# Sub Club Podcast: Drive Revenue and Retention - Ryan Beck, Pray.com

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un0t53BDKXs
Duration: 53 min
Language: English
Words: 10962
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/un0t53BDKXs

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Bernard and with me today Revenue cat CEO Jacob piding Our Guest today is Ryan Beck co-founder and CTO 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 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

[0:40] morning this beautiful day for podcasting dud let's go so Ryan I wanted to dig in first to the story of pray.com we don't always go into the story but I think we've got some like interesting twists and turns along the way that I think the audience would be interested in hearing so so tell us about the founding of pray.com and kind of those early years the original thesis was we saw the 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

[1:14] was going to meet dogma and reality was going to 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 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

[1:51] Network was going great in order to on board these Faith organizations you had to go to them and you generally had to go to them more than once to get to a % penetration rate of on boarding 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 and I also Imagine the uh folks you could recruit to sell this product probably are busy on that day I would guess that is true yeah you need a sales professional that has the faith background yeah just an army of atheists selling your product

[2:26] probably not going to connect no they they probably would not they would not and so yeah that was uh that was how we started and then one of the things you told me while we were kind of prepping for this is that you also were worked multi or not even multi-denominational but across all faiths right so it was like Buddhists and Muslims and Christians and kind of like worked across all Fai I imagine that was a challenge as well in those early days it was interesting to work with some of the largest Moss synagogues temples parishes and churches because we saw ourselves as this rather basic platform form in which

[3:00] Faith organizations could build the pawn and so we didn't want in really any nonprofit We didn't want to be pigeon hold 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 and uh as we you know approach 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

[3:36] problem no matter their religion and they all have the same goal just they look at it from a different 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 you launched a product you had like amazing retention the main problem you talked about was kind of needing this Salesforce but what else wasn't working if you had such amazing retention and then you know where did you go from there these organizations they tend to be a little bit older on the demographic scale and so virality isn't um isn't something that you're

[4:08] going to get with with that type of demographic like you would with maybe the high school demographic or college demographic where they're sharing their 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 right and you all were mobile first we were mobile first we were mobile first because we thought the in 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 and now they're texting us you're like

[4:42] thank God they're they're actually texting us now and not just calling us all the time you know but yeah I can imagine even even in the past five years or so there's still transition happening especially in those like older cohorts in terms of like behaviors and there's probably some cohorts that just will never make the mobile transition even for like 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 meaning their phone you know what I mean like you can't help somebody who's like at a a Dell at home that

[5:14] you're trying to figure out how to log in but still it's got have a lot of challenges you know before we move on to to kind of 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 like a high paying demographic I mean you know I've talked to a lot of apps where younger cohorts don't perform well even my own like weather app like I look at Stats and like the payers are like men over 45 and I think there's

[5:47] probably going to be a lot of apps where the boomer generation with trillions of wealth I spend it on something it might as well be apps you know what I mean how about that any lessons from that time period about like kind of working with those demographics and those cohorts we may get into it a little bit more and this ties into you know when we started doing Performance Marketing and focus more on consumer subscription we went TV worked really well for us pre pandemic and 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

[6:21] they necessarily trusted as widely now Facebook was and still is to some extent in 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 it pays higher the higher ltvs there's a little more difficulty in getting them to conversion though and so

[7:00] you know it can balance out for us it worked out better that demographic generally is I 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 your kids they may not be religion but for a lot of people jumping ahead right because at some point Y all decided to not focus on

[7:35] uh like a social network aspect anymore right like what led up into that decision like what were the inputs that that made yall decide like okay we need a different a different tack is 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 you know speed is uh velocity is very important to us and so we we were always looking for ways in which we can speed up our growth rate and so we started doing the from our social network we found these daily prayers were very helpful these pastors would send out

[8:09] messages to Their audience text messages to to Their audience and people would resonate with them was this an emergent behavior that that was happening on your network or was this something you all built into like a feature like daily notifications or it was both so it was emergent in that we 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 were doing yeah but we tied in text messages that was kind of the thing because people really wanted to gravitate towards these and so we we found that they were

[8:41] operating a little bit different than social posts and that people really engaged with these 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 pastors 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 do these social posts with a little bit of a devotional behind the quote and so that's what's led to our daily our morning noon and nightly prayers which is kind of a a main feature of our app

[9:14] if you 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 are you still maintaining the the social product is it still part of it yes and it's tucked away because there are some people that still use it and it's going to 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 you it's

