Sub Club Podcast Summary

Episode: Building Trust with Users to Drive Revenue and Retention – Ryan Beck, Pray.com

Released: October 30, 2024
Hosts: David Barnard & Jacob Eiting (RevenueCat)
Guest: Ryan Beck (Co-founder & CTO, Pray.com)

Overview

This episode dives into Pray.com's journey in building a faith-oriented app, focusing on how the company established trust with its (often older) user base, navigated monetization—particularly around consumer subscriptions—and drove both revenue and retention. Ryan Beck shares lessons learned from pivoting business models, tailoring for different demographics, performance marketing, and fostering close collaboration between technical and marketing teams.

Founding Story and Early Challenges

Founding Insight:

• Faith and Technology Adoption: Pray.com was founded to address lackluster tech adoption in faith communities, aiming to help faith organizations digitize their operations without disrupting their traditions radically.
  • "Traditionally, faith space has been laggards in technology adoption...coming in and doing a Netflix to their blockbuster was something they resisted." (03:38, Ryan)

Original Product:

• Launched as a private social network for faith organizations—including mosques, synagogues, and temples—emphasizing platform agnosticism (04:31).
• "We wanted to build a platform that was...agnostic to a religion coming on." (03:30, Ryan)

Early Challenges:

• Difficult onboarding due to:
  • Older user base, not digitally native (05:06)
  • Organizations only gathered once a week, requiring significant salesforce effort (02:53)
• "These organizations, they tend to be a little bit older on the demographic scale...virality isn't...what you're going to get with that type of demographic." (04:42, Ryan)

Adapting to Demographics: Where and How to Reach Users

Key Insights:

• Older Cohorts’ Value: High LTV (Lifetime Value), but harder to convert.
  • "That demographic generally is a higher LTV...there's a little more difficulty in getting them to conversion..." (06:44, Ryan)
• Marketing Channels:
  • Pre-pandemic: TV and radio ads were effective, as they were trusted mediums for older users.
  • Facebook (and Facebook proper) remains strong for older demographics even as more users become digitally native post-pandemic (06:44, Ryan).

Lessons on Cohort Marketing:

• Don't ignore less digitally native demographics; they spend more and are increasingly active on mobile.

Pivot From Social to Subscription and the Role of Content

Trigger for Pivot:

• Despite high retention, growth wasn’t fast enough for venture investors. Monetization was limited to facilitating donations (12:09).
• Shifted focus to more scalable, consumer-facing content: daily prayers and devotionals—features that emerged from user behavior in the social network (08:25–10:14).

Daily Prayers & Devotionals:

• Identified as the main "sticky" feature, analog to how faith communities share physical quote cards (09:14, Ryan).
• Led to the creation of morning, noon, and nightly prayers—now core product features.
• Launched monetization via subscriptions in 2019.

Monetization Strategies & Lessons

Initial Monetization:

• Facilitated donations for organizations—handled millions in transactions but Pray.com didn’t retain the revenue.
• Introduced subscriptions for consumers in 2019, using insights from apps like Calm and Headspace (12:46, 13:46).

Product and Paywall Experiments:

• Adopted imitate, iterate, innovate approach (13:46, Ryan).
• Developed platform to allow rapid A/B tests of onboarding flows, paywalls, etc. (13:46).
• Example: Removing phone number field from onboarding led to better monetization, as requiring it caused high drop-off (20:05–20:40).

"That customer onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey." (20:40, Ryan)

Handling Pushback:

• Experienced qualitative feedback from users who believed faith content should be free (16:04–16:35).

  • Mitigated by maintaining a free tier and offering human responses to every support request, including negative reviews (16:41, Ryan).

  "We respond to every customer feedback. Anytime someone writes in, we respond..." (16:41, Ryan)

Iterative Data-Driven Decisions:

• Modeled tradeoffs between retention, ARPU, and user feedback (14:43, Ryan).
• Rapidly reversed experiments that hurt metrics ("revert, revert, revert!" 19:39).

Performance Marketing & Creative Strategy

Platform Diversification:

• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): Consistently best performer post-ATT/IDFA, particularly for running large-scale campaigns.
  • "We always come back to kind of meta...they seem to be ahead of the curve..." (27:49, Ryan)

Creative Lessons:

• Warns against "creative concentration"—overreliance on a single successful ad led to a crash when Meta pulled it (20:40–22:43).

