Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Simmons.
Josh graduated from Texas A&M University in 2000 and then served as a youth minister and music minister for 4 years at two different Catholic parishes (one in Garland, TX).
While working in the Church, he started designing websites on the side in 2003 to generate extra income for his growing family.
In 2004, he shifted his focus to website development (online software) and developed many custom applications, including the real-time scoring system for the NBA’s Vegas Summer League (which was eventually taken over by NBA.com).
In June 2005, Josh left his position at the parish to pursue website development full-time. In December 2005, he released the original version of eCatholic and signed on a few “beta” parishes. In early 2006, eCatholic began to gain momentum and started to spread to parishes around the country. Eleven years later, eCatholic has become the leader and the largest provider of Catholic websites in the world.
In addition to their website platform, eCatholic also provides an online donations and payments platform (eCatholic Payments) and live video streaming service (eCatholic LIVE). With an ever-expanding breadth of online software, eCatholic’s vision is to become THE technology provider for the Catholic Church.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Creating and growing a business is never without challenges. Eleven years ago, when we started, our biggest challenge was getting the word out about eCatholic and helping parishes understand the critical importance of a great website. We’ve also had technological challenges through the years as we’ve scaled from a handful of parishes on a single server to thousands of clients across a vast cloud infrastructure. Today, our biggest challenge is growing rapidly while continuing to provide phenomenal customer support.
Please tell us about eCatholic.
eCatholic is a leading technology provider for the Catholic Church. We provide beautiful, simple cloud solutions to help improve communication, evangelization, and stewardship through our website and payments platforms, as well as through online video streaming. Our goal is to help Catholics focus on their mission, not technology.
The cornerstone of our success has always been to: 1) Provide incredible user experiences through beautiful, simple software and 2) Provide phenomenal customer service.
I am most proud of the amazing team and culture that we have built through the years and humbled that we have had the opportunity to impact millions of people through the software that we have created.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Honestly, there is not a lot that I would do differently. We are who we are because of the challenges that we have overcome and the lessons that we have learned along the way.
Contact Info:
- Website: eCatholic.com
- Phone: 877-932-1776
- Email: sales@eCatholic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eCatholic
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eCatholic
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/eCatholic
- Other: http://www.ecatholicblog.com
Image Credit:
Joe Garcia
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