STEP BY STEP BUSINESS – Sam Moorcroft co-founded ChristianCafe.com in 1999.
FOCUS – Our purpose is to connect people who say they're Christians and want to meet other single people of shared faith. We give them options to pick how involved they are in their local church and their denomination. From the beginning, we focused our marketing efforts on America. Now, we've added UK, Australia, NZ, Philippines, Singapore, S.Korea, S.Africa. Today, it's half American, ~15% Canadian.
TEAM & TECH– My average staff tenure is 20+ years. I hired my most recent employee in 2002. The original programmer is still here. I had the advantage of having some very clever and knowledgeable people start with me. As tech. evolved, they learned it. We got a grant from the Canadian government for $100k+ because we built Apple's first dating app. I believe there was no other dating app, and we were the first back in 2010. We had first-mover advantage. We have such a niche foothold that ~75% of our traffic daily comes from people who already know us. I learned that employees want to know that you care about them. If you treat your employees well, they will return the favor ten times. It's very expensive to bring someone new in. It's also upsetting to the whole team because you've got to integrate somebody else in. My wife is our CMO. we've been married for 20 years, and we have five kids.
MARKETING – We've had 25k+ marriages. It works. ~25% of our traffic comes from marketing. We do Google Ads, Bing, and affiliate (CJ, Pepperjam, and direct affiliates). We typically pay 40% of lifetime including renewals. We also do a lot of CPL and CPA deals. Also a ton of SEO work: backlinks and content for specific long-tail search results, like, "Austin, Texas Christian singles." Lately, we've been using AI a lot. Our site is unique amongst all dating sites when people come in because we don't give people a permanent free trial. We treat you like you paid for the first 10 days but cut you off afterward.
SAFETY – We built an anti-scammer tool that is behavioral-based. We kill them, but we don't tell them they're dead. We also give a network of volunteers free access in exchange for finding abuse.
