GTM Sauce

BibleBuddy · B2C · AI Bible chat companion

Earn money only from banner ads, skipping full-screen ads

Couldn't crack monetization; founder was wary of charging for faith content

Failedpricing

What they did

BibleBuddy monetized with banner ads and did not use interstitial ads; the guest was hesitant to monetize Christianity at all.

What happened

He could not monetize it properly; he later used interstitials in Praycreen.

In their words

Lotanna Ezeike - He Built a Simple $120k/Yr App, Then Sold It For Multiple 6 Figures!

Play from 13:40
13:36

HostAnd then you grew through some weird marketing channels, like Twitter ads.

13:40

LottsSo I found that hardcore Christians normally have an affinity to like one pastor, or like one like celebrity pastors. So I was kind of like, "Okay, if you follow that pastor, that's probably like a good indicator that you're Christian." So Twitter at the time, I don't know if they do that now, they allow you to target the followers of specific accounts. So I think I just went on and I was like, "Okay, cool. Who the top 20 or 25 most famous pastors? Okay, cool. What are their Twitter accounts?" And then just like target their followers. This is one of the first apps that I created, so like I found it very hard to find how to monetize it. So we happened we started doing ads at first, which was more like banner ads, I remember, but at the time we didn't do the interstitial ones. I couldn't crack how to monetize it properly. I think maybe I was just more afraid. I was kind of like, "Oh, God, if I monetize like Christianity, is that bad? I don't know." So that kind of like my first one. I think I definitely took a lot of learnings from that.

14:35

HostI'm just trying to look at if the follower ads are still a thing. I think they are. I think I was looking in the Twitter ads dashboard the other day. Oh, there it is: follower look-alike.

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

Tags: ad-monetization, banner-ads, monetization-fear