MyChurch.org?

Yes, we like the .org. The majority of church websites are .org, so we fit well within that framework. I admire craigslist.org – a for-profit company that strives to make a useful tool (as opposed to quick profits) and withstood the .com bust. We plan to stick around for a long time, and I think the .org embodies our vision better than a .com

What are some things you have learned during this whole process?

One of the most important things I learned was that distribution is key. For a consumer website with no brand name behind it, it is a fairy tale to think that users will magically show up and stick around. “Viral growth” is not that easy and needs a good distribution strategy that involves both engineering and marketing to really be effective.

Marketing fascinates me, and I’ve learned a lot about it. Subtle differences in packaging go a long way. People won’t understand “social networking and Web 2.0 for churches” but they will react to “Myspace for your church”