Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
11 tactics from Ryan Beck
Drive Revenue and Retention - Ryan Beck, Pray.com
Watch the full episode“I'm a big fan of imitate, iterate, and innovate. I would rather imitate to start because innovation is hard — you don't know how it's going to perform when it goes live. But imitation you can set benchmarks. We rolled out bedtime Bible stories and sleep Psalms — content people were already finding traction with in the secular space.”
Imitate → Iterate → Innovate — Set Benchmarks Before You Differentiate
Ryan Beck deliberately copied the secular subscription playbook (Calm's sleep content, Headspace's meditation style) and applied it to faith, setting clear benchmarks from the start. This gave Pray.com a proven content structure to iterate on rather than inventing from scratch. The innovation came later — once the baselines were established and they understood what worked for their specific audience, they built things that had no secular analog.
“We had phone, email, name — and that phone number was not working with consumer subscription. It cause such high drop off you couldn't then monetize. By removing the requirement of a phone you would then better convert.”
Phone Number Field Killed Onboarding Conversion — Removing It Unlocked Subscription
Pray.com originally required phone numbers in onboarding because their social network needed verified users. When they transitioned to consumer subscription, that single field caused catastrophic drop-off before users ever reached the paywall. Removing it unblocked the entire monetization funnel. The lesson: onboarding fields appropriate for one business model can be fatal in another — audit every friction point when pivoting monetization strategy.
“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. Facebook was and still is to some extent King of that demographic — but TV worked really well when that audience was there.”
TV and Radio to Reach Older High-LTV Demographics — Meet Them in Their Medium
Pray.com's primary audience is 45+ users who came to faith later in life and have higher lifetime values than younger cohorts. Rather than forcing this demographic into Instagram, Ryan ran TV and radio campaigns that met them in the medium they trusted. The result: TV buyers were 'blown away' by the effectiveness. The lesson is channel–audience fit: older high-LTV users respond better to broadcast trust signals than to performance digital.
“As seen on TV is a real thing. As seen on Instagram is not a real thing. Five bucks gets me on Instagram. Five bucks does not get me on TV. The barrier to entry was higher — people thought this is legit.”
"As Seen on TV" Trust Signal Can't Be Faked for $5 — Barrier to Entry Creates Credibility
Ryan Beck identified a key difference between broadcast and digital advertising: the high cost and gatekeeping of TV creates an implicit trust signal that cheap digital cannot replicate. For a faith app targeting audiences where trust is everything, that broadcast credibility was worth a premium. Post-IDFA, this logic has become even more relevant — as digital attribution degrades, brand-building channels with inherent trust value become more defensible investments.
“We had Meta going — tens of thousands of dollars a day — and most of it was behind one creative. It was performing really great, had five stars in the description, Meta approved it. Then Meta decided: not good. They took it down on a dime. Our customer acquisition costs were untenable and we had to bring down those campaigns and retool.”
Creative Concentration Risk — 80% in One Meta Ad Got Yanked Overnight
Pray.com ran tens of thousands of dollars per day on Meta, with the majority concentrated in a single top-performing creative. When Meta deactivated it without warning, CAC spiked to unsustainable levels overnight during Q5 — the most important acquisition period for subscription apps. The fix: treat your creative portfolio like an investment portfolio, and apply position-size limits so no single asset can blow up your entire campaign.
“Just like an investor with an investment portfolio — you don't want 80% of your investments tied up in one creative. If it's an Nvidia you've got 30% max. Do anything more than that and you run a little bit of risk. Creative diversification is very important — it was a hard lesson learned.”
Portfolio-Diversify Ad Creative — Cap Any Single Creative at 30% Like an Investment
After losing their top creative overnight, Pray.com rebuilt their Meta strategy with explicit concentration limits: no single creative gets more than 30% of spend, the same way a smart investor caps a single stock position. They now test aggressively across formats borrowed from gaming, dating, and other verticals. The discipline forces continuous creative development rather than riding one winner until it dies.
“One of the strategies that has worked well is some sort of light or heavy quiz funnel in your onboarding to help understand the user. We're light in our journey there — but there are things we do to make sure we're helping guide them in their faith journey, because you can use these indicators to help people with healthy habits.”
Light Onboarding Quiz Personalizes Faith Journey Without Heavy-Handed NOOM-Style Interrogation
Pray.com collects a few onboarding signals about where users are in their faith journey — curious all the way to regularly attending a faith organization — and uses them to personalize the initial content experience. Ryan was explicit that this is not the intensive quiz-funnel approach made famous by Noom (which he called 'a multi-day onboarding event'), but rather a lightweight signal collection. The goal is long-term retention, not tricking users: people don't pay you for reinforcing bad habits.
“Post-IDFA, subscription is not enough. I look at it across three lenses: subscription is my core, ads is my secondary, and one-time purchases or upsells is another avenue. I start with Revenue as my North Star since I think that's the best metric for a company.”
Revenue Is the Only North Star — Subscription + Ads + One-Time Are Three Levers, Not One
Ryan Beck argues that post-IDFA, consumer subscription apps need to think about monetization in three buckets simultaneously: subscription (recurring revenue), ads (ad-supported tier for non-subscribers), and one-time purchases (consumables, content bundles). Duolingo is his example: subs + ads + gems. Revenue — not any individual KPI — is the North Star because it integrates all three levers and avoids local optimization that looks good in isolation but misses the full picture.
“If nobody complains about your price you're not charging enough. People are complaining about having to pay — you're doing the right thing. It's a signal that they want it, a positive signal of value creation. Nobody complains about the price of something they don't want.”
Complaints About Price Are a Positive Value Signal — Silence Means Nobody Wants It
When Pray.com introduced subscriptions, some users complained that faith content should be free. Rather than treating this as a crisis, Ryan reads price complaints as confirmation that the product is valuable. An app nobody wants generates zero complaints about pricing. His response to negative App Store reviews: reply personally, get on a call, show people the team cares — and track the data separately to confirm that conversion rates validate the price.
“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. We were able to run rapid iterations on our tests and that's really what helped us figure out what could monetize.”
Server-Side A/B Testing Infrastructure — Avoid Redeploying Apps for Every Experiment
Pray.com rebuilt their entire product infrastructure specifically to support rapid server-side experimentation — allowing onboarding flows and paywalls to be changed without a new App Store submission. This architectural decision compressed the feedback loop from weeks to days. For subscription apps where onboarding and paywall conversion are the primary revenue levers, the ability to test without a release cycle is a force multiplier for growth velocity.
“One of the key things I learned is: don't have different road maps. Make sure that your product road map is taking into account the whole organization. When performance marketing is closely related to the technical side of the business, it's all under one roof — and that created a lot of empathy where I was able to have a different perspective than most engineers.”
One Shared Roadmap Across Product and Marketing — No Engineering/Growth Divide
Ryan Beck ran both tech and performance marketing at Pray.com, which gave him unusual empathy for the marketers' needs and let him prioritize marketing infrastructure requests alongside product development on one shared roadmap. The result: no dysfunction between teams, faster execution on growth experiments, and a culture where every engineer thinks of themselves as a growth engineer. He cites Blinkist's CTO-led performance setup as the benchmark that validated this approach.