ChatKJV

ChatKJV is a chatbot that takes how you feel and answers with a verse from the King James Bible. One line: chat with the Scriptures and tell it how you feel. I built it at Tecmie for a general Christian audience and launched it on Product Hunt on 26 January 2023.

The idea predates ChatGPT: an avatar bot that answers from scripture rather than from general knowledge. I put out a tweet testing the idea, it went viral, and the working preview followed in about 24 hours.

From a tweet to a working app

The tweet was the validation step. Once it took off I built the app inside a day, and that preview is what went to Product Hunt.

Using it is simple: type a feeling or a question, get back a passage from the KJV. We chose the King James text because it is public domain and it is the translation most of our audience already knows, which makes it practical for a bot that should answer from a fixed corpus rather than improvise.

Growth and coverage

By late January 2023 we had 10k users in five days, and more than 18k visitors had sent at least one message.

Coverage followed through the year. Techpoint Africa profiled me on 1 March 2023. Talking Points Memo wrote about it on 13 March from a political angle, which was a stretch. The bot does one thing: it returns a verse based on how you say you feel. Connect Nigeria ran an interview on 20 April, and Built by Africans told the tweet-to-MVP story on 3 October (that site is offline; the link above goes to an archived copy). The Startup Couches podcast covered it in an episode on AI tools in religion, and I gave a MawAidha talk on it at AI Kenya.

What it cost to run

A free product that goes viral has one obvious bill: model inference. That was the main financial pressure on ChatKJV while traffic was high, and it shaped every decision we made about the product afterwards.

We announced a mobile app as coming soon and never shipped it.