[9:48] hard to get to yeah it's tough when you when you have you have products that are like used but maybe don't fit your business need and like how to responsibly like pivot away and like you know take careful stakeholders and everything especially when they're stakeholders you care about in the sense of like their perception of your brand and whatnot right they're still potential future customers so it's really interesting that I thought you were going to say digital analog of prayer chains is this a thing this is a thing I'm me in rural Ohio we used to have like a phone chain that you know you sometimes they used to have this for

[10:18] school before like one to many communication right the school was something was going on you'd have you call this person then you call the next person but that was like all the parishes around here would have like prayer chains like we needed to hit the phones if there's something going on I thought that's what it was going to be about but I imagine people probably use it for that that kind of thing too yeah we built a feature that you were able to build These Chains it was kind of like we we took from Twitter and our ex now that kind of you can add these these

[10:43] threads onto your post that had context and you could say oh yes it was answered or hey we're still need you know here's an update so people can update it they can answer it so yeah there's a lot of analog in the physical world that we're able to just pretty seamlessly transition to the digital world that's why we started with like hey there's a lot of practices that we do physically that can go into the digital world very seamlessly you just got to get people over to that digital world let's keep talking through this pivot of the app but through the lens of monetization so were you monetizing the app before this

[11:18] 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 going to transition to subscription to actually monetize it or were we already monetizing we were mon in through donations we weren't monetizing the organizations on our platform were monetizing and we had you were facilitating donations right yeah we were facilitating them and so there was some transaction volume and it was significant it was in the million so it was it was good and it was in 2019 when we added the revenue the monetization on our side where we started collecting a

[11:51] subscription fee so how did you determine in those early days I mean it sounds like this key feature these like daily prayer things were the kind of Main monetizable feature what was that like process of deciding what to monetize what did you monetize and how did things go you know for us there's clear paths some of the giant CSS companies of the prepandemic era of like the comms and headspace they had gone down that path it was more secular right so they had Comm 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

[12:25] 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 going to perform and how it goes live but imitation you can set benchmarks and so we were able to roll out bedtime Bible stores sleep Psalms and some of these contents that were people were Finding Traction to already and then meditative prayers and things like that that had an analoges to what people were already consuming in the secular space so that that made it easy

[12:58] and we just it ated I mean it was constant test we redid our whole product platform to allow for testing of onboarding flows paywalls 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 that what could monetize and what couldn't monetize and then how far we could take that monetization 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

[13:37] monetization of like putting different features behind pay walls adding new features that are paid versus free don't want to kill the Golden Goose that was like driving the retention you were talking about like Facebook like retention any kind of lessons from some of those early iterations on like how the the community responded to monetization you know how you introduced it and how you ated on that to get to where you are today it was you know being very data driven so you know there's data informed and uh that seems to be the Pinnacle I'm I'm very much a student of data driven product development so looking at the data

[14:13] 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 interaction and so we let that be the guide and we set up kpis right so you have average revenue per user uh there retention and these are things that are tradeoffs right you can model these out you can figure out if I have my retention is X and it goes down by 10% what is that due to my longtail Revenue right you can

[14:47] model these things out and so you just have to have a robust understanding of the data and how the kpis you want to look at in a consumer impact that revenue and ultim Ely you want to be do what's best for the customer because that's how you're going to monetize but then you have to make sure that you can sustain a business we for-profit business right yeah I was going to say I think uh taking on venture capital is a good way to not worry about charging for things you know what I mean David I think this this usually the Indie developers who feel like there's no need

[15:16] for a return and all of this is you know free that's like oh I can't charge but you know when you got a but did you see any specific or do you have any specific examples that come to mind of qualitative push back of like oh they shouldn't because I think I forget if it was prey.com or some other religious based app I had talked to or or looked at at some point that got push back that like this is Faith it's Church it should be free like it's you know greed is is bad and like monetization is evil like was there qualitative feedback on that

[15:50] kind of stuff as you did start to push toward monetization there's some you can you know that's probably all of our negative reviews is you get big enough there 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 want to listen to them and there is going to be a segment of those

[16:20] 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 and so it's a balance and yes we do get it and we you know we try to we respond to every customer feedback anytime someone writes in we respond we'll get feedback that says doubt anybody's going to respond to this and just charging trying to make money and we'll respond and how 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 ear who there is not

