“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.