Sermon recordings into social clips for churches

The idea

Almost every church already records its Sunday service, and almost none of that footage gets a second life. The person responsible — a comms volunteer or a part-time media staffer — knows they should be posting clips, but pulling three good moments out of a 40-minute sermon means an evening in a video editor nobody has. So the recording goes up on YouTube in full, gets 60 views, and dies.

Generic AI clippers like Vid.AI and Opus prove people pay to skip editing labor, but they score moments for retention-bait virality and know nothing about sermons. The wedge is domain awareness: detecting illustrations, one-liners, and scripture payoffs specifically, overlaying the actual verse reference on screen, and shipping a posting cadence built around the church week. Whisper plus ffmpeg makes the pipeline nearly free to run, and the source material renews itself every seven days — the best possible shape for subscription retention.

Who pays

The buyer is the church itself, out of a real media/comms budget line — $29 to $79 a month depending on volume, billed to a card the media director controls. Churches between 200 and 2,000 attendees are the sweet spot: big enough to have a budget, small enough to lack an editor. Distribution runs through the tight referral network of worship and media directors — Facebook groups, church-tech conferences like the Church IT Network, and one church’s Reels visibly improving is a pitch its peers see every week.

MVP scope

• Upload or YouTube-link ingestion, Whisper transcription, Claude-scored moment detection tuned for sermon structure
• 9:16 auto-crop with burned-in word-level captions and scripture-reference lower-thirds
• Clip review grid with basic trim, download as MP4
• Church logo watermark and one caption style preset
• Stripe subscriptions with per-sermon quota
• Skip for v1: direct social publishing/scheduling, multi-camera input, translation, team roles, custom fonts

Build SermonClips, a web app that turns full sermon recordings into captioned vertical clips. Stack: Next.js (App Router) frontend and API, Whisper for transcription, ffmpeg for cutting and rendering, Claude API for moment detection.

Core flow: 1) Church uploads a sermon video or pastes a YouTube link. 2) Whisper produces a word-level timestamped transcript. 3) Send the transcript to Claude with a sermon-specific prompt that scores segments for clip-worthiness: personal illustrations, quotable one-liners, scripture payoffs, altar-call moments. Return 6-10 candidate segments with start/end timestamps and a suggested hook title. 4) ffmpeg cuts each segment, crops to 9:16 with a face-tracking center crop, burns in word-by-word captions, and overlays the scripture reference (e.g. Romans 8:28) as a styled lower-third whenever the transcript cites one — parse references with a regex over book-name variants. 5) User reviews clips in a grid, trims edges with a scrubber, downloads or schedules.

Pages: landing, dashboard (sermon list), sermon detail (clip grid + editor), settings (caption style, church logo watermark), billing. Include a Sunday-to-Tuesday template that suggests a posting order for the week.

Non-obvious details: chunk Whisper on silence boundaries to keep timestamps accurate past 45 minutes; render captions as ASS subtitles piped to ffmpeg, not drawtext, for word-level timing.

Pricing: Starter $29/mo (2 sermons/mo), Growth $49/mo (5), Pro $79/mo (unlimited, team seats). Stripe billing.