[16:54] 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 uh to make sure that we hear them and we respect them because they do come in and more so in the faith space I mean it's a lot of these things are a fine line even outside of the face space like you just got to use your judgment I think people and just in general people over rotate on negative comments more than they they do on positive and I think that's what

[17:26] throws a lot of Developers for a loop there was a crazy Reddit through I got find it this weekend about developer who got one his first negative review for charging money and was like ready to like take down the pay wall and everything I I just like no no no it's fine this is it's working as expected it's working as expected if nobody complains about your price you're not charging enough so 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 yeah nobody complains about products they

[17:56] 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 that it cost something like they actually want it which is a good signal but that's what that mean you go back to data driven right that's what indicators like retention indicators like conversion rate indicators like LTV RPO 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 kind of understand I think it's just really hard to not really hard

[18:29] but I do think it takes some wisdom and and sort of like a steady hand to be able to also integrate that qualitative feedback you know what I mean there like individuals right it's easy to look at a conversion rate and say like oh well you know 80% of the people didn't buy it's harder to like talk to one of those 80% of people who thinks you're like ripping them off you know what I mean so being able to handle both of those is is tricky but it's important especially in consumer where you have to really synthesize like qualitative and quantitative yeah there's lots of data

[18:57] lots of input and speaking of that to synthesize but I'll ask a question any top lessons from that time of a win or a fail so like one kind of like test you did on the monetization that was just like doubled revenue or something crazy like that and then on the contrary any like change you tried to make like massively impacted retention in a way you're like revert revert revert any any of those kind of wins or fails that you can think of that you want to share I mean there's a few and there's some that early on in The Social Network it was phone email name right you're going into

[19:31] these communities we want to make sure you're a real person and we had the phone in there and consumer subscription 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 you mean requesting the phone number would cause such high drop off in it cause such high turn that you couldn't then monetize so by removing the requirement of a phone you would then better correct correct so you you know that onboarding experience just like when you're onboarding new employees to your company or into your product that customer onboarding is the

[20:08] most important part of the customer journey and so really really honing in that placement of the pay wall making sure that it you know you could put it up front you can put it as the first thing and you may get some that initial conversion may go up but then that longtail that LTV and so you just have to understand those further down those longtail metrics and so I think another thing when we were running lots and lots of paid advertisements some of the failings in 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

[20:51] 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 our CS went upside down our customer acquisition costs were untable 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 yeah consumer subscription holidays you know like yeah so you mean

[21:32] like diversity just like having more creative content on Advertising than you need right yeah so just like if you're an investor and you have an Investment Portfolio you don't want 80% of your Investments tied up in one creative you want it to be maybe if it's an Nvidia you got 30% Max right but if you do anything more than that you you run a little bit of a risk and so you want to your creative diversification is is very important and so that's was something that was a that was a hard lesson learned because it costs lots of money how do you do creative do you have that

[22:03] all inous or do you work with agencies or what's your process we've done both now we work with a great a agency they run it and we've developed kind of a Playbook prior to working with them that we we like to run and so we are probably one of their most aggressive uh clients when it comes to creative testing they work with some really big names some of the names that are part of the that GP bullhound chart right right so we just run a very aggressive creative testing there's really nothing that within limits obviously there's concerns but there we'll try pretty much anything we look across Industries we aren't looking

[22:38] at oh how does uh media companies we're looking at gaming we're looking at dating all these different apps How what are they running to find that inspiration because of going back to that kind of the the triple ey framework that imitate iterate innovate and so we're running our we're doing diversification across that that generally leads us to a well Diversified creative mix that's helping us scale our campaigns I'm sure there's interesting um inside the the Facebook's black box of optimization I'm sure there's really interesting emerging phenomenon when you're trying to Traverse like a demographic that's usually unstated or like Facebook doesn't have a necessarily know but they probably kind of do know

[23:17] you know what I mean because they should probably Target based on but they also need to you know known Christians or known people who would resonate with your content but then they also to grow The Tam they probably should be it might be the case that the Facebook algorithm is the greatest evangelist in the world in terms of like net net evangelism you know what I mean do you think about that do you consider yourself to selling to folks who are already within the faith and like strengthening their faith or or do you think about like expanding Beyond you know maybe folks who aren't like actively involved in the faith I

