Introducing Pray: The Catholic Novena App 🙏📲

Earlier this week I published a teaser article ahead of the official launch day marketing push. Today I’m very excited to announce that Pray: The Catholic Novena App has reached 1.0 status and is available for mass market consumption.

In order to make the largest wave possible, we have multiple interviews lined up on Catholic radio stations, app reviews publishing on popular Catholic websites, and an organized launch team ready to like and share the content. This is really happening and I couldn’t be more excited to see what the outcome will be.

There are many reasons why I’m so excited about this particular launch. Foremost, it’s my first product to ship that I would call my own. Technically, this app is the first release from a general partnership that I formed with my neighbor and good friend, Devin Rose. I’ll talk more about the partnership in a moment, but first, I promised to explain what the app is.

Pray is an iOS mobile app for the Catholic community. It was designed to be a simple way to pray Novenas, which are prayers made to a Catholic saint over a nine day period with a specific intention. The app makes it easy to leave prayer requests through Facebook and to track the results of those requests as well as your friends’ requests.

The app was designed to be simple and free of fluff. It was meant to solve one problem really, really well. From a lean startup perspective, it’s a test of the hypothesis that a global community of Catholics would use this app for prayer on a regular basis.

Why this? Why now?

As you know, this is my first mobile app side project that shipped. You may be wondering why I chose this project over many of the other ones I could have pursued. I’d love to share some of the lessons I’ve learned that lead me to writing this today.

Lesson #1: Partner with the Right People

My strength is in building mobile apps. I’m detail oriented and combine hard technical skills with good vision and business savvy. However, with so many apps in the App Store today, you need more than just a great product to be successful. You need to partner with other people to form a more complete team.

A successful app business requires great product + great marketing.

I’ve been saying that for a long time, but it has become a hard rule for me now. You should never spend your time building an app without a realistic plan to get it in a lot of peoples hands.

My business partner and neighbor, Devin, listened to me talk about building apps for other startups over the past year while our kids played together in the yard. I would also listen to him talk about building audience, writing books, and publishing courses for the Catholic community.

Devin has spent the past seven years building his audience. He has written a best-selling book in the Catholic niche, has been interviewed on a Catholic television program, and appeared on countless Catholic radio shows and blogs.

At some point it occurred to us that together we had product and marketing capability. Devin had an idea for a mobile app and together we reduced it down to a tighter product that solved a single problem well for a large niche of mobile users. A new side project was born. I found a partner that I worked well with. He brought something substantial and complementary to the table, and most importantly helped create the momentum and accountability to get us here. For me, Devin was the right partner to give us a prayer with marketing (lol 🙏) and to inspire me to finish this MVP product.

Lesson #2: Build for Communities

Sometime in the past year, I realized the importance of community. If your app or business idea can solve a problem for an easily defined, closely knit community then there is a decent chance at getting word-of-mouth distribution.

In this respect, the Catholic community presented many ideal characteristics. It’s a large, tight-knit community in which word spreads quickly. Initially, I didn’t realize how large Catholicism was. According to Wikipedia, about 21% of our 320M citizens identify as Catholic. It’s the largest denomination of Christianity in the US with 67M people.

When you look at Catholicism globally, the story gets even more interesting. For example, before I did some top-down analysis I didn’t realize that the Philippines has 100M people of which a whopping 83% identify as Catholic. This means that there are more English speaking Filipino Catholics (83M) than in the US. Catholicism dominates in other regions of the world. All told, Catholicism accounts for almost 1.3 billion people world-wide.

This is definitely a large, tight-knit, community and we have an ability to actually reach them.

Lesson #3: The App Store Fundamentally Changed What Scale Means

I’ve been building mobile apps since before the App Store when Windows Mobile was still popular. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, and later the App Store, I knew that the technology landscape had changed for good. I decided right there to commit to the mobile technology wave and stopped accepting web projects altogether.

One of the most impressive things about the mobile app space, and why entrepreneurs everywhere want to build an app-based business, is the near zero distribution costs to reach a global market. I can develop an app from anywhere in the world, upload a build to the App Store, and within hours it can be available for distribution across every market around the globe. I pay $99/year and 30% of $0 to make my free app available to over 1 billion iPhone users. (I’ll talk about the revenue model in a future post)

Compare that to the resources required to design, manufacturer, and distribute something like your smartphone to every market on the globe. Our app can use freemium economics to extract pennies per user and still be insanely profitable. While these App Store characteristics theoretically apply to any app project, most of my other ideas would realistically target US users that I could reach. Due to the global Catholic community, Pray has a realistic chance of reaching a much much larger audience than I’ve considered possible in the past.

Lesson #4: How Viral Distribution Actually Works

The cheapest way to reach a lot of people is through word-of-mouth referrals. All of the major platforms we use today (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) relied on word-of-mouth to achieve meteoric growth.

In order to have a chance at word-of-mouth, or viral distribution, your product has to offer some way to spread through an action your users intrinsically want to do anyway. For example, LinkedIn was the first to use the address book uploader. It made sense for a business networking tool to have a 1-click way to connect with your existing network of friends. At that time, it was new and people didn’t consider it spammy the way we might today.

During development of our product, I noticed that Catholics were already using Facebook to make prayer requests where they could receive support from within their community. A person would leave a request on their wall for others to pray for their job search, the sale of their home, the health of a loved one, etc. Almost instantly, their community would pour in likes and comments to let them know they were not alone and that others were praying for them as well.

I realized that their online social network was serving a basic human need that is as old as time. This is the need to feel comforted, supported, and loved. They want to know they aren’t alone and that they have a powerful community of people praying for them in their time of need. I find this the most appealing aspect of organized religion.

Unlike other apps, Pray leverages Facebook to make it simple to make prayer requests right where their existing community already is… on Facebook. Pray allows users the opportunity to post directly on Facebook and to readily access the prayer requests of their friends in order to make it easy for the community to pray for each other. This is something they already do online and offline.

If viral distribution is going to work at all, it’s going to be because of an action your users wanted to perform anyway.

Prior to launch, with only our beta testers, we’ve seen a high percentage of users requesting prayers. The word is quickly spreading across borders. Pray already has active users in 7 countries.

Today, we launch our app for the world to see. While we are optimistic, we don’t know how big this day will be. If you want to find out, you can help by recommending this article. I’ll be writing about the outcome of our launch day activities in about a week or so after things settle down and we can analyze the results. My commitment to you is that the next post will be an authentic and truthful post mortem, regardless of the outcome.

Wish us luck and come back to follow our journey.