1. From Social Network to Subscription App: PRAY.COM began as a private social network for faith organizations, achieving impressive retention but struggling with scalable growth. The team pivoted when they noticed high engagement with daily devotional content, which became the foundation for their subscription model.
2. Multiple Revenue Streams Are Essential: Post-IDFA, Ryan believes subscription alone isn't enough. PRAY.COM follows Duolingo's model of combining subscriptions (primary), advertising (secondary), and one-time purchases to create a more resilient business.
3. Older Demographics Respond to Different Marketing Channels: While digital natives might be reached effectively through social media, PRAY.COM found that TV and radio advertising were particularly effective for reaching older, high-value customers who tend to have stronger trust in traditional media.
4. Creative Diversification in Advertising: The team learned the hard way about "creative concentration risk" when Meta suddenly rejected their top-performing ad. Now they maintain diverse creative assets across platforms to avoid having their acquisition disrupted.
5. Data-Driven Decision Making: PRAY.COM maintains a rigorous focus on measuring impact across channels, testing paywalls, onboarding flows, and other variables while tracking how they affect key metrics like retention and revenue.
6. Unified Product and Marketing Organization: Rather than having separate roadmaps for engineering and marketing, PRAY.COM maintains a single, unified roadmap that helps the entire team see priorities clearly and understand trade-offs.‍
7. Mission-Driven Culture: The company follows what Ryan calls the "Solomon model"—hiring the best talent regardless of religious background while ensuring everyone shares a commitment to the mission of creating value for faith communities.

David Barnard: Hello. I'm your host, David Barnard. And with me today, RevenueCat CEO Jacob Heiding. Our guest today is Ryan Beck, co-founder and CTO at PRAY.COM, an app with the mission to grow faith, cultivate community, and leave a legacy of helping others. On the podcast, we talk with Ryan about the risk of ad creative concentration, how to reach older high-value demographics, and why the ultimate KPI is still just revenue. Hey, Ryan. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Ryan Beck: Yeah. Well, thank you very much, David, Jacob, for having me. I look forward to the conversation. And, Jacob, always nice to chat with you this nice Monday morning. It's a beautiful day for podcasting, dude. Let's go.

David: So, Ryan, I wanted to dig in first to the story at PRAY.COM. We don't always go into the story, but I think you've got some interesting twists and turns along the way that I think the audience would be interested in hearing. So tell us about the founding of PRAY.COM and kind of those early years.

Ryan: The original thesis was we saw a need in the faith space for digitization. Traditionally, faith space has been laggards in technology adoption. So they've been hesitant to go on social and things like this. And we saw that coming to kind of an end where reality was gonna meet dogma and reality was gonna win out.

What I mean by that is churches have been operating—faith organizations have been operating a certain way for millennia, quite literally. And so coming in and doing a Netflix to their Blockbuster was something they resisted. And that was not something we wanted to do. We wanted to help them transition. And so that was the whole thing.

So we started off with a private social network for faith organizations. And so we had some of the largest faith organizations across the country on the platform, and that went really well. We had great retention, you know, Facebook-level retention. The social network was going great.

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 percent penetration rate of onboarding their organization. And the problem is faith organizations, they're open generally one day a week where everyone's there, and it's usually the same day. And so the salesforce needed for that—

Jacob: And I also imagine the folks you could recruit to sell this product probably are busy on that day, I would guess.

Ryan: That is true. Yeah. You need a sales professional that has the faith background.

Jacob: Just an army of atheists selling your product probably not gonna connect.

Ryan: No. They probably would not. They would not. And so, yeah, that was how we started.

Jacob: And then one of the things you told me while we were kinda prepping for this is that you also worked multi—or not even multidenomination, but across all faiths. Right? So it was like Buddhists and Muslims and Christians and kind of like worked across all faiths. I imagine that was a challenge as well in those early days.

Ryan: It was interesting to work with some of the largest mosques, synagogues, temples, parishes, and churches, because we saw ourselves as this rather basic platform in which faith organizations could build upon. And so we didn't want to be pigeonholed into one. We wanted to build a platform that was rather—to use a term—agnostic to religion coming on, because we saw this space was underserved.

And so we actually didn't have a lot of resistance. Now all the founders were all Christian founders. And so we had to come at it with a little bit of humility as we approached some of these religions that were not ours and explain to them the heart and the thesis around it, because they all have the same problem, no matter their religion, and they all have the same goal, just they look at it from a different lens. Right? They're just trying to help their community generally speaking. And they're trying to promote virtues and values in that community with their people.