[23:49] wouldn't speak for meta to you know determine if they're the greatest evangelist but their algorithm is very good it's still the best in the market for applications mobile applications and the way we approach that is that we kind of let meta do its thing and they're pretty good and we find a breath right from people who are curious to people who are strong in you know going to their Faith organization on a weekly basis uh so it's the whole gamut and Facebook figures it out yeah I'm sure how do you um think about those different customer profiles on like like content side and like product side do

[24:27] you do you think about like folks who are maybe I mean there's probably many dimensions that you can cut up that content on right depending on denominations or not and things like this I I imagine that's kind of a an interesting puzzle as well I think that pre idfa there's a little more more controls that were helpful I personally haven't seen post idfa where those controls have been a net benefit over time maybe in to make sure I understood your question how I how I'm interpreting is sometimes you can get fine grained with your audience matching and I find that pre ID F there it was a

[25:01] little bit better I'm wondering just like from a you know you get somebody in net from wherever right like how do you think about what kind of content is within the app you know depending on those different profiles of like you know the Curious all the way to the like super strong in their faith and then and then across also like the different denominations and and and styles of of things it's got to be an interesting problem to determine like where you focus your investment right yeah like I mean on on boarding are you ask asking people like you know do you attend regularly and then do you show different

[25:32] content and different experiences based on some of that kind of data the questions that you ask one of the strategies that have has worked well is some sort of light or heavy kind of quiz funnel in your onboarding to help understand what's that weight loss at that really put you no that put you through the ringer you know it's like a multi-day onboarding event you know and got book it you got to get it on your calendar take some PTO yeah they really you know showcased how you can you can utilize these quizzes to optimize the user experience post onboarding to make it feel more for them and I would say

[26:09] we're light in our journey there but there's things that we do to make sure that we're we're helping guide them in their in their faith Journey because all these things all these indicators right they could be used for kind of Nefarious or malicious purposes but you can also use these things to help people in their healthy habits and that's where we focus on is helping people with healthy habits just like n right they want to take in that information so that they can help you in your weight loss journey and help you become healthier people won't pay you for reinforcing bad habits I mean they will but like not forever right you

[26:42] want those long-term customers that's where the money is so we really focus on developing those getting those questions answered in onboarding to help us facilitate that mental and spiritual health track that they want to go on we've been talking about meta are you experimenting with Tik Tok and snap and all sorts of other even tabula those kind of ads seem to maybe perform well for your demographic yeah any other kind of channels that you're experimenting with or seeing success with we experiment with most of the channels but we always come back to kind of meta I think post idfa for mobile applications they're the ones that seem to be ahead

[27:18] of the curve as as far as figuring it out and how to handle this app tracking and deliver the right ads to the right people so that people on their platform can resonate with it and find Value in that product and so they they seem to be ahead of the curve and we're on our you know Google platforms and and Tik Tok and things like that but we find that the consistency is with the meta platform that's just where they have a wide array of products that you can Market on and advertise on and and reach a wide demographic to help them in their faith Journey better than some of the

[27:52] other other platforms do you find within meta do you focus on like more instag because I like Facebook itself has reals within it as well and I don't know if they like actually separate the two anymore do you have a sense of like which specific apps in their platform are resonating the best or is it kind of all over the place yeah I would say that early on it used to be mostly Facebook we would talk to the meta rep and early on pre idfa like call it 2020 2019 that we would run a lot of images and it would be on Facebook they would resonate

[28:26] really well like in Fe ads basically yeah and they were like now everyone's moving a video and like man these videos there're a lot more to to make but it's say 100 times the cost of production right yeah but they weren't really resonating and maybe it was on us in its transition Now video is kind of more the dominant form yeah they've also raised the prevalence of video and short short form video in every app I complain about this every app has reels now like every app like Gmail's going to have reals soon like but I guess it's also helpful because you probably have one you know

[28:58] focus on short form video creative and then you can deploy that across a bunch of different platforms yeah and when when Tik Tok kind of became a mstay application I'm a big fan of meta's quarterly earnings so we'll we're listening to those and probably providing a lot of them and so I was just like hey we need to um we started investing in the reels early on and and now that's where it predominantly is and it spread across the the application verse for meta and I wouldn't say Facebook is you know by far the the leader anymore and I think that it's been 5 years is you know four or five

[29:33] years and you're getting new people and we had a a kind of an accelerated Tech adoption cycle with the pandemic that moved people across platforms and made people more comfortable our parents are now scanning QR codes they weren't doing that and so they you know they became mobile capable now and so you're seeing different demographic shift across these applications earlier you mentioned TV and radio I wanted to dig in that a little bit and one of the things you said and maybe we can talk about these things in parallel but I'd never thought about trust before in ads and the way you said it was that you know that older

