Ryan Swanson: Hello and welcome to the Satisfied program here on the Thee Generation podcast. I’m Ryan Swanson, and we have a very exciting episode today. We’ve been doing a series on stories of victory, and I trust you’ve been encouraged by that. But we’re taking a pause from those to bring you in on something that happened last week. Many of you are aware that in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, last week was the Thee Generation Youth Summit, or The War Max as it’s now called. I trust you’ve been encouraged, those of you that were there or have been tuning into the bonus episodes that have been rolling since then of the different sessions. That was definitely encouraging, and it was very neat to see the progression that the Lord led each of the preachers during that time.

Also, during those few days, we were excited to have the rollout of the Chord app. Now, we’ve been building up to this for what seems like years, but it’s just been about six or seven months now that we’ve been working on this app. But it is finally here in the app stores, both on Android and the Apple App Store. I want to give you a little bit of background on how we got to this point. My father-in-law already gave my testimony in his podcast two weeks ago, so I won’t go back into the details of that and back that far. But just to say that it was a small group, a group of two other individuals in my life, a three-fold core that the Lord used to deliver me and to really put me on a journey of sustained victory in purity. It is still a small group that the Lord is using to lead me on that journey.

The principle found in Ecclesiastes chapter 4 of the three-fold core, not quickly broken, is very dear to me, very special because that is what the Lord used to deliver me. As I tell guys, accountability is not the only thing needed for victory, but for many of us, it was the only thing missing for many, many years. We were fighting pornography on our own and in our own isolation, which is exactly where the devil wants you to fight it—all by yourself. You just don’t win that battle on your own. It’s almost ironic, silly, that we would fight something like this alone because so many of us are fighting the same battle in our own trenches, all by ourselves, instead of joining forces and fighting this together, fighting, as we say, fighting as a church. This is how it’s supposed to happen. Anyway, clear biblical principles, and it’s just so Bible. For those that are a part of this, it is a freeing thing to be a part of a group that is checking in with each other every day, a scale of 1 to 10, so there is complete honesty, transparency, objectivity in every way when it comes to our purity. It’s a very freeing thing. So obviously, something I’m passionate about.

Now, it was kind of on this premise that we started Satisfied Ministries several years back. When I say Satisfied Ministries, at that point, it was really just relegated to this very podcast, which you’re listening to now, this Satisfied Program on the Thee Generation network. We started that in 2021. I’ve just got a few metrics here to show you what the Lord has done. In 2021, as we started almost an experimental podcast focused on purity, we had 8,655 listens. In 2022, we had 23,125. And in 2023, up to this point in October, we’ve had 27,000 listens to the Satisfied podcast just this year. Of course, that’s with over two months still remaining in the year. So there is no doubt that there is a huge desire, a thirst for help in this area.

When we started this podcast in 2021, it was very common for my wife and I to get emails from men and women who were looking for help, personal help in these areas of purity. So obviously, with so much of my passion being in these small groups, my wife and I began setting these up. The way we would do it is we would start in the group with them. I would be in the men’s groups and my wife in the ladies, and we would help them add in a couple of others, so there were three in a group, and then we would eventually step out and go in and help start another one.

So, over the past three years, we’ve been starting a fair number of these groups, helping out as many as we could. But the problem came with, I had to ask the question, how sustainable is this, or how can this model scale? When I have to be in every group starting it myself… It really limits how fast this ministry, this purity movement, can scale.

And that’s when the idea of the Cord came about. Having a platform where men and women who understand the need for accountability could just go on and start their own groups, check in together, and it was not limited by myself or my wife at all. This could continue to grow and multiply and did not require direct interaction in every group.

And there, of course, are so many other reasons, as we began development, why this is so much more ideal than the video platform we were using before to check in daily. We have been able to write into this software so many features that are going to be incredibly helpful in the purity realm. And we have more down the line. I’ll mention a couple of those at the end of this podcast.

But last week, we had the exciting opportunity to roll out this app in the Thursday night meeting and immediately we began to see users download and sign on and begin to use this. As of this point, about a little over a week into this, well, we have 135 users on the app with about 30 chords that have been started. 30 groups, and the exciting thing to me is to see that in one week more of these accountability groups have been started than in three years of ministry doing it myself and with my wife and me. It is a model that can multiply beyond us, is not limited by us, and I’m so excited to see how the Lord will use this and grow this around the world.

It’s now freeing my wife and me up to be able to focus more on the administration side. There’s quite a bit that has to be done on this side still with running an app, but also our desire is now to help equip churches to use this as a tool. I had the opportunity to speak to quite a few different pastors last week at the Youth Summit and was so encouraged by the desire of pastors to help those in their church with this issue. And not just to help them, but to be a part of their victory.

