Stitch popular faith podcast clips and farmed hooks onto a quick app demo

Daniel Kwon… like revival in in in Christianity right now. And so alongside that and and also being like a Christian that struggled with like getting into the Bible every single day, that's also why I ended up building the app Shepherd, which was more recent, about 3 or 4 months ago. Shepherd kind of started between my co-founder on Conch and Arise and I, where we were both just like, "We want to build something that actually feels more purpose-driven."

Daniel KwonAnd again, growing up Christian, but not really being able to get into the Bible consistently, we just thought, "Why not build like a Tamagotchi-style app for it?" And kind of going back to the the small business factor, the founder should be the biggest influencer of their app sort of angle, this also blew up. It was like seven videos, and we did like 20 million views in 2 weeks, got over 100,000 downloads,

Daniel Kwonand nothing was optimized for this. We literally ideated or conceptualized with like AI and just some calls. It was like a two-week build. Two-week build alongside a two-week growth sprint. Yeah, I mean, the app broke a ton. There were a lot of issues, but we got it to 75k MRR in those 2 weeks, and we're currently working on tightening like the social loops that exist in the app because we think the bigger play is is K-factor

Joseph ChoiWait, so is this the account where the most viral videos were, or were they on like creator accounts?

Daniel KwonSome on creator accounts, but the most viral videos were on Instagram, actually. I mean, this is arguable either way, but I would say it's much easier to grow an Instagram account from scratch. So the premise of the app is to basically become a shepherd to your own lamb or soul by consistently reading the Bible and encouraging other like shepherds to pray. So we're kind of gamifying Christianity in a in a sense.

Joseph Choi… interesting concepts. It's like the movement, which is Christianity and people wanting to invest more in their faith. And then there's the actual I guess like the format or the form factor of the app, which is like the Tamagotchi-style. This one is definitely has a little bit more depth to it, where you're you're taking care of your soul, [laughter] or you're taking care of your faith. Were the most successful videos all from this one account?

Daniel KwonYep. Yep. So with this one, we got like super scrappy. I call it "Frankensteining," but I mean, I did it with Conch. You basically just find videos that have already gone viral related to your subject matter, and you stitch them together. That's kind of like where it's up to whoever's creating the content. These are just like podcast clips of of Bryce Crawford, who's huge influencer in the Christian space. And then there's other clips on the page

Daniel Kwonof basically just hooks that I farmed from looking up the phrase "Bible reading." This was like very standard hook-demo, which is kind of why we phased it out. Because it's such a meaningful app, we didn't want it to be an app where it required like the hacky UGC influencer route, and there's also just so much potential in terms of bringing this into schools and and churches through natural social loops, like we saw in apps like NGL and Gas App, tbh.

Joseph ChoiYou guys kind of did this yourself, where you got your own creators for some of these other formats, or you're just getting hooks that already exist?