Sermon recordings into social clips for churches

The idea

Most churches record every service and do nothing with the footage. The pastor’s best 60 seconds — the story, the one-liner, the scripture payoff — dies on a two-hour YouTube archive with 40 views. Meanwhile the church down the road is growing because a volunteer spends six hours a week hand-cutting Reels. Generic clip tools like Vid.AI and OpusClip prove people pay to delete that labor, but they score moments for podcast virality, not sermon structure, and they have no idea what to do with a scripture reference.

The wedge is sermon-aware everything: moment detection trained on how sermons actually build (illustration, application, payoff), scripture overlays rendered automatically, and a publishing cadence template that matches church rhythm — upload Sunday afternoon, clips scheduled Tuesday through Friday. Weekly services mean weekly uploads, which means the habitual usage pattern every subscription product wants and most never get.

Who pays

The buyer is the communications volunteer or part-time media staffer at churches of 200+ attendance, spending from a real media budget that already covers ProPresenter and Planning Center. Price at $29-79/mo across three tiers keyed to sermon volume and campuses. Distribution runs on the church-media referral network — worship and media directors share tools in Facebook groups and at conferences like Salt — plus content marketing aimed at the search term church social media clips.

MVP scope

• Upload or YouTube-link ingest, Whisper transcription, Claude-scored sermon moments
• Vertical clip rendering with word-by-word captions and scripture lower-thirds
• Review screen with boundary trimming and four caption style presets
• Sunday-to-Friday scheduling template with direct download as fallback
• Stripe billing with three tiers and a 14-day trial
• Skip for v1: direct social API posting, multi-language, live-stream ingest, team permissions beyond shared login

Build PulpitClips, a web app that turns sermon recordings into captioned vertical clips. Stack: Next.js on Vercel, Whisper for transcription, ffmpeg for cutting and rendering, Claude API for moment selection.

Core flow: user uploads a sermon video or pastes a YouTube link; Whisper transcribes with word-level timestamps; the transcript is chunked and sent to Claude with a sermon-specific rubric that scores segments for illustrations, one-liners, and scripture payoffs; the top 6-10 segments are cut with ffmpeg into 9:16 clips with burned-in word-by-word captions; user reviews, trims boundaries, and downloads or schedules.

Pages: landing, upload dashboard, clip review screen (video player, transcript editor, caption style picker with 4 presets), scheduling calendar preset to a Sunday-upload, Tuesday-through-Friday posting cadence, settings, billing.

Non-obvious details: detect scripture references in the transcript with a regex over book-name variants plus Claude verification, and render the reference (for example John 3:16) as a lower-third overlay during that clip. Extend clip boundaries to the nearest sentence end from the word timestamps so clips never cut mid-phrase.

Run transcription and rendering as background jobs with a queue; email when clips are ready.

Pricing: Solo $29/mo (4 sermons, 40 clips), Team $49/mo (8 sermons, watermark-free, 3 seats), Multi-campus $79/mo (unlimited sermons, brand presets per campus). 14-day trial, no card.