About us
Every startup story begins with taking the first step. Our story begins two years on a cold winter’s night in Chicago (January 2018). Two discipleship pastors met in the lobby of a hotel at a church conference. We started talking about our similar backgrounds in church ministry then we quickly shifted into a deep talk on discipleship and technology in the church. Actually, we both were venting out about the lack of good technology for churches. There were barely any good mobile apps/platforms dedicated to helping churches grow. We both could count the number of “decent” church apps on one hand.
We talked for hours about what we wish we could do using the current mobile app technology. Then, it hit us like a snowball in the face. I had a passion for UX/UI design and background as a director of discipleship while also working with a few different startups. Calvin had a background in software engineering and was excited to build an app for his church. Just like that, we decided to partner together to build a discipleship app. That is what we said we would do and that is what we did.
The day after we talked about building an app for the church, we also came up with the name Restvo. As pastors as well as entrepreneurs, we knew that hard work was important but we had also learned the hard way about the importance of being restful. Burn out in church ministry was all to common… so we decided to play with the word “restful” as an idea for a company. We searched for available domains and found out that www.restvo.com was available! We purchased the domain name that morning and got started working on building Restvo that very day.