David: You launched a product. You had amazing retention. The main problem you talked about was kind of needing the salesforce, but what else wasn't working if you had such amazing retention? And then, you know, where did you go from there?

Ryan: These organizations, they tend to be a little bit older on the demographic scale. And so virality isn't something that you're gonna get with that type of demographic like you would with maybe the high school demographic or college demographic where they're sharing—they're digital natives.

When we're going to these organizations, we have a booth in which they're coming to us to ask us, "How do you download an app?"

David: Right. And you all were mobile first?

Ryan: We were mobile first. We were mobile first because we thought that—and rightfully so—that's just where even they were even at that time. And you can fast forward now, post-pandemic, our parents are probably texting us where they used to just call us. Right? They're actually texting us now and not just calling us all the time.

Jacob: But, yeah, I can imagine even in the past five years or so, there's still transition happening, especially in those older cohorts in terms of behaviors. And then there's probably some cohorts that just will never make the mobile transition.

Even for a given computer savviness, I feel like mobile is still easier. Because of what you described there, at least they can bring you their computer to the booth instead of meeting with their phone. You know what I mean? Like, you can't help somebody who's at a Dell at home, then you're trying to figure out how to log in. But still, it's got a lot of challenges.

David: You know, before we move on to kinda what you did next, I do think it's interesting because this older demographic, while I mean, especially since 2020 has kind of adopted technology a little more than they did in the past, especially on mobile. But it is still a high-paying demographic.

I mean, I've talked to a lot of apps where younger cohorts don't perform well. Even my own weather app—I look at stats and the payers are men over 45. And I think there's probably gonna be a lot of apps where the boomer generation with trillions of wealth—they're spending on something. It might as well be apps. How about that? Any lessons from that time period about working with those demographics and those cohorts?

Ryan: We may get into it a little bit more, and this ties into when we started doing performance marketing and focus more on consumer subscription. TV worked really well for us pre-pandemic and during the pandemic because that older cohort was there. And that was the medium in which they trusted for advertisement. Digital was not something they necessarily trusted as widely.

Now Facebook was, and still is to some extent—Facebook proper, right, is still king of that demographic. And it does a very good job of that, but the TV platform worked really well when that audience was there. And so we were able to kind of meet that demographic where they were at on their technology journey.

A lot of them were still on TV and radio at that time, and now they're starting to get more and more digital native and in generally it's mobile. And so yes, that demographic pays higher, has higher LTVs, but there's a little more difficulty in getting them to conversion though. And so it can balance out. For us, it worked out better. That demographic generally has higher LTV.

They align more. And just if you think about our own life journeys, we start thinking about faith and religion generally later on in life when families come into play and you're thinking about "How do I raise my kid? Where do I settle down?" You're starting to think about those things that religion generally talks about, those value-based kind of foundations that you want maybe to instill in your kids. They may not be religion, but for a lot of people, it is.

Jacob: Jumping ahead. Right? Because at some point, y'all decided to not focus on the social network aspect anymore. Right? Like, what led up into that decision? Like, what were the inputs that made y'all decide, "Okay. We need a different tack?"

Ryan: It's really the growth. So retention was great, but, you know, when we modeled out the growth, it wasn't fast enough. And we're a venture capital-backed company. And so speed—velocity is very important to us. And so we're always looking for ways in which we can speed up our growth rate.

And so we started doing—from our social network, we found these daily prayers were very helpful. These pastors would send out messages to their audience, text messages to their audience, and people would resonate with them.

Jacob: Was this an emergent behavior that was happening on your network, or was this something you all built into, like, a feature, like, daily notifications?

Ryan: It was both. So it was emergent in that these were just normal social posts that you would see on a Facebook group. So it wasn't like a daily prayer feature, but it was something that people were doing.

David: Yeah.

Ryan: But we tied in text messages. That was kind of the thing because people really wanted to gravitate towards these. And so we found that they were operating a little bit different than social posts and that people really engaged with these.

And what we found was there's an analog to this in the physical world in which they're kind of these little quote cards, but they're faith quotes. And that's basically what these masters were giving, and what we added on—the capability they could record an audio or a video clip.

And so what you are finding is they would do these social posts with a little bit of a devotional behind the quote. And so that's what led to our daily—our morning, noon and nightly prayers, which is kind of a main feature of our app. If you go and you see it, you'll see. And that's what transitioned us into this content where we're like, well, we can make these devotionals.

And we created those devotionals in 2019. They worked really well, had great engagement. And then that's what led us into our entry into subscription because we started doing more long form.

Jacob: Are you still maintaining the social product? Is it still part of it?

