Thanks @BlendahTom! It seems like most Christians feel a certain amount of guilt about their prayer lives - they wish they prayed more! And it shouldn't be a surprise - prayer is hard work! Basically, PrayerMate was designed to solve that problem of when you say to someone "I'll pray for you!" and then you never actually get around to it.
Last summer I launched a new feature to let you subscribe to content from various Christian charities and churches, and since then, by God's grace, it's really taken off - especially since the app became free to download in January 2014. It's fast approaching its 40,000th download across the two platforms - iOS & Android.
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One thing I've always admired about religious communities is their ability to create incredibly effective internal distribution channels, held together by what's effectively a shared-values protocol. Anything that aligns with the value system gets promoted, anything against that value system gets shunned... both top down and bottom up.
I'm no believer, (though I accidentally read the bible and a few other holy books at one point) - but if I was the founder of this company and wanted to make an offensive amount of money, I'd create a 'pledge to pray' feature, which pre-approves donations to my local church (minus the transaction/processing fee of course) that triggers when I *DON'T" pray.
That is, if the app isn't engaged with for a period of time, the user automatically tithes $X... this has a triple-whammy effect on distro:
1) Users WILL forget = more money = greater LTV = more room for CAC.
2) Pastors (I.E. Community influencers) will be all over this, as more users = more funds for their congregation... for each pastor you convert into a (free and willing) salesperson, you get 200 to 5000 high-quality impressions every Sunday.
3) By adding pain every time the user doesn't engage, you have a somewhat anti-fragile, habit-loop reinforcing mechanism... my gut says retention will go right up as a result. Retention = increased LTV and more opportunities to leverage social network.
Anyways. I don't think you should do it (as I believe religion does more harm than good compared to an equivalent amount of effort invested in education, charitable causes etc) ...but if you wanted to make Teh Benjamins, that's how I'd go about doing it.
*Tips hat*
Excellent app that helps our small group prayer requests collated and updated in one place. I find the reminder and scheduling functionality very useful.
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PrayerMate
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