Why we said no to listing secular events next to faith events
Three weeks after launch, we had our first real conversation about scope. A platform owner wanted to know if Gathrd could list their corporate team-building weekend. It was a polite email. Reasonable question. And our answer was no, we won't do it. Here's why that moment changed how we think about what Gathrd is meant to be.
The pressure to be everything
Every events platform starts here. You build for your community. Then someone asks if you can do a bit more. List one secular event. Become a general marketplace. Capture more of the calendar. The unit economics look better that way. Eventbrite proved it works. Why wouldn't it work for us?
The honest answer is that it would have worked, at least commercially. But it would have broken something we built Gathrd to solve in the first place. Churches and faith organisations already struggle with discovery. There's no central place to find what's happening in your denomination, your city, your tradition. So we built that place. Specific. Intentional. For them.
If we'd opened the door to secular events, we'd have solved a problem that doesn't exist for us and created a new one: dilution. Suddenly a vicar searching for Pentecostal prayer nights would be scrolling past yoga classes and networking brunches. The directory becomes less useful, not more.
What a faith-only directory actually means
This isn't about exclusion or judgment. It's about clarity. A worship night. A conference. A prayer meeting. A community lunch run by a parish. Those are the events that belong on Gathrd. They serve a specific purpose in a specific community, and that community deserves a place that speaks their language and understands their context.
When someone opens Gathrd, they know what they're going to find. Not a nightclub venue masquerading as community. Not a corporate conference. Faith events, listed properly, with denomination filters so a Methodist can find Methodist events, a Catholic can find Catholic events. That specificity is the whole point.
It also shapes how we build features. Our door check-in system, for instance. We integrated NFC via TapTrust because churches wanted it. No nightclub cares about that. Our Gift Aid split-checkout matters because UK charities do. Eventbrite doesn't offer it because they're not building for that audience. Every choice we make assumes you're running a faith event, not a general one.
The cost of staying small
There's a trade-off, and we live with it daily. A broader platform would capture more events, more fees, more data. Our 3% platform fee (versus Eventbrite's 6.95% plus £0.59 per ticket) already makes us the more honest choice for churches. Adding secular events might have doubled our revenue by now. It didn't. We chose depth over breadth.
That decision made sense because our customer wasn't asking for everything. They were asking for something. A place for their specific world. When a church staff member or a ministry leader opens Gathrd, they should feel like it was built for them, not retrofitted to serve ten different markets. That feeling is harder to fake when you're trying to be everything to everyone.
It's also why we've kept pricing simple and fair. The Church plan is £19.99 a month or £199.99 a year for unlimited events. The Ministry plan is £49.99 a month. We're not trying to upsell. We're trying to stay sustainable while serving the communities we actually understand.
A decision we'd make again
Six months in, I don't regret that email we sent. Saying no to the corporate team-building weekend was saying yes to something more important: building a platform that respects the shape of the communities using it. Not trying to stretch ourselves into every corner of the events market.
That doesn't mean we're closed. We listen constantly. We've added features based on real feedback from the people running events every week. Multi-denomination filtering came from church feedback. The offline door check-in came from retreat organisers who needed it. But those are all refinements to the same thing we set out to build.
What it does mean is that when you use Gathrd, whether you're discovering a prayer meeting or booking your congregation's annual conference, you're not competing for attention with a nightclub listing. You're in a space built specifically for you. That's not a limitation. It's the entire purpose.
The events world doesn't need another general marketplace. It needs better tools for the communities that already exist. Does your platform feel built for you, or does it feel like you're fighting for space?
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