  "You don't want 80% of your investments tied up in one creative..." (22:19, Ryan)

• Aggressive testing and diversification of creative, looking at other industries (23:43).

TV & Radio: Trust and Attribution

• TV/radio best for trust with older demographics.
  • "‘As seen on TV’ is a real thing, right? ‘As seen on Instagram’ is not a real thing." (31:12, Ryan)
• Used media-mix modeling to statistically attribute impact (32:19–32:43).
• Volatility much higher than digital; must spread bets and accept statistical uncertainty (35:42).

Organizational Structure & Cross-Team Collaboration

Unified Roadmap:

• Engineering and marketing operate under a single, shifting product roadmap; no dedicated “growth engineers”—everyone is involved.
  • "Don't have different roadmaps. Make sure your product roadmap is taking into account the whole organization..." (40:08, Ryan)
• Ensures urgent marketing/engineering requests are handled swiftly and empathetically.

Empathy Through Role Blending:

• Early on, Ryan himself ran both product/engineering and performance marketing, fostering deep cross-functional understanding (36:43, 39:26).

Product Roadmapping and Modeling

B2C vs. SaaS:

• SaaS and consumer subscriptions have distinct planning needs:
  • In SaaS, feature launches can be tightly modeled for revenue (via add-ons/upsell). In B2C, it's fuzzier—more focus on overall value and user experience.
  • "The roadmap can be a little more fuzzy than a SaaS." (43:24, Ryan)

North Star KPI:

• Revenue remains the principal KPI, with additional focus on retention and ARPU (49:06).

Multi-Modal Monetization:

• Inspired by Duolingo:
  • Core subscription
  • Ad-supported experiences
  • One-time purchases/upsells (49:07)

Trust, Mission, and Company Culture

Trust as Product & Brand Differentiator:

• Trust in mediums ("as seen on TV") translates to brand credibility especially in faith communities (31:12).

Team Mission/Empathy:

• Company open to all backgrounds, but aligned on a shared "missional" value—creating positive community impact within the app's context (50:33–51:42).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Creative Diversification:

  "You don't want 80% of your investments tied up in one creative. ...Your creative diversification is very important." (22:19–22:43, Ryan)

• On Monetizing Faith:

  "Anytime someone writes in, we respond...we respect that...it's a balance when you're running a business between making sure that the customers...[and] you can sustain a business." (16:41, Ryan)

• On Product Roadmapping:

  "Don't have different roadmaps. Make sure your product roadmap is taking into account the whole organization..." (40:08, Ryan)

• On Trust in Media:

  "'As seen on TV' is a real thing, right? 'As seen on Instagram' is not a real thing." (31:12, Ryan)

• On Craft vs. Data:

  "If we don't have some human magic going into product creation, the AIs are just going to replace us." (47:22, Jacob)

• On Team Collaboration:

  "It created a lot of empathy where I was able to have a different perspective than probably most engineers that I got to feel the pain of needs from the marketing team..." (36:43, Ryan)

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Pray.com origin story: 01:25–04:31
• Pivoting from social network to content/subscription: 08:10–12:33
• Monetization strategy and user pushback: 12:33–16:41
• Data-driven product and paywall iteration: 14:43–20:40
• Performance marketing + risk of creative concentration: 20:40–23:43
• Meta and other ad platform insights: 27:35–29:55
• Trust in TV/radio and attribution modeling: 31:12–35:42
• Organizational structure and cross-team empathy: 36:15–41:06
• Product roadmap in B2B vs. B2C: 43:24–47:22
• Multi-pronged monetization (subscription, ads, one-time): 47:59–49:59
• Team culture and mission-alignment: 50:33–51:42

Final Thoughts

This episode is a primer on:

• Adapting products for high-value but tech-cautious demographics.
• The importance of trust—not just in product but in marketing channels.
• Why cross-team empathy is key to growth, especially in app businesses balancing product, marketing, and rapid iteration.
• Navigating pushback when charging for traditionally free domains (like faith/religion).
• Structuring organizations for speed and data-driven experimentation while preserving mission and human touch.

For more, check out Pray.com, Ryan’s LinkedIn ('purpose'), and join the Sub Club community.