Why the founder of Muslim Pro is now building a Catholic app

This article is part of our series, The Backstory, where we sit down with founders, operators, investors, and community builders who are doing something out of the box. The goal is to uncover how they’re thinking about and solving real-world problems, and how they got there.

Photo credit: Erwan Macé

Erwan Macé spent a decade building one of the world’s largest Muslim apps – and he is not a Muslim. A French Catholic, he grew Muslim Pro, a muslim prayer app, to surpass 100 million download, sold it for an undisclosed amount in 2017, before leaving the firm in a year later. Now, he is building another product for his own faith.

The road between leaving Muslim Pro and starting his new company, Catho+, a Catholic companion app that combines a digital Bible and missal with daily readings, guided prayers, a global prayer community, and tools to help users build religious habits, was not smooth. 

In fact, Macé founded three apps during that time – MyCyberHome (a mobile security app), Connect Messenger (a privacy-focused messaging app for close friends and family), and the personal finance app Dobin. All three failed to find a market. 

Since starting Catho+ early this year, the app has reached about 50,000 downloads with almost no marketing, Macé claims. We spoke to Macé about how a random Bible verse became his sign to start building, why he refuses to run ads, and why he’s delaying raising funds if he can help it.

In brief

• Biggest moment: Selling Muslim Pro in 2017 without ever raising outside funding.
• Where you might have seen them: As the founder of Muslim Pro, which was acquired in 2018 for an undisclosed sum.
• Key achievements: Grew Muslim Pro to more than 100 million downloads. Launched Catho+ in 12 languages, with users in 165 countries.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What gave you the idea to start Catho+?

I take an analytical approach to my work, but I believe in God, in something bigger than us. 

The day I started building Catho+, my fourth child, Noémie, had been born severely premature and was in intensive care. I opened an open-source Bible, 35,500 verses, to work out the database structure, and scrolled at random. The first verse I landed on mentioned her name, one of only 20 in the whole text. 

The engineer in me knows the odds, roughly one in 1,800. The rest of me did not need them.

It gave me a sense that someone was watching over my family, that she was going to be fine, and that this was the right thing to do. She is fine. It did not change how I build, but it changed why.