Ryan: Yes. And it's tucked away because there are some people that still use it. And it's gonna be revitalized here in some fashion, but it will not look the same as, like, a Facebook group most likely. But it's tucked away. It's hard to get to.

Jacob: Yeah. It's tough when you have products that are used, but maybe don't fit your business need and, like, how to responsibly pivot away and take care of all stakeholders and everything. Especially when they're stakeholders you care about in the sense of their perception of your brand and whatnot. Right? There's still potential future customers.

David: Let's keep talking through this pivot of the app, but through the lens of monetization. So were you monetizing the app before this transition to subscriptions? Like, did you have ads in the app, or was it zero monetization and you're like, "Okay. We have something here, and we're gonna transition to subscriptions to actually monetize it," or were you already monetizing?

Ryan: We were monetizing through donations. We weren't monetizing. The organizations on our platform were monetizing. And we had—

David: You were facilitating donations. Right.

Ryan: Yeah. We were facilitating them. And so there were some transaction volume, and it was significant. It was in the millions. So it was good. And it was in 2019 when we added the revenue, the monetization on our side where we started collecting a subscription fee.

David: So how did you determine in those early days—I mean, it sounds like this key feature, these daily prayer things were the kind of main monetizable feature. What was that process of deciding what to monetize? What did you monetize, and how did things go?

Ryan: For us, there's clear paths. Some of the giant CSS companies have the pre-pandemic era of the Calms and Headspaces. They had gone down that path. It was more secular. Right? So they had—Calm had figured out sleep content.

And so for us, there was a lot of similarities that we could do, but more on the faith perspective rather than the secular perspective. And so we just tested out, you know, we saw what was working for other people.

I'm a big fan of imitate, iterate and innovate. And I would rather imitate to start because innovation is hard, right? You don't know how it's gonna perform and how it goes live, but imitation, you can set benchmarks.

And so we were able to roll out bedtime Bible stories, sleep Psalms, and some of these contents that people were finding traction to already, and then meditative prayers and things like that, that had analogs to what people were already consuming in the secular space.

So that made it easy. And we just iterated. I mean, it was constant tests. We redid our whole product platform to allow for testing of onboarding flows, paywalls, and having that from the server side so that we didn't have to deploy new apps every time we wanted to test something.

And so we were able to run rapid iterations on our tests, and that's really what helped us figure out what could monetize and what couldn't monetize and then how far we could take that monetization.

David: I think a lot of apps, especially apps that are free, are very nervous to monetize. And then those that are already monetizing are nervous to mess with the monetization of putting different features behind paywalls, adding new features that are paid versus free. Don't wanna kill the golden goose that was driving the retention. You're talking about Facebook-like retention.

Any kind of lessons from some of those early iterations on how the community responded to monetization, how you introduced it, and how you iterated on that to get to where you are today?

Ryan: It was, you know, being very data-driven. So there's data-informed and that seems to be the pinnacle. I'm very much a student of data-driven product development. So looking at the data, seeing how people are responding—and that data is sometimes quantitative and sometimes qualitative. So customer feedback, you're looking at how many reports you're getting on certain things, and you're listening to your customers and you're listening to the data. You're listening to the customers through the data, their interactions.

And so we let that be the guide and we set up KPIs, right? So you have average revenue per user, their retention, and these are things that are trade-offs. Right? You can model these out. You can figure out if my retention is x and it goes down by 10 percent, what does that do to my long-tail revenue? Right? You can model these things out.

And so you just have to have a robust understanding of the data and how the KPIs you wanna look at in a consumer subscription impact that revenue. And ultimately you wanna do what's best for the customer because that's how you're gonna monetize, but then you have to make sure that you can sustain a business or a for-profit business. Right?

Jacob: Yeah. I was gonna say, I think, taking on venture capital is a good way to not worry about charging for things. You know what I mean, David? I think this is always—it's usually the indie developers who feel like there's no need for a return and all of this is free. That's like, "I can't charge," but, you know, when you gotta—

David: But did you see any specific or do you have any specific examples that come to mind of qualitative pushback? Because I think—forget if it was PRAY.COM or some other religious-based app I had talked to or looked at at some point that got pushback that "This is faith, this church. It should be free. It's, you know, greed is bad and monetization is evil." Like, was there qualitative feedback on that kind of stuff as you did start to push toward monetization?

Ryan: There's some. You can—you know, that's probably all of our negative reviews. As you get big enough, you can find a hater for every topic. Right? And it's not for everybody. And we respect that. That's why we have a free version that people can enjoy and they don't have to pay.