And we’re working towards right now actually being able to have pastors be kind of a sub-admin and coach to the groups in his church. And I’m very, very excited about that. That was actually the idea of someone there at the Youth Summit, and we’ve already begun working on that in the software itself and working towards that feature, being able to have sub-admins. But even how it stands now, it is a wonderful tool for churches to use. Our goal is not in any way to replace the church but rather to equip the church, to just be a means of communication, a platform of communication for those that are wanting to disciple each other and see these threefold chords develop within their church.

So 135 users, 30 chords in just over a week, and we’re praying that we’re just going to keep seeing those groups multiply exponentially as we continue to grow. Now in order to do that though, this is really something that is going to grow organically. We are using different means to try to get the word out there, and I guess you could say market, but really the boots on the ground, you know those in your church that could use this. You know those around you in your Christian school that could use this, or whatever it is.

And even if you don’t think you know who needs it, you do. Because there’s so many around us who are struggling in isolated defeat in this area and they just need someone to bring it up and say, “Hey this is something that’s been a help to me I’m excited about this but would you be willing to be a part of my victory and me be a part of yours can we fight this together?” That’s how this thing’s gonna grow, how it’s gonna multiply and that is a church being a church.

I just presented this in our church a couple of nights ago, and I had some very excited people come to me afterward. But one of them was a gentleman who just said, “Hey, I would love to help out in any way I can with this app. What can I do to help?” And I just said, go to the other men in the church and just start asking, just start offering, “Hey, can I be a part of your victory and you be a part of mine? Can we do this together?” That’s the best thing you can do.

So practically, I wanna walk you through the app real fast. I’m hoping you’ve got your phones out, and if you haven’t downloaded it already, go for it. Be a part of this.

But… By the way, we are working through a couple of bugs right now, as is always the case with software. Any new software is going to have issues with it that we’re working through. But you can help us with that by, as you come across these things, communicate them to us. Shoot me an email at ryan@thecord.app and let me know. That’s ryan@thecord.app if you have any issues at all or questions. But those bug issues are a big deal. We can’t fix them if we don’t know about them. So there might be something that is unique to your setup on your device that we’ve got to know about if we’re going to fix those. So communicate those things as they come in.

One of them right now is for some people; uh, the app is not showing up in the app stores. And I’ve heard that from a good number of people and we’re working on that on this end. Um, I think it may be just an issue with SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization, and it’s just going to grow as we become more popular and the more clicks we get and more searches that could solidify, but our team is working on that to be sure everything is set up correctly. For some, it’s popping up right away, and others, they just are having a hard time finding it. If that’s the case with you, then just go to our website thechord.app, and there’s direct links there right at the beginning right at the top of the page. Click those, and it will lead you right to the app store where you need to download that. So thecord.app, that will be your source for those links if you can’t find it in the app store. So go ahead and download that.

And again, we can walk through it quickly here. The onboarding process is pretty simple. It’s gonna have you put in your phone number. It’ll send you a verification code. It’ll text you a verification code, and you can plug that right in, and that will get you into the app. You can put in your email address, and then it’ll ask you a couple of demographic questions. Once you get those, it’ll lead you to a video. And that’s my wife and I just explaining a little bit about the app, and I’ll just let you watch that. When you finish the video, it’s going to give you, it’ll have a button that says join now, and it’ll give you the option to join in a couple of different ways.

Now, this is a subscription model app, and so there’s the option to do a, pay monthly a $5 a month, or if you want to commit for a year and pay yearly, it’s $48 a year or $4 a month. So it’s a little bit more economical to do it that way. Now, I haven’t said a ton about the finances of this endeavor, and that’s really been on purpose. We’ve made it a point not to ask for money at any point in this, but several have devised that it just probably would be good to lay that out there. So here’s the full disclosure.

Okay. This endeavor was a $50,000 project, and that’s just the development. So every other, there’s so many more expenses than that just in the launch of this, whether it’s the website and hosting, domain names, we’ve spent thousands of dollars on that, but there are so many videos done and marketing materials, everything, merchandise, all this stuff has been quite an endeavor. However, I can tell you that the Lord has provided and paid every penny at this point. And so we’re, we are very, very thankful for that and can honestly say, because we haven’t been asking for it and launching these huge fundraising campaigns, that this has been a hundred percent God’s doing and it’s just been his blessing on the project, and so we’re, we’re thrilled with that.

However, to help mitigate the ongoing costs of this, which the monthly costs are extremely high to run and maintain an app for tech support, for server costs, everything, ongoing development. We have features that we are going to be constantly rolling out.

This is just version 1.0, it is already incredibly useful for what we want to do with accountability, but we have so much more we want to do. In fact, this coming Monday, we have plans to release another version already that has several more features laid out. It’s going to make this even easier to use in some ways, and I think you’ll notice those when you make that upgrade on Monday.

