Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Erich Kerekes, Co-Founder and CTO of Hallow, located in Chicago, IL, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Hallow is a Catholic meditation app. We offer over 5,000 audio-guided prayers, meditations, sleep, and music sessions with a host of ways to customize your prayer experience. Our goal is to help as many people as possible grow in their relationship with God. By the grace of God, we recently hit 3M downloads and over 65M prayers completed through the app.

Tell us about yourself

Four years ago, my cofounders and I were much like our target market: we were young adults who were working in stressful environments, had Catholic upbringings, but were admittedly limited in our own personal relationships with God. More specifically, for me, prayer was one-sided and repetitive. I would tell God about my day, thank Him for good things, apologize for mistakes or stumblings, and ask for His intercession with a few things, but I rarely ever spent time in silence to listen for His voice. Beyond that, the only other real prayers that I practiced were ones that I had memorized from an early age—Our Father, Hail Mary, etc. While these are powerful in their own right, they do not allow for the two-way conversation required to form a relationship.

Lastly, we were all seeking peace in the craziness of the world. Our CEO, Alex, turned to meditation through a popular mindfulness app. I myself turned to nature and hiking to find peace in silence. In each case for our team, our methods were effective but not fully satisfactory, and we felt like they were lacking in spirituality, and we were disconnected from our Christian faith.

So we set out to find the intersection between meditation and Christianity, and our world was opened up as we were exposed to many types of contemplative prayer techniques that we had never known before. After practicing them in our own lives, we found they were exactly what we were looking for, and they changed our lives - they brought us peace while at the same time helping us grow in our relationship with God. We then set out to help as many people as possible discover these same techniques, and that's what keeps us motivated every day.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Far and away, the most impactful thing that we do is provide a space for folks to grow closer to God every day. We have heard countless stories of the prayerful experiences that our members continue to have through the app, including truly profound changes in well-being, a sense of peace, and, perhaps above all, the impact of feeling truly and deeply loved. Even if, after all this, we help just one individual feel closer to God, then it was all worth it, and that will always be our biggest accomplishment.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Constant prioritization. At any given moment, there are a million different things you can do - you can go after partnership a, b, or c, develop product feature x, y, or z, write content 1, 2, or 3…but you only have so many resources and so much time. Knowing how much energy to put toward something and when to do it (and when to give up on a project!) are among the biggest challenges we face every day.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Focus on execution, and be scrappy. Don't wait for doors to open; you have to open them yourself. There's a time and a place for ideas and planning, but they're a dime a dozen, and the important thing is making progress and taking action as soon as possible.
  2. Have resilience because most things won't work. If you're doing it right, you'll constantly be testing new ideas across all aspects of your business. Most things won't work, so you have to be ready to move on, iterate (or massively pivot), and try again.
  3. Find a or several good mentors. This one is especially true if you've never started a business before. While many problems will be unique to your company, there are many that are not. Finding people who have been there and done that across the many parts of your business (e.g., growth, product, industry, content) can be a game-changer for how quickly you get the ball rolling and the success you have when you try.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://hallow.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HallowApp/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hallowapp/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hallowapp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hallowapp/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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