Founded in December last year in Nigeria by 26 year-old software engineer Oyelaja Oyekan Adebambo, Prayerbox.co is a Twitter for all things religion and aims to help users remain connected to their creator unlike other platforms.
Prayerbox.co is a simple way for users to share their hopes, struggles and gratitude with friends, families and their religious communities. Prayerbox allows users to create profiles and post their prayer requests and testimonies with ther followers. It also connects like-minded users to share prayers into each other’s inboxes so they can pray with them or encourage each other in the spiritual journey. Those who follow each other can find prayers and testimonies in the feeds just like Twitter does.
Prayerbox also has mentions, hashtags and setting to allow users to make their prayers private or public. Profane language is automatically filtered out of the plaform.
Like Twitter pages for companies and celebrities, Prayerbox has Church Pages which verified churches use to interact with their followers on the platform by sharing either prayer points, bible verses, announcements, events and much more with their online congregation. According to Adebambo, users can also request prayers to a Church Page and as well share testimonies with the followers or members of the church. Like a normal church, the pages allow followers to pay tithes, offerings and donationsto churches directly. Unlike religious stuff, users also discuss normal events and current issues in the society like the upcoming elections and the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria.
Prayerbox is funded by 440ng a joint venture betwwen 88mph and L5lab and is the second venture by the founder. In his second year in university, Adebambo founded Waaazap.com, a social network that never took off as was a complete clone of Facebook.
“Waaazap’s failure taught me a lot of things about building a startup,” he says. “It’s not about the code behind your product, it’s about what your product does and what your users think of it. Do they need it? Do they want it? I didn’t quit tho, I kept on learning and improving my programming skills. One day while working on Waaazap, I had an idea. Facebook connects people, Twitter connects the world and LinkedIn connects professionals. But then how do people connect religiously outside the church? Boom!”
Though brought up in a religious family, his love for coding made him miss church services most of the times so he figured out a solution to that. His search came to an end when he realized several people posting prayers on Facebook and Twitter so he decided to built a similar platform to connect religious people to each other than use Facebook which had no distiunguishing factor.
“It is a honour to be able to create something so useful and powerful out of a simple idea,” he says.”As an entrepreneur you have to look at the world around you and decide what you want to change or do to make it a better place. Most importantly you have to love what you do. Everyday I am thinking about Prayerbox and how it affects the people around me. This energy keeps me going and to be able to do this is a dream come true. Be sure you to share a prayer on www.prayerbox.co”