But we have so many plans down the road for even greater feature releases. Every one of those, of course, is time and development and software and management, and everything, and that all has a price tag. So because of that cost, then it’s obviously going to be paid for somehow. Apps are funded in one of several different ways. If you can think of other free apps, then they’re probably apps that have advertising in them. Of course, we don’t want to be running ads on our app, which could be counterintuitive for a purity app because many times those are not the things we would want to be known by.

But then also, you can, of course, make money by selling information and all that demographic information we’re collecting from you guys. We could just be pawning that off to anyone around the world that is willing to pay for your info. And we have opted out of funding the app in that way. Don’t worry. There’s actually, believe it or not, legal ways to do that. But we are not going to partake in selling off your info. So that doesn’t help us fund the app.

So really what we’ve landed on is a subscription model, $5 a month. Now we have toyed with the idea of having the model where a pastor or a church could pay for the app to be used at no cost for those within their church. And we may roll something like that out in the future, but I appreciated one preacher I was speaking with last week, and he said, “You know, I really wouldn’t be interested in that.” It kind of took me by surprise, and I said, “Why is that?” He said, “If the individuals in my church do not care enough about their own purity to give up one cup of coffee a month, then this is probably not going to work for them anyway.” In other words, they’re not desperate enough to be communicating something on every day and what it’s going to take to invest in this purity journey. So if five dollars a month is not going to work for them, then I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing by paying for it for them. It doesn’t hurt to have something invested in each month and have some sort of commitment. 

So I appreciate that perspective, and at this point, I think the subscription model is a good way to go. But anyway, so five dollars a month or four dollars a month if you pay annually, that’s the subscription model you’re going to see. Once you get through that, you’ll have the ability to start a chord. It will give you two different options. One of them is to start a chord yourself with those that you know, with individuals you know. You type in their phone number or search your contacts, and you can invite them to a cord with yourself.

The other way is if you literally have no connections, maybe you’re not part of a church, you stumbled across this podcast and you have no connections with people around you that could help keep you accountable, we still want to help. So you can click to join a cord that we can set up for you. And I actually have individuals that are on standby to jump in there with you and help at least get you started until we can have other individuals to build up to have a group of three that you can check in with and becomes your chord. You can do it that way, but I will say ideally by far is to be checking in with people you know. Now either could work. I’ve been a part of both, and they definitely can work. But the organic discipleship with people you are actually seeing at church or at school is just so much more helpful. So I would definitely recommend that.

Don’t just opt for that option to pick someone you don’t know because it’s easier and not as uncomfortable. If you’ve got a church you can work with, bring this up to your pastor, your youth pastor, and say, “Hey can you help me find someone in this youth group that I could be accountable with?” because maybe you don’t know someone. Maybe you’ve got a good friend and you just ask them if this is something that they’ve struggled with, could we be a part of each other’s purity in this way? So anyway, those are the two options that you have to start a chord.

Once you do that, you can begin the check-in process. You click check-in, you can do it once a day, and that will bring up a prompt to rate yourself in what’s called on the app, Thoughts, Viewing, and Actions, the actions referring to self-gratification. So you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. It’ll give you a subtext explaining in just a few words what that means to rate yourself on that number and then you just hit record. It’ll start a video where you explain to the other individuals in your group why you rated yourself that way and also giving action steps to take from there if that’s needed. If you’re rating yourself, for example, I had a failure, you say because I had my phone in bed with me. Well, then you’re gonna put an action step down and say you know what because of that I’m committing for the next couple of weeks here, keep me accountable that I’m not going to have my phone in bed with me. This isn’t just a confession booth here; we actually want to take actions based on what we’re checking in, always growing.

So that’s what you do in your check-in videos; the other guys can watch that and reply to it directly within their feed on that check-in screen. On the progress page, you’ll be able to watch your purity progress over time on a graph. And then eventually, once you’ve checked in for a month, it’s really neat. It’s gonna give you a line showing the average from last month that your goal is just to continue to be growing, be beating last month’s average. So you’re always growing, always moving in the right direction. It keeps you from getting discouraged when you, if you have a failure because if you’re using the average app out there to help in pornography, it’s just a track counter. It’s just a streak counter. And so… It’s really discouraging if you get to the end of 30 days and you’ve had great victory and then have a failure and boom that resets back to zero and you feel like I’m back to square one and nothing really was accomplished. But it’s absolutely not the case. It’s not how the Lord has designed your brain to work. You’ve been rebuilding habits. There has been a renewing of your mind that’s been taking place, and you’re not back to square one. It’s important you don’t feel that way. So in representing it this way, it’s going to encourage you to continue to always grow, always moving in the right direction, so that’s what that page does in the progress screen.

