What Revenue Multiple Does Jesus Get You?

The difference between believers and grifters in the age of theological monopolies

One of the most efficient ways to grow revenue while retaining profit is to make your product’s value prop ideological, not merely economical. Consumers are willing to pay premiums for goods that signal their beliefs.

Typically however, these identities are based on a set of political or ideological beliefs. I buy Patagonia because I care about the environment, or I buy Black Rifle Coffee because I support the troops. A cousin to this strategy is employed by companies like Tesla or Palantir who form cults of personality around their leaders, mixing a potent cocktail of quasi-religious identities and judicious shareholder returns to grow their companies. (For more on this strategy, check my research report and playbook on it.)

There is also a type of company that hijacks existing religious beliefs as a way to grab market share. This strategy takes an existing category, like Vertical SaaS or media distribution, and then, if I may be a smidge crass, goes about Jesusifying it. These companies may slightly alter the operating model, but mostly it is about making their product such a natural extension of religious identity that it feels as important to buy it as paying tithing to the church.

Most folks in Silicon Valley are in the Michael Jordan school of thought when it comes to identity politics companies, namely that, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Artificially constraining your market size feels dumb.

However, there are three data points that have recently made me reconsider whether we should be taking the Jesusification strategy more seriously.

1. The national decline in Christian share of identity has finally plateaued at around 63%, while Gen Z and millennial attendance to church has been skyrocketing, now surpassing the average attendance of older generations. This is a sizable market with demographic tailwinds.

2. One of the very few non-AI consumer apps that has broken out over the last five years is Hallow. The app focuses on Catholic prayer and meditation and raised $105 million. It has had over 25 million downloads and reaching the #1 spot in the App Store.

3. There are two new public stocks whose entire business model is Jesusification. Angel is a Christian focused competitor to firms like Paramount and Netflix, while Gloo is an upcoming IPO that does Vertical SaaS for churches.

It is on this last data point I’d like to focus the remainder of my essay. These companies are perfect case studies for the potential (and the dangers) of this strategy. Even if you have no interest in biblical-businesses, this essay will be valuable to you because you can choose to actively buy or short both of these stocks (aka bet on this strategy). But more broadly, I also hope that these ideas can be applied to forms of religion beyond Christianity. Before networked computers, companies often aspired to build geographic monopolies. In the AI era, companies are attempting to build theological monopolies instead.

The benefits of selling out (to a higher power)