Pray.com · Christian prayer and devotional app
Make faith versions of Calm-style content: bedtime Bible stories and sleep psalms
Guest says it made monetizing easy; no numbers
Workedfeature-developmentpositioning-nichepaywall
What they did
Followed the 'imitate, iterate, innovate' approach: copy formats already proven by Calm and Headspace (e.g. sleep content) to get benchmarks, but from a faith perspective: bedtime Bible stories, sleep psalms, meditative prayers. Then iterate through constant tests to learn what could be monetized and how far. Kept a free version for users who expect faith content to be free.
What happened
Guest says imitation 'made that easy' and let them set benchmarks before innovating.
- Stage
- Launch (monetization launch)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Building Trust with Users to Drive Revenue and Retention – Ryan Beck, Pray.com“I'm a big fan of imitate, iterate, and innovate. And I would rather imitate to start cuz innovation is hard, right?”
“And so we were able to roll out bedtime Bible stories, sleep psalms, and some of these contents that were people were finding attraction to already, and then meditative prayers and things like that that had analogues to what people were already consuming in the secular space.”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Pray.com: Visit each church in person, often more than once, to sign up its membersFacebook-level retention, but too slow to grow; dropped for consumer subscriptions
- Pray.com: Turn pastors' popular daily prayer posts into morning, noon and night prayersGreat engagement; became the main feature and the path into subscriptions
- Pray.com: Rebuild the app so paywalls and onboarding can be tested without app updatesEnabled rapid test cycles that showed what could be monetized; no numbers
- Pray.com: Stop asking for a phone number at signupPhone field hurt subscription conversion; removing it helped monetization (no numbers)
- Pray.com: Put most of a big Meta budget behind one winning adFailed: Meta pulled the ad in peak season and CAC became untenable
- Pray.com: Test lots of ad ideas borrowed from games and dating apps, not just your categoryGuest says it produces a diversified creative mix that scales campaigns
- Pray.com: Move ads from Facebook image posts to Reels video earlyVideo ads didn't land at first; Reels is now where most spend runs
- Pray.com: Run TV and radio ads to reach older people who trust TV more than online adsWorked well pre- and during the pandemic; TV agencies were blown away (no numbers)
- Pray.com: Measure TV and online ads together with a statistical model, not click trackingComfortable running on statistical models since before ATT; no numbers
- Pray.com: Reply to every piece of feedback, and have founders call upset usersHow they handle 'faith should be free' pushback; no numbers
- Pray.com: Keep one shared roadmap for product, engineering and marketingGuest's key lesson; keeps a lean team aligned (no numbers)
- Pray.com: Ask a few quiz questions at signup to tailor the prayer planGuest says quiz onboarding has worked well; theirs is still light
- Pray.com: Add ads and one-time purchases like books on top of the subscription