A Sacred Startup

By Matt Potter

It was the early days of their startup, and Matt Potter and his three cofounders were in a rented broom closet in Santa Monica, California, fielding tech support calls on their cell phones for their new app. A call was routed to Matt, and a woman on the other end said she was having trouble logging in to the app.

“I have to listen to the app now,” she said with anxiety in her voice. “You don’t know what I’m going through.”

Taken aback, Matt replied, “Well, what are you going through?”

“I’m in the chemo chair right now,” she explained. “I’m going through stage four cancer for the second time, I don’t have any family—all my family have passed away—and this is all I have to listen to while I’m sitting here for four hours.”

Shocked, Matt began to weep as he helped restore the woman’s access to the app.

“I didn’t know what to say,” he recalls. “It felt like we were failing this woman. So we fixed it, and I gave her a free subscription. We were just like, ‘Whatever you need, we’re gonna take care of you. We’ll help you.’”

The app that meant so much to the woman is Pray.com, a multimedia repository of online Bibles, videos, music and other spiritual resources that Steve Galena, Michael Lynn, Ryan Beck and Matt Potter launched in 2016.

Pray.com recently passed the milestone of 15 million downloads and 1 billion listening minutes as of December 2022—not to mention 109 million social shares of content from the platform. Beyond the stats, they regularly hear stories, like that of the woman in the chemo chair, from people whose lives have been impacted by the app.

One email they received was from a police officer who had been planning for months to take his own life. He had gotten home from his shift, put his gun in his mouth and was prepared to pull the trigger when a friend pinged his phone with a piece of shared content from Pray.com. The man was writing the app developers to thank them for saving his life.

“When we started Pray.com, I thought we would help people reconnect with their faith. I thought we would help people learn more of the Bible. I thought we would entertain and teach kids the Bible,” Matt says. “I never thought we would help people’s mental health, and I never thought that we would help people make a different choice than ending it all.”

As a company with such a commitment to ministry, it may seem unusual that Pray.com began as a tech startup—with a business plan, investors and a goal to make a profit and generate incomes for its 50-plus employees and more than 100 contractors. Matt’s personal story, however, sheds some light on why he has such a passion to align his business goals with eternal impact.

Matt’s mother was a 15-year-old girl who found herself pregnant and walked into a community church on the outskirts of a small town in Washington, seeking advice from anyone she might find there. The pastor, a young man who had only been in the role for a short time, didn’t know what to do. So, he called another pastor friend of his in Southern California who was leading a church plant with 20 people.

“I’ve got a married couple in my church who have been trying to have a baby for 10 years,” his friend said. “They’ve been looking for a baby to adopt, so why don’t you ask this girl if she’d be willing to give her baby up for adoption?”

The couple flew to Washington on the day Matt was born and brought him home with them. The small congregation they were a part of in L.A. grew to be the 15,000-member Shepherd Church, pastored by Dudley Rutherford, with campuses in Agua Dulce, Woodland Hills, Porter Ranch and online. Matt grew up in the church and went to college at Boise State University in Idaho. He was in his senior year when Apple’s app store opened.

“I just kind of knew something was going to happen with this,” he recalls, imagining the possible business opportunities the platform created. One in particular was in real estate, a world Matt had grown up in, since his father owned a real estate company. Every realtor is going to want their own apps, he thought.

So, although he had no experience in developing apps, Matt started a real estate software as a service company, hired someone to teach him code and built the first version of the app with his business partner and best friend, Will Grewal. He dropped out of Boise State two credits shy of a degree and kept himself afloat with credit cards as the company began to gain traction.

Eleven years later, HomeStack is based in Southern California and has white-labeled and licensed 7,000 versions of its app for major real estate companies such as Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s and Keller Williams, as well as local agencies and individual agents.

Despite HomeStack’s success, Matt felt dissatisfied.

“I’m just coming to work every day feeling like I lost my purpose,” he recalls. “I reached a point where I really didn’t need to work if I didn’t want to. And, you know, I just felt God tugging on my heart to help and give back.”

It was around this time he ran into his friend Steve Gatena in a coffee shop in Santa Monica. Steve shared with Matt how his business partner had died in a plane crash, and when he was struggling, a friend shared with him an audio recording of a sermon by Dallas pastor Matt Chandler. The sermon changed his life, and Steve became a Christian.

