“We Hope to Lose Even More Money”: Why BibleChat’s Founder Is Betting on Purpose Over Profit

Laurențiu Bălașa builds purpose into every layer of his company. As the co-founder of BibleChat, a faith-based app that quickly climbed to the top of the U.S. App Store rankings, he is part of a new wave of Romanian entrepreneurs who are scaling globally while staying deeply grounded in social values.

As Endeavor’s raison d’être is encouraging high-impact entrepreneurs to multiply the value they create, we picked his brain about the challenges of creating a global faith-based product, innovating in millennia-old social structures, and infusing purpose horizontally into his organization.    

BibleChat has grown tremendously. But success means different things to different founders. For you personally, what does “giving back” truly mean?

In the context of a business that’s grown so quickly, the autonomy we offer our team and the complete ownership they have in the company is a form of giving back. These are roles that go beyond just jobs, spaces where people feel comfortable experimenting, even if that means making mistakes. We support that wholeheartedly. Creating such roles helps people grow.

Together with my co-founder Marius, we’re also launching a Venture Studio through which we’ll invest in other consumer-facing apps. It’s another way we want to give back, to share knowledge with anyone who’s seeking it, investing our own capital. We’re able to do this because of what we’ve learned in the last 15 years building apps and, more specifically, during the last seven years building this company.

We also fund Hacker25.com, a community where young people passionate about app development can learn how to scale an application, attend Q&A sessions, receive mentorship, secure funding, and participate in hackathons, all with a focus on mobile consumer apps. It’s the first community of its kind in Romania.

Thanks to BibleChat’s growth, we can now run a charity across three continents: the US, Europe, and Asia, with philanthropic activities in various locations, and with the help of the Endeavor network we can expand our reach even more. We update our website weekly with real, measurable ways we’re helping. Our core focus areas are: education and school dropout prevention, mental health prevention, and humanitarian aid, such as distributing food in places like the Philippines, where we fed over 1,000 people, or in Ecuador and Mexico, some of our focus areas.

How do you balance stability with encouraging people to experiment and make mistakes while scaling a business?

It’s actually normal to do so. The assumption that we, as founders, “allow” employees to make mistakes is based on the implicit belief that we know what’s right. But we don’t. Our goal is to bring people who think differently from us into the team, operating under the premise that we don’t know what the market wants, and that’s the main lesson we’ve learned.

BibleChat targets a much younger demographic than the one me and my co-founder are in, so we have to stay humble. Once you start with that mindset, it becomes much easier to experiment. Our role is to encourage this, and to understand that the speed of iteration in experimentation is the main contributor to success, because that’s how you learn.

In practice, we run experiments on localized and specific audiences to gather insights fast.

You’ve mentioned openly encouraging employees to start their own ventures after working with you. What drives you to actively support employees who might eventually leave, and how does this create value for BibleChat?

To help people become self-starters, you have to actively encourage that in the positions you create internally. The biggest advantage is that I truly believe we don’t know exactly what users want in our product. Sure, we have ideas, but so do the other people on the team, and they come from very diverse backgrounds. The more divergent the experimentation, the faster the learning.

We’ve often been surprised by experiments we thought would never work, but did. That’s why we give full ownership and freedom. It benefits the company and the product because we’ve discovered things our competitors haven’t, mainly because those competitors operate with top-down, autocratic structures, where for instance, a UI/UX department dictates what gets tested.

That kind of setup is damaging in the long term. In our case, we give a lot of ownership to engineers, not at the expense of other departments, but by recognizing the strategic value they bring. In the long run, this teaches them to be self starters and even pursue their own ventures.

Your company explicitly incorporates charity work. How do you decide where to focus your charitable efforts, and how do you make sure you’re maximizing real-world impact?

We’ve chosen our charitable focus to reflect the main use cases within our app: Bible study and mental health support. That’s why we help prevent school dropout and mental illness, especially among children.

As demand has grown, we’ve added a humanitarian aid layer as well, supporting various countries. Our main goal is to help children stay in school and protect their mental health. For example, in Necșești, the school with the lowest graduation rate in Romania, we set up an afterschool program and are funding extra tutoring and free meals to encourage participation.

We also launched a high school initiative to educate teenagers about the mental health risks of social media, developed with help from psychologist friends. These are our core directions, both in Romania and in Denver, where we operate another registered charity.

The context is that, as a startup, we’re losing money. But we’ve set a budget and will soon begin fundraising, presenting what we’ve accomplished and asking other stakeholders from investors, to the community and our users, to help us scale our impact.

What’s the perception in Romania around mixed business models that integrate social components?

I don’t think people here have much of a perception about it, they’re simply not used to this type of thinking. This approach is more common in more mature capitalist societies.

The response we’ve gotten in Romania has mostly been confusion: “Wait, you’re a loss-making company funding a philanthropic foundation across the globe?” But I hope it inspires other companies to consider it. The benefits for the company are clear.

I have this philosophy that philanthropy can help you make more money, both as an individual and as an organization. When you begin your entrepreneurial journey, it’s easy to overappreciate the importance of money, since it’s the circulatory system of any business. This can lead to an obsession with revenue, profit, and meeting KPIs, even if your business has a social mission.

Over time, that obsession creates pressure. It’s the same for individuals: you start measuring yourself against salary growth, stock options, benefits, and that pressure becomes toxic to both productivity and creativity.

Philanthropy is the counterweight. That money-focused obsession leads to stress and materialism, which ironically makes you less creative and less likely to generate wealth. But when you choose to give away your money and put it into social causes, you enter a more relaxed state. From there, you can more easily attract abundance into your life and your business.

BibleChat offers faith-driven content and guidance. How do you reconcile the spiritual dimension of your mission with the commercial reality of charging a subscription fee?

It’s actually simple. Right now, we’re losing a lot of money, and we hope to lose even more in the long run. Meaning that we hope our actions will eventually generate enough value for us to go public. When we tell investors about our long-term mission, we start with explaining the potential for a return. 

On the user side, most people understand that servers cost money, developers need to be paid, and the majority are okay with paying for a subscription. Over 90% of our app’s functionalities are completely free and unlimited. This generosity stands out to users, especially when they see we’re offering for free more than any competitor, which often encourages them to support us through a paid plan if they are in a position to do so.

Have you faced criticism or ethical dilemmas in developing a faith-based product?

Plenty.

Our own AI architecture was built precisely on the ethical dilemmas around the very sensitive questions users ask, around topics like: transgender, transhumanism, suicide, homicide, LGBTQ+ and more.

We needed control over how the AI responds.

All our features are reviewed by our Biblical Council, a group of priests, pastors, and experienced internal team members from various denominations. It’s an ongoing process, and we’ve taken risks by innovating in what’s traditionally a very conservative space.

But our goal is clear: without changing the word of God, we want to innovate in terms of features and use cases, in ways that others haven’t because they remained stuck in dogma.

Endeavor talks a lot about the “multiplier effect” — founders reinvesting success into the next generation. What does that look like for you?

That’s exactly what we’re doing with Hacker25 and our Venture Studio.

We’re working with young people, helping them become entrepreneurs. We run free acceleration programs in our office, where we spend a full week mentoring them, and then investing in their companies.

I think we’ve already taken pretty concrete steps that align closely with our business direction, and we hope to have an even greater impact going forward.

If you were starting from scratch today, knowing what you know now about giving back, business ethics, and entrepreneