After months of strategy, development, testing and more than a few rebuilds, FaithFinder officially launched September 1.
For IDMD, this project has been interesting for a very different reason than simply launching another website.
FaithFinder gave me an opportunity to build and test something I have been thinking about for some time:
How much more can we build when AI, automation, CRM technology and good digital strategy are designed together from the beginning?
FaithFinder started with a fairly straightforward problem.
There are thousands of churches, Christian schools, businesses and community organizations doing meaningful work, but the information surrounding them is scattered across websites, Google profiles, social media pages and traditional directories.
At the same time, many smaller organizations don’t have large marketing teams or technology budgets.
I wanted to solve both problems.
The result is a platform designed not only to help people discover organizations, but eventually to help those organizations manage leads, promote themselves, automate communication and grow — without requiring an enterprise-level marketing budget or technology department.
And a lot of what made the build possible was the combination of AI-assisted development and marketing automation.
The Problem: A Directory Wasn’t Enough
The first version of the idea was simple:
Build a searchable Christian directory.
But once I started mapping the user experience, it became obvious that a conventional directory wasn’t going to solve the larger problem.
People needed an easier way to search.
Organizations needed better profiles.
Businesses needed a way to generate and manage leads.
Churches and schools needed ways to verify and update their information.
And if FaithFinder grew, the administration behind all of that needed to scale without requiring someone to manually process every form, email, subscription or listing change.
That meant I wasn’t really building a directory.
I was building a digital platform with several interconnected systems underneath it.
Today, visitors can already search the FaithFinder church directory, explore Christian and faith-based education options and discover faith-friendly businesses.
But the more interesting work is what happens behind those pages.
Using AI to Accelerate Web Development
One of the biggest differences between building FaithFinder and developing a traditional website has been the role AI played in the process.
I did not want to rely on AI to decide the strategy.
The architecture, customer journey, business model and user experience still needed human decisions.
Where AI became enormously useful was in helping me build and troubleshoot technical pieces that would traditionally have required significantly more development time.
For example, the FaithFinder directory needed to handle large amounts of listing data while still feeling simple to the person using it.
The church directory includes search, filters, location data, maps and individual listings.
Instead of manually creating hundreds or thousands of pages, I was able to use AI as a development partner while building the code and logic required to turn structured data into a functioning interactive online directory.
AI helped accelerate the process of working through PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, troubleshooting problems, refining search behaviour and improving the user interface.
That didn’t eliminate the technical work.
It changed how quickly I could move through it.
The difference is important.
AI is exceptionally useful when you know what you want the system to accomplish, can test what it produces and understand enough of the technology to identify when something isn’t working properly.
Used that way, it can dramatically shorten the distance between an idea and a working prototype.
Building Pages in Minutes Instead of Hours
Another goal was to avoid rebuilding the same page every time a new organization joined FaithFinder.
So I created reusable page structures for the major listing categories.
Instead of designing each listing from scratch, FaithFinder can use templates for:
- churches
- Christian schools
- businesses
- featured listings
- claim and verification pages
- future promotional and campaign pages
Once the information and assets are ready, a new page can be assembled much more quickly while maintaining consistent branding, navigation and user experience.
That changes the economics of running the platform.
If every listing took several hours of custom web development, scaling FaithFinder into hundreds or thousands of organizations would quickly become impractical.
When the structure is templated and the repetitive work is automated, the platform becomes much more scalable.
That is something I think many businesses underestimate when they approach website development.
The question shouldn’t only be:
What does this page look like?
It should also be:
What happens when we need 100 of them?
GoHighLevel Is Becoming the Operational Engine
The website is only the front end.
Behind it, I am building much of the operational infrastructure in GoHighLevel.
This is where FaithFinder begins to move from website development into CRM and marketing automation.
The goal is that organizations entering the FaithFinder ecosystem can move through structured processes rather than relying on manual administration.
That includes:
Form and survey intake
When a church, school or business submits or claims a listing, the information enters a structured system instead of disappearing into an email inbox.
Automated workflows
Different actions can trigger different workflows depending on whether someone is claiming an existing listing, adding a new organization, requesting an upgrade or submitting information that requires review.
Email automation
Confirmation emails, follow-ups and future onboarding sequences can be triggered automatically based on what the user has done.
CRM lead management
Organizations and contacts are stored within a CRM rather than fragmented across spreadsheets and inboxes.
Intelligent tagging
Contacts can be categorized based on organization type, location, listing status, product tier and other attributes.
That becomes increasingly valuable as the database grows because segmentation can happen automatically.
A Calgary church should not receive the same communication as an Edmonton business or an Alberta Christian school.
The CRM should already understand the difference.
Automating Payments and Subscriptions
FaithFinder also has paid visibility and marketing tiers, which introduces another operational challenge.
If the business grows, I don’t want subscriptions being manually invoiced, tracked or reconciled every month.
The platform is being designed to support automated recurring payments and subscription management, connecting the customer journey with the CRM.
That means an organization can eventually move from:
interest → signup → payment → onboarding → listing status → communication
without requiring a person to manually move information from one system to another at every stage.
This is where good automation becomes particularly valuable.
The goal isn’t automation for its own sake.
It is eliminating repetitive administrative work so people can spend their time on the parts of the business that actually require people.
Building Triggers Into the Customer Journey
Triggers are another important part of the FaithFinder architecture.
A form submission isn’t simply a form submission.
It can become an event.
For example:
A business submits its information.
That can trigger a CRM record.
The CRM can apply the appropriate tags.
A workflow can notify the correct person.
The business can receive an automated confirmation.
Its record can enter an approval process.
If it chooses a paid product, a different workflow can begin.
If it does nothing, a follow-up sequence can eventually take over.
The same principle can apply to churches and schools while still giving each type of organization its own journey.
This is what I mean when I talk about building automation into a platform rather than adding it as an afterthought.
Designing for What Comes Next
FaithFinder is live, but the backend is still evolving.
That is intentional.
Some of the next development priorities include:
Automated approval workflows
Rather than manually tracking every new or modified listing, submissions can move through structured review and approval stages.
Webhooks
Webhooks will allow different platforms within the FaithFinder technology stack to communicate automatically when specific events occur.
That opens the door to significantly more sophisticated automation between the website, CRM, payments and other tools.
Automatic upgrades
Eventually, changing a subscription tier should trigger the appropriate changes throughout the system automatically.
A customer shouldn’t need someone manually updating several platforms because they moved from one plan to another.
The goal is:
upgrade once → update everywhere.
Deeper segmentation and automation
As the database grows, the CRM can become increasingly intelligent about who receives which communications, opportunities and resources.
That creates the possibility for highly relevant automation without losing the local and community-oriented nature of FaithFinder.
AI Didn’t Replace the Strategy
This may be the most important lesson from the project.
AI helped me build FaithFinder faster.
It helped with code.
It helped troubleshoot.
It helped me iterate page designs.
It helped identify problems and think through solutions.
It dramatically expanded what I could realistically build myself.
But AI did not decide what FaithFinder should become.
That still required understanding the audience, identifying the problem, designing the customer journey and deciding which technology actually belonged in the system.
There is an important distinction between:
using AI to make something
and
using AI to help execute a well-designed strategy.
The second is where I think the real opportunity lies.
What FaithFinder Has Taught Me About Digital Development
The biggest takeaway so far is that the barriers to building sophisticated digital products are changing very quickly.
A few years ago, creating something like FaithFinder would likely have required a much larger initial development budget and several highly specialized resources before the first version could even be tested.
Today, the combination of AI-assisted coding, WordPress, CRM platforms like GoHighLevel, marketing automation and payment technology makes it possible to prototype, test and improve much faster.
That doesn’t make digital strategy less important.
It makes it more important.
Because when the cost and time required to build something decreases, the competitive advantage increasingly becomes:
Knowing what should be built in the first place.
FaithFinder Is Live — But This Is Version One
September 1 marks the launch.
It doesn’t mark the end of the build.
I expect FaithFinder to look very different a year from now.
There will be more automation.
More organizations.
More data.
More integrations.
More intelligence behind how the CRM operates.
And inevitably, more things that need to be rebuilt because the people using the platform show me a better way to do them.
That is part of building a digital product.
You don’t build everything and then discover whether anyone needs it.
You build the foundation, launch, learn and improve.
That is exactly what we are doing now.
Or, if you’re an Alberta business interested in becoming part of the soft launch, you can add your business to FaithFinder.
The platform is live.
Now we get to see what happens when people start using it.