And so it's a balance when you're running a business between making sure that the customers, because the customer is who you're building for, the value you're trying to deliver—you wanna listen to them. And there is gonna be a segment of those, especially probably more so in the faith space, that expect things to be free because that's kind of how the model has worked previously.

And so it's a balance—and yes, we do get it. And we try to—we respond to every customer feedback. Anytime someone writes in, we respond. We'll get feedback that says, "I doubt anybody's gonna respond to this and you're just charging trying to make money," and we'll respond. And I'll get on a call. My business partner, Steve, who's the CEO, he'll get on a call.

And then we have a great customer support person who runs that, who—there is not one report that comes in, positive or negative, that is not getting a person responding. And so that's how we've handled it. And it's labor-intensive, but that was something we decided from the very beginning. And that's how we've handled the objections, to make sure that we hear them and we respect them because they do come in and more so in the faith space.

Jacob: I mean, it's a lot of these things are a fine line even outside of the faith space. Like, you just gotta use your judgment. I think people and just in general, people over-rotate on negative comments more than they do on positive, and I think that's what throws a lot of developers for a loop.

There was a crazy Reddit thread I saw this weekend about a developer who got his first negative review for charging money and was, like, ready to take down the paywall and everything. I was like, "I just think, no. No. No. It's fine. This is—it's working as expected."

David: It's working as expected. If nobody complains about your price, you're not charging enough. So if people are complaining about having to pay, you're doing the right thing because it's a signal that they want it. So, like, you're building something valuable. It's like a positive signal of value creation.

Jacob: Yeah. Nobody complains about products they don't care about. Right? That's also a truth. And nobody complains about a price of something that they don't want. Like, if trash is sitting on the ground, you're not complaining it costs something. It's like they actually want it, which is a good signal.

But that's what that—I mean, you go back to data-driven. Right? That's what indicators like retention, indicators like conversion rate, indicators like LTV, ARPU—you can just, like, turn the dials. And if you can see what the alchemy does, right, like, what the other numbers go up and down, and you can kinda understand.

I think it's just really hard—none of that is really hard, but I do think it takes some wisdom and sort of a steady hand to be able to also integrate that qualitative feedback. You know what I mean? There's individuals. Right? It's easy to look at a conversion rate and say, "Oh, well, you know, 80 percent of the people didn't buy." It's harder to talk to one of those 80 percent of people who thinks you're ripping them off. You know what I mean? So to me, handling both of those is tricky, but it's important, especially in consumer where you have to really synthesize qualitative and quantitative.

David: Yeah. There's lots of data. Lots of input. And speaking of that, having to synthesize—I'll ask a question. Any top lessons from that time of a win or a fail? So, like, one kind of test you did on the monetization that was just, like, doubled revenue or something crazy like that. And then on the contrary, any change you tried to make that massively impacted retention in a way you were like, "Revert, revert, revert." Any of those kind of wins or fails that you can think of that you wanna share?

Ryan: I mean, there's a few. Early on in the social network, it was phone, email, name, right? You're going into these communities. We wanna make sure you're a real person. And we had the phone in there. In consumer subscription, which we do now, we found ways to work with it, but that phone number was not working with consumer subscription, and it was tough to get it back in there.

David: You mean requesting the phone number would cause such high drop-off that you couldn't then monetize? So by removing the requirement of a phone, you would then monetize better?

Ryan: Correct. Correct. So that onboarding experience, just like when you're onboarding new employees to your company or into your product, that customer onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey. And so really honing in that placement of the paywall, making sure that it—you could put it up front. You can put it as the first thing and you may get some initial conversion may go up, but then that long-tail, that LTV. And so you just have to understand those further down those long-tail metrics.

And so I think another thing—when we were running lots and lots of paid advertisements, some of the failings of paid advertisement is not having a diversity of creative. So we had Meta going, it was tens of thousands of dollars a day. And most of it was behind one creative. It was performing really great and it had five stars in the description and Meta approved it. They said, "Looks good," but then Meta decided, "You know what, not good." And they took it down on a dime and it totally went upside down. Our CACs went upside, our customer acquisition costs were untenable.

And so we had to bring down those campaigns, retool it, figure it out and then bring them back up. And this was part of that Q5, you know, of post-Christmas to end of January when everything is really great for CSS companies.

Jacob: Consumer subscription holidays, you know.

David: So you mean, like, diversity, just like having more advertising than you need. Right?