“How can I help people just like me?” Steve asked Matt, describing his vision for a one-stop “digital destination for Christians online” comparable to what sports fans have in ESPN.com. Instead, Christian content tends to be scattered across multiple platforms and destinations, such as church websites, YouTube, Facebook and podcasting platforms.

“It’s all over the place,” Matt notes. “But there’s no one place where you can access all of the content from incredible people. And when Steve told that to me—‘the ESPN for Christians’—I was just like, ‘Oh man, I got it. I know exactly what you’re talking about, and this is gonna change the world.’”

That coffee shop conversation led to Matt walking away from the successful company he had started and landing in a Santa Monica broom closet, and Matt and Steve both found a way to use their entrepreneurial gifts to launch a business that would also satisfy their thirst to make a difference in the lives of others. They were joined by cofounders CFO Michael Lynn, a former private wealth advisor with Merrill Lynch, and CTO Ryan Beck, who has a background in software engineering.

Pray.com’s business model includes funding from investors, subscribers, advertisers and content partners. Although 200,000 pieces of content on Pray.com are free for anyone who downloads the app, the company’s business model includes funding from subscriptions for premium content. (For $7.99 per month, subscribers get access to all the content on the platform.) In addition to subscriptions, Pray.com hosts ads from likeminded businesses and organizations, and it receives revenue from partners who pay to have their content hosted and promoted on the platform.

When asked why they chose to launch Pray.com as a business and not a non-profit ministry, Matt explains the challenges of scaling and the capital needed to launch a high-quality product.

“The advantages are that we can make decisions to grow all over the world, and we’re not constrained by donors. In other words, we don’t want to have to ask people for money to be able to grow,” he notes. “I love the nonprofit model. I just don’t think it’s right for something that requires such large capital in the beginning. When you’re building an app, and you want to make it world class—which is what we wanted to do—you have to raise a lot of capital in the beginning.”

While building a team of developers, designers and marketers to ensure that the app was competitively positioned from the start, Pray.com also invested in commissioning high quality content.

“We hired a 61-piece orchestra. We have former Disney voice actors and actresses, sound editors, sound designers, musicians, creating all this incredible content that we built,” Matt explains, describing the cinematic “biblical sagas” that make Scripture come alive to listeners.

Although one of the core functions of the platform at its inception was a social network for prayer requests, Pray.com has grown to include audio, dramatized and text-based Bibles, teaching videos, music, podcasts, guided prayer and more. Through personalization, developers are able to identify what appeals to individual users and curate content accordingly.

Matt expects that the app will continue to evolve as users’ needs change and new forms of media become ubiquitous. As it is, he notes that user behavior often reflects current events. During the pandemic, mental health took center stage in the cultural consciousness, and the use of apps for meditation, mindfulness and self-care increased dramatically. 

Matt cites Pray.com cofounder Mike Lynn’s observation that the COVID-19 pandemic gave birth to a mental health crisis he calls the “hidden pandemic.”

“We see a lot of people utilizing our meditative prayer series that has content for anxiety, depression and some of the other felt needs people are dealing with every single day, not just the one hour a week that they’re in church,” Matt notes. “They want supplemental content to reconnect with their faith and help them through some of the things they’re going through with mental health.”

Matt doesn’t see Pray.com as a replacement for church participation or mental health care, but he believes it meets a need people have for connection and encouragement in an increasingly isolated culture.

“As we’re seeing a decline in—not all churches—but a lot of churches’ attendance, downloads of Christian and faith-based apps have been growing faster than ever before,” he says. “With over 500 million downloads of Christian and faith-based apps, we’re seeing this digital transformation happen.”

This became particularly vivid for Matt when he hit the road in 2019, speaking at churches and encouraging people to download the app. At one church, a woman came up to him to thank him for Pray.com and said, “You don’t know me, but I called in and talked to you. I was the woman in the chemo chair.”

Of course, with nearly nine million apps available worldwide, she didn’t have to use Pray.com. When it didn’t work, she could have switched to Netflix, scrolled through her Facebook feed or looked up cat videos on YouTube to cheer her up. Instead, she stuck with the app that was meeting her in a time of crisis. And for Matt Potter, that’s the kind of story that reminds him why they started Pray.com.

“The results are what matter the most,” he says. “And the results are people like the woman that was in the chemo chair and people like the man that was going home and going to kill himself. If this did not exist in the world, there would be people who are dead, and that just blows me away. I never thought that would happen.”