Pray.com · Christian prayer and devotional app
Visit each church in person, often more than once, to sign up its members
Facebook-level retention, but too slow to grow; dropped for consumer subscriptions
Mixedin-personsales-orgcommunity
What they did
Sold a private social network to faith organizations (mosques, synagogues, temples, parishes, churches) and onboarded their members in person with a booth, often teaching older members how to download an app. Reaching 80% penetration usually took more than one visit. Organizations gather one day a week (usually the same day), so a field sales force with a faith background was needed.
What happened
Great retention, but growth modeled too slow for a VC-backed company and needed a large, specialized sales force; led to the pivot to consumer content.
- Stage
- early
- Effort
- Some of the largest faith organizations in the US on the platform
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Building Trust with Users to Drive Revenue and Retention – Ryan Beck, Pray.com“In order to onboard these faith organizations, you had to go to them, and you generally had to go to them more than once to get to 80% penetration rate of onboarding their organization.”
“Is really the growth. So retention was great, but, you know, when we modeled out the growth, it wasn't fast enough.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- 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: Make faith versions of Calm-style content: bedtime Bible stories and sleep psalmsGuest says it made monetizing easy; no numbers
- 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