What should product leaders consider when building a mission-driven product and scaling niche apps? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Jonathan Ozeran, Hallow Co-Founder Erich Kerekes shares his insights on transitioning from a corporate career to founding a successful Catholic prayer and meditation app, navigating the challenges of product development and user engagement, and leveraging data to create a personalized experience for a growing community. Tune in for actionable advice on turning passion projects into thriving businesses.
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Show Notes
- Transitioning from a corporate career to founding a mission-driven product
- Identifying the intersection of faith and meditative practices as a market opportunity
- Iterating on the initial app with user feedback to improve the experience
- Adopting a flexible, adaptable approach to product team structure and responsibilities
- Aligning product development with evolving company priorities and goals
- Tailoring management styles to individual team members for optimal performance
- Leveraging user advisory boards and surveys to gather continuous feedback
- Implementing feature flagging and A/B testing to validate product enhancements
- Overcoming technical scaling challenges with database optimization and infrastructure
- Localizing content and features for international expansion
- Defining key metrics like week 4 retention as leading indicators of long-term success
- Qualifying meaningful user engagement actions beyond just app opens
- Balancing free and paid features to align with the mission of accessibility
- Exploring opportunities for virtual/augmented reality in the prayer experience
- Adding seamless transitions like a “prayer clock” to enhance the user flow
- Continuously expanding content and features to serve users at all faith stages
- Emphasizing the importance of community and shared prayer experiences
- Advising product builders to take small, actionable steps towards their vision
- Maintaining a focus on user needs and aligning metrics with the core mission
- Embracing flexibility, adaptation, and upfront communication of values and goals
About the speaker
Erich is the CTO & Co-Founder of Hallow, a Catholic startup focused on prayer, meditation, music, bible, and sleep. The app launched 5 years ago, but has grown rapidly and recently crossed 18 million downloads, 450 million prayers completed, 4 billion minutes in prayer, 250,000 five-star reviews, and is the #1 Catholic app in the world. Erich was raised Catholic but it wasn’t a huge part of his life, until he began exploring it more deeply in college. Even then, it was more on the theology side than a personal relationship through prayer. It wasn’t until Erich’s co-founder, Alex, first approached him about Hallow that he truly discovered the contemplative and meditative side of Catholicism and started forming a deeper personal relationship with God. Over the last several years, the Hallow team has grown with the app, raising over $105M in venture funding from some of the best investors in the world and scaling the team to 80 folks. Erich grew up in Barrington, IL. He attended the University of Notre Dame School and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Computer Science. He worked professionally in management consulting before Hallow at McKinsey & Company, and now lives in Chicago. He’s been blessed to be named a member of Forbes 30 under 30 with his two co-founders, Alex Jones and Alessandro DiSanto.
About the host
Jonathan is a product and operations leader, company builder, investor and advisor. He has assembled, scaled and led product, design, software engineering, hardware engineering and machine learning teams across numerous financing stages (pre-seed through Series G).