Ryan: Yeah. So just like if you're an investor and you have an investment portfolio, you don't want 80 percent of your investments tied up in one creative. You want it to be maybe if it's an NVIDIA, you got 30 percent max. Right. But if you do anything more than that, you run a little bit of a risk. And so your creative diversification is very important. And so that's something that was a hard lesson learned cause it costs lots of money.

David: How do you do creative? Do you have that all in-house or do you work with agencies or what's your process?

Ryan: We've done both. Now we work with a grade-A agency. They run it and we've developed kind of a playbook prior to working with them that we like to run. And so we are probably one of their most aggressive clients when it comes to creative testing and they work with some really big names, some of the names that are part of the GP Bullhound chart. Right?

So we just run very aggressive creative testing. There's really nothing that—within limits, obviously there's concerns, but we'll try pretty much anything. We look across industries. We aren't looking at "Oh, how do media companies—" We're looking at gaming, we're looking at data, all these different apps. How, what are they running to find that inspiration? Because of going back to that kind of IIIF framework—that imitate, iterate, innovate. And so we're running—we're doing diversification across that. That generally leads us to a well-diversified creative mix that's helping us scale our campaigns.

[The conversation continues with discussion about monetization strategies, the importance of data-driven decision making, and the unique challenges of building a faith-based app.]

Ryan: When it comes to the B2C side, I really think of subscription as kind of your core for your monetization. But my general thoughts are, post-IDFA, subscription is not enough. I think Duolingo is a perfect case study of subscription plus ads. They also have some other monetization—it's less so, but they do have some other monetization paths. And they have one-time. So they have ads, subs, and then one-time upsells.

Jacob: So multi-time upsells. Right? Like, it's consumable. Like, they can—you can buy, like—

David: Yeah. Nonrecurring, but, like, you can consume many, like, gem refills or whatever.

Ryan: Yeah. And so you can start looking at them with some of the lens that's been applied to consumer subscriptions lately, which is with some SaaS metrics. And so I think that I look at across those three lenses. One—subscription's gonna be my core, ads is my secondary, and then one-time purchases or upsells is another avenue in which I have to figure out how can I monetize across my user base?

So then I generally start with revenue as my north star, since I think that's the best metric for a company, just revenue.

Jacob: Same. We agree on that, Ryan.

Ryan: Yep. Yeah. It's in the name. It's in the name. And so I think that we start there and we figure out how can we add value since we have both sides of the marketplace along those lines for our consumer. So they're gonna give us money. What value do they get in exchange? And then how can we make sure that that money coming to us is shared with that money in the form of value shared with our pastors and our leaders?

And so that's how we look at our B2C application—is across those three revenue lines, revenue being the north star. And then what features can we add that increase each one of those? Subscriptions is kind of tried and true. And there's a lot of tactics around that. Ads—that's tried and true. A lot of tactics. One-time is where you have to get a little bit creative for your space.

[The interview concludes with discussion of team structure and culture.]

David: The tech product is the most central, and we know that it's extremely important. How do you, like, as leadership team or however you think about your pie of corporate focus—how do you break it down? Like, how much resourcing and thought goes into the different sort of categories of work?

Ryan: We don't have engineers dedicated towards [growth]. It's more of—everybody's a growth engineer. Right? I mean, at a venture-backed startup—but that's kinda true. Yeah. It's one roadmap. So we don't have different roadmaps.

I think that's one of the key things that I learned—is don't have different roadmaps. Make sure that your product roadmap is taking into account the whole organization and making sure that everyone's getting visibility into that and understanding the priority and priority shifts, and then modeling out the ramifications of if we delay this, this is what we can expect.

And so giving people more—I'm not perfect on this, but that's the ideal state of, we do have one roadmap, it's a living roadmap, it's constantly changing and it's based on different stakeholders so that everyone's aware of what's coming.

Ryan: I like to say that we took—for the people that come from a religious background, we took a Solomon approach to things. Solomon in the Old Testament built a temple, the temple of God. But he got the best artisans from around the area, and it didn't matter which religion they came from. It was just the best, and they had to be able to apply their best.

And so that's how we think about it. We are very much missional. And so even if you don't come from a Christian background, which is the content that's on our platform, you have to be empathetic towards that space and you have to be aligned with wanting to create value.

So there's very much a missional component, but we don't have like this strict restriction. Sales is a little bit different because you're interfacing with these religious organizations. So you have to have this trust in there. And generally, people are gonna trust—when it comes to religious—people of their same kind.

But we don't have any strict things. It's more—we're not a religious organization. We don't have a doctrine of faith. And so we just look for people that just wanna do good in the world, wanna see kind of values communities created. And so that's how we filter.