[30:09] generation trusts tv ads like if it's on TV it's true kind of mentality which is unfortunately led many astray I think how does trust play into that and like creating ads on platforms that people trust and in ways that people trust but then what does the TV strategy look like now with maybe that's not as big of a deal for folks as seen on TV is a real thing right as seen on Instagram is not a real thing and so that trust element is there with TV you may have an influence on Instagram and YouTube that you're like oh Mr Beast promotes this or so and so um I have no idea what Mr

[30:45] Beast promotes but he is the first influencer that came on my mind and so I think what you find is the influencer has the weight of the medium before it so TV was the medium and that had a lot of weight so if people saw it they thought this is legit why because the barrier to entry was higher five bucks gets me on Instagram my advertisement right five bucks does not get me on TV and so you know that's one of the things that you you find your your strategy is a lot different it's more akin to betting rather than Investments where I feel like digital Performance Marketing

[31:20] on digital is more to investment strategy it's like betting but you also don't know if you won until your tax season next year right cuz like but like how do you find out like you bet on a big ad on CNN or something like this do you even try to like do some attribution there do you find it useful or do you just go like we know this kind of has to kind of work oh no we we are in the data data driven to the core I mean we are looking at by minute we're looking at realtime feeds when we run it we have a

[31:47] great brand with prey.com that resonates very well this is technical question but like who you work with like a platform for TV ad buys and they actually give you by the minute when ads are running yes and they would help us with that media mix modeling but it would just be for broadcast and then we'd have our Performance Marketing so you have to blend it so from the very beginning we've been doing media mix modeling and so we've been comfortable kind of flying with statistical models rather than you know very deterministic models of Performance Marketing which is I think is the evolution of versus maybe five or

[32:20] six years ago I think with the at made this more important it's just like there always was uncertainty I just think people didn't want to admit there was now we just accept that there's uncertainty right and you just roll with it it's really interesting I see I anecdotally like when I'm sitting at my parents house and they've got Fox News on or something like this or or whatever I see so many consumer subscription ads for apps I've never like even heard of it's crazy actually I wonder in some cases might a road that perceive trust you know and over time like it's no longer like breaking between Walter con

[32:48] kite you know to sell you Colgate like feels like it's a little bit more accessible so I wonder if that that's going to change the same as uh for terrestrial radio too I hear so often I hear Babel and and n and like so many like thres radio buys and I mean you probably know this but like I've heard it's depending on how you target can be cheaper than you think especially probably at your scale you know you're spending five figures on Facebook a day it's like probably not that crazy yeah I think that TV radio are different today than they were not to make this a a

[33:20] political thing but during the Trump trump Administration TV was was at its height you know it was it was doing really well yeah whether Fox News or CNN or MBC everybody's just glued to the yeah you mean for Effectiveness even I guess cost probably went up along long with that too right I think it was the ratios were good if you had a good brand which we do so it worked it resonated well we worked with some of the the biggest TV buying agencies and they were blown away by the effectiveness of of our advertisements that we can actually get well it's Unique it's like you don't

[33:51] see an app it's like the ju supposition of two things like technology and Faith which I mean exists but it's like somewhat novel right the combination of those things so it doesn't surprise me at least be intriguing compared to your 20th fitness app or like whatever right it's like something somewhat new so it's pretty interesting yeah and the creatives were a little bit different but they weren't too much I mean we had James ear jones reads the Bible and so that helps with creatives but we ran other ones that didn't didn't have James Ro Jones that our content team put together some bangers and so they were

[34:22] able to perform really well and set us up for understanding the media mix models but TV buying radio buying totally different animal you're making big bets on Prime times and and these kind of earlier shows and then you have to have a a 50% strategy covering 50% of your spend that's very well spread out across many channels time slots so that you can have some consistencies because a Tuesday prime time one week may just be the best thing you've ever seen and may be the worst thing you ever seen the next week so it's it's very volatile and you just have to understand that volatility and bring some some calmness

[34:59] to that that turbulence yeah I was I was gonna ask like how does your team divide your focus between like customer engagement product development right like actually on what you build versus like you know your internal optimization around pay walls and stuff like that versus like feels like this whole Performance Marketing and advertising and acquisition that's probably like a whole technology stack right like how do you like as leadership team or whatever however you think about you know your your pie of Cor Focus like how do you break it down like how much resourcing and thought goes into the different sort of categories of work the tech product