In the connections panel, it’s going to also allow you to add a second chord which you say, well, that’s kinda early to be talking about adding a second chord we’re just starting this thing I’ve actually already had two individuals ask me or maybe three actually have asked if they could start a third chord already so we actually are rolling out a release where that will be feasible to add a third chord as well if you’d like to do that. But the reason you would add a second or third chord is if you had more individuals in your church or wherever that you’re trying to help trying to reach out to. You can add them into a second group, and then the check-in will actually allow you to if you want to send your video and your check-in to both groups at the same time. We’re trying to keep this as sustainable as possible, and so it’ll let you send to both groups at the same time just in case you’re in a time crunch at the end of the day and don’t have time to send individual videos to both.

So you could do that, and then that second group or the third group would kind of be a—we picture that as a rotating group. So get a couple of guys in there and help them get started, and then you can step out of that group and just let them function on their own. Then grab some more and start another group, and this could just continue to multiply in that way. And there’s no reason why any one of you couldn’t be involved in a purity ministry in that way with those around you.

Now there’s so much more I could say about this, but we need to bring this to an end. Let me just mention real quickly a few upgrades that should be coming in the release here at the beginning of next week.

One of these would be, at this point, you have a 60-second limitation on each video, and I want to keep that. That’s very much on purpose with the experience of doing this for three years and seeing how you can have individuals that just kind of want to ramble a little bit and explain their day in 10 minutes. The other individuals in the group may not have 10 minutes, or if there’s two people doing that in a group, 20 minutes to watch through their videos at the end of every day. So eventually, someone just inevitably ends up saying, “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop doing this daily accountability because I don’t have time to watch the videos at the end of each day.” So we’re trying to keep that short and very concise. In 60 seconds, you can communicate everything that needs to be said. And so we’ve had that limitation.

The only thing we want to adjust, and it’s either going to be on this next release or the one following, but your first video you will be able to have—it’ll be kind of an intro video, and you’ll have probably five minutes, I think is what we decided, to explain a little bit of your journey, where you’re at, and to be able to communicate that, just to get started and on the same page.

Another thing we’re adding into this next release is an FAQ section. Now, at this point, the FAQ section is on our website. It’s a series of videos. Right now, there’s just three videos hitting the hot-button questions that we’ve been asked through the years of doing these groups, but I think they’re going to be questions that really everyone probably has. Those questions are: Why are we checking in every day? Why do we use a scale when we check in? And then thirdly, What happens when I fall? What are we supposed to do when we have a failure? And there’s three very short, I think they’re just over a minute each, videos on those topics that you can find on our website, and that will be linked within the app on the next release. So if you wanted to find those now, that section is at thechord.app/FAQ or you can just find it in the menu on our website, thechord.app. It’s just called the FAQ page.

And there are so many other things that we can mention we’re going to want to add into the app. But some of that I’ll leave in suspense and let you see those version 2.0, 3.0, and others that we have planned and coming down the road. So we’ll keep you updated on these things, but for now, why don’t you just get started, just take the plunge, download the app. And if this is something you feel like the Lord wants you to do, it could be a help to you, your purity, or maybe those around you, and you’d like to be a part of their purity, then download the app and start the conversation.

Now, one easy way to do that is to just send them a link to our website or shoot them a link to our YouTube channel even. And you could do that with a quick text just saying, “Hey, here’s something that’s been a help to me and something I’m excited about. And I’d love if you would join me in this journey using the Chord app.” And just that little bit of personal testimony with the resources that we have available for you to share that with them with our videos, that could really make a difference in someone’s life and getting them to a point where they’re willing also to be a part of this and to begin shedding light on those dark areas of their heart.

Look, we are so excited to see how the Lord is going to use and already is using this app, and we would welcome any feedback you have. So once again, you can email me at ryan@thecord.app. As well as we continue our series of stories of victory, um, you can also reach out to me at that same address and send me any testimonies that you have. And I know several are working right now. 

We have two young ladies who are going to be sharing their testimonies on the podcast. And those will be read by my wife on here, and we’ll have those coming up in the coming months. So we look forward to that, and we love any more if you’ve mentioned to me that you have a testimony that you’d like to share or even if you haven’t and I’ve not talked to you about it either way, go ahead and send those my way. We would love to share those on the podcast. So once again, email ryan@thecord.app.

Well, friends, I’m excited about this. Thanks for being a part of these last six or seven months in this journey. And now let’s grow together. Talk to those, you know, let’s get the word out there and see how the Lord can use you to change lives through small group daily accountability. Well, we’ll look forward to speaking with you next time on The Satisfied Program as we resume our series on stories of victory and learn to be less gratified and more satisfied with Jesus Christ.