[35:35] is the most Central and we know that it's extremely important for the you know I oversee the technology and the product now and then I work very closely on the day-to-day for Performance Marketing and we've hired a a VP of marketing he ran all of our life cycle and retention marketing and then now he's taking over that Performance Marketing so I'm handing him over the Reign and he's been doing a great job so that was like kind of the Performance Marketing was closely related to the technical side of the business yeah so it was just all Under One Roof uh when we started and so that made it easy

[36:06] because I had a lot of empathy with the marketers because I was the marketer and so I was like Hey Tech Team and I'm running the TCH I'm like hey guys I'm I get it I get it it's you know we're getting another request and it's coming at you you know and you got to get it done yesterday so 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 where a lot of times when it's divided and so really it was one cohesive hole and then

[36:33] we still operate even though I'm more of uh of a partner transitioning it over but it's still built into our DNA so we're closely aligned on that and so really it's we don't really divide it up but we know that there's a priority hey if the tech product is not working correctly if not sending the right signals if it doesn't have the right flows if something you know we're watching each step of the flow if something's broken there the whole thing collapses vice versa if something on the on the marketing side if a creative goes sideways or gets dropped out of the of the list or or something happens over

[37:08] there if a change happens in Facebook platform and or YouTube or whatever and one of the signals goes down they have to adjust and then we you know we have to work in tandem so it's a very unified front and we don't really divide it up like a normal organization I feel like that's one of the biggest things we've seen talking to larger customers who are considering migrating to revenue cat like existing apps that are large and want to use Revenue cat is there's often a dysfunction between marketing and Engineering where the marketing team is like fighting for resources they're not tightly integrated and similarly like

[37:48] often to very successful apps performance rolled up to like a CTO or like a very technical or they built it into as part of the machine this was a realization sort of mid or mid into of this journey for me I talked to um I think it somebody from blinkist actually and like how they did you know because they were very successful early on on this and you know it all ran up to their CTO right and he was you know he integrated like all this stuff and made sure it all ran and then you were saying Ryan just like elevating the urgency of those requests to Engineers because like

[38:17] they don't always understand and and also I find too on marketing sometimes marketers will totally hamstrung by something which to an engineer is Trivial right it's like oh uh and you just like if you can connect that and like clear that barrier like suddenly you can unlock a lot of value but I think businesses like yours it's not app and then layer marketing on it right like the whole machine is like one big product right one big business which I don't know if everybody's figured that out yet and we talked to uh Jason Van the mura on the podcast two years ago now and he was head of growth

[38:50] engineering and this sounds like that's that's what you've built and maybe that's like a big takeaway for a lot of organizations who have dysfunction between marketing and Engineering is like you need to like rethink how these teams work together because when you compare growth and Engineering together to be more effective it's going to be way more effective do you have the engineers like dedicated to growth and Performance Marketing stuff we actually don't uh we don't have Engineers dedicated towards it it's more of everybody's a growth engineer right I mean at a venture back startup yes David that's kind of true yeah it's one road map so we don't have different road maps

[39:29] that I think that's one of the key things that I learned is don't have different road maps make sure that your product road map 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 that I'm not the you know I wouldn't say I'm perfect on this but that's the ideal state of we do have one road map it's a living road map it's constantly changing and it's based on different stakeholders so that

[40:03] everyone's aware of what's coming and so that you know I think that's how we've solved it rather than saying okay there's going to be a team dedicated to this because when you're small and Scrappy and I still consider us small and Scrappy we run a lean team is when there's some Engineers over there that seem like they have a little bit of downtime and you you have a hey come over here you end up in this like interlocking resource straints constraints where like one team will have a little bit of extra resources and then but there's team with the need we're at this stage now where we have

[40:35] like multiple engineering teams and growing and I think one of the things that's made it somewhat more successful is basically us having to go and do being my CTO and I like repr prioritizations like and just moving people around constantly to like because yeah you lack that visibility and stuff and but you know I don't think anybody's got it figured out I love the the one road mapap thing I don't know I'm trying to the zero road maps I don't want any road maps just ask me what's our road map it's whatever we're working on right now everything else is just ideas hot take all right no road

[41:07] maps there's just today we have to live in the moment Ryan you know one tiny little example from what you were just talking about that I just experienced like last week in My Little Indie app my little weather app I've known for like 18 months that our onboarding sucks but I wanted to focus on the product and so I kind ignored the onboarding and I like just put together like what I thought was like the most simple onboarding that my cousin who's doing the development could possibly do and so for like 18 months it's been like eating away at me like we got to fix the onboarding we got

[41:39] to fix but I never talked to him about it and so just last week I finally like had the conversation like and like laid out the whole thing of like okay we have a hard paywall onboarding is everything and like we need to start running some Cycles on onboarding here's like the expectations I see like if we improve onboarding I think we can improve conversion by X-ray and I had this whole like 40 minute conversation and lots of back and forth and just having that conversation on that level to like get on the same team that hey we actually need to spend some Cycles on this was a

[42:12] huge unlock for us as like a little twers team I can't imagine like as a bigger organization that is facing a lot of this dysfunction even if you can't necessarily combine all the teams and create a growth engineer or whatever just like break down those communication barriers between growth and Engineering so that you're all on that same team and understand where those roadblocks are I try to break down the barriers David just nobody wants to hear it when they actually know what I think that's the problem they don't want to know you don't want to know what the road map looks like it's crazy in there yeah one question would be how do

[42:45] you think about the product road map and so we have a SAS portion and a and a consumer portion you can kind of look at as a two-sided Marketplace like an Etsy or something where we connect people and pastors and I find that in consumer subscription World in a directed consumer application the rap can be a little more fuzzy than a a SAS and so in the SAS world there's a lot more modeling there's a lot more math towards features because you understand like hey if we roll out this product we can have a net revenue retention increase because we can now upsell for this and we think

[43:18] there's going to be a 3% adoption rate you can do that a little bit in consumer but when I've talked to other D Toc companies I find that that's less prevalent than in the SAS world so how do you I guess a question for you how do you think about it at uh at Revenue cat about your road map and modeling yeah I mean I think that really depends on how you're pricing which is the reason it doesn't work in consumer as well is because like some sasses can do really nice alicart pricing where you're like okay you want feature X is our core feature and then you want feature y okay

[43:48] we'll just add on you know another charge per seed or whatever to your contract and so you can very easily go okay we think 20% of our customers will use this it's $10,000 a year bang like that's our value and there it is pretty nice and also usually that's coupled with a like pretty understood B2B Salesforce where you're like I know how to get these folks to convert to this and you can incentivize people to do that too it's like hey sell this new $10,000 widget add-on and I think you'd be surprised like I would love to know at like a sales Salesforce maybe is like

[44:18] the extreme example but like say mid to late stage midcap SAS companies I would bet the majority of their Salesforce is not like selling Salesforce it's sell cross whatever right it's all about just expanding it's has nothing to do now Revenue C we actually our specific case is different because of the way we price it's like mostly based on volume so it's like a little bit harder because it's like well we price on volume for everything else so it's like you add in a new thing and it just for us it ends up getting kind of baked out in like how much pressure we get we can you know in

[44:48] like a contract negotiation or whatever if we're adding in features and things like that but it's a little bit less all a cart I need a mixed media modeling uh model for it right I just know if I build a more useful product like people will pay for it more pay more for it and then I just figure that like a little bit of horse trading we'll find the right price so I don't benefit from that modeling so I don't have a road map why I'm just like well we'll just build whatever but to that point too like sometimes you'll have like key customers that will be like we need X we will

[45:14] literally sign a contract for y if you guys build X today and like okay now we have a road map like this is getting built right now because it's gonna like it's a bird in the hand but yeah I just feel like generally and I think I don't know if this is true out if this is like a a B2B thing I think it's kind of true for all businesses it's kind of actually I think the the philosophical underpinnings of of media mix modeling is just there's so much so many inputs to these systems and like so many uncertainties that I think if you try to

[45:42] overly simplify and be like oh this lever moves this number and if you like TR over focus on that stuff I think you can end up driving to like really odd conclusions there's probably some relationship right between lever a and output B but if you're not considering everything else I I find this too with like I think you see this a lot in like funnel funnel optimization right it's like okay you move your pay wall from the beginning to the end like you were saying yeah you'll change or from the end to the beginning you'll change your conversion rate but you're G to it's going to have other effects right and

[46:11] which may or may not be localized to that change which then makes it hard to manage and and measure so you have to make sure you're measuring multiple data points and then I still think there's like I don't know this might be just personal I feel like there's still room for craft right there's still room for like gut feel and being like me like I think this feels better and like we should do this but as much as I'm I look at dashboards all day I'm very data driven but you know I don't know if we don't have if we don't have some human magic going into product creation the AIS are

[46:38] just going to replace us and wouldn't that be terrible well yeah depends what magic is you know might we might find out that uh our magic wasn't as magical as we thought isn't that magic after nope nope see as soon as you have a road map you're replaceable so like uh no road map can't be replaced by AI how do you manage the be to road map Ryan I think a lot of people would be curious about that at your stage and given all that we've discussed you mean like features specifically David or like just B Toc like because we kind of like did this chase a rabbit on the B2B side but

[47:09] most of our listeners are B Toc so I wanted to kind of bring it back to like what do you do on the BTC side that maybe folks listening can learn from when it comes to the BTC side I really think of subscription is is kind of your core for your your monetization but my general thoughts are post idfa subscription is not enough I think dualingo 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 onetime upsell so they actually multi-time upsells right

[47:46] like it's consumable like they can you can buy like yeah non-recurring but like you can consume many like gem refills or whatever yeah and so you can start looking at them with some of the the lens that's been applied to Consumer subscriptions lately which is with some SAS metrics and so I think that I look at across those three lenses one subscription is going to 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 I generally start with Revenue as my Northstar since I think that's the best

[48:22] metric for a company just Revenue same we agree on that Ryan yeah yeah it's in the name it's in the name and so I think that we 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 going to 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 is shared with our pastors and our leaders and so that's how we look at our BDC application is across those three

[48:57] Revenue lines Revenue being the Northstar 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 for us it's a lot different than maybe a duelingo or something like that my church used to have the little candles they charge you a quarter to light so maybe that could work yeah yeah books right so all these things yeah yeah one time content right sorry I've had to hold back I had a lot of zingers in this

[49:30] one but I was like try to try to I don't know where the line is you know what I'm flexible and flexible I did train to become a pastor so there's going to be a lot of judgment if you I imagine David had a question on here just like cultur I do imagine you kind of have to be take it pretty lightly to like run a tech company in this space and everybody's got to be very like open-minded and very chill about this I like to say that we took a for the the people that come from a religious background we took a Solomon approach to things uh Solomon in the Old

[50:00] Testament uh built a temple the Temple of the god right but he got the best 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 we do 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

[50:32] 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 going to trust when it comes to relig people of their their same kind but we don't have any strict things it's more strict religious we're not a religious organization we don't have like a doctrine of faith and so we just look for people that just want to do good in the world want to see kind kind of values communities created and so that's how we we filter at some point in time I think maybe it became a misunderstood

[51:04] that that you should join a company when you don't believe in the mission because it's a good mic or whatever right that's actually a benefit to you because like I think that mission is so specific and charged in some way right or just like very clear and I think asking that very directly is probably somewhat easy right in your not easy but nobody's getting to day one on prey.com being like you do what you know what I mean every Everybody kind of understands what they're getting into and why which is nice it's nice to have those selectors those filters that happen naturally right yep yep that is true no one's

[51:38] surprised should that be a screening question do you believe in consumer subscription apps to pray to the god of David what do you think my founder interview is for we probably should put it earlier in the process right I was like do you believe we're in the Techno the techn capital Singularity and you want to accelerate uh what no okay uh no doesn't get that weird I do have Ray kall's book up here his latest one so you know I'm all in you wouldn't look at me funny I actually literally don't ask that but like maybe I should well Ryan this has been a ton of fun we do need to

[52:07] wrap up but as we do wrap up was there anything you want to share we're going to share links to of course pray.com it's in the name pray.com you can go check out the apps see what they're working on such a good brand that's a I don't want to ask how much that.com cost you but it was probably worth it expensive and fair and we'll link to your personal LinkedIn which I think is really cool too the name of you're LinkedIn as purpose so you must have been like really early on LinkedIn to be able to get the title instead of like your your name so you're like handle on

[52:33] LinkedIn as purpose we'll share that in a link to the app as well but anything else you wanted to share as we're wrapping up no just thank you for having me this has been a great conversation longtime listener and Jacob's blushing and but this is one of the most valuable podcasts in the consumer probably the most in the CSS space so I really appreciate it thanks for having me thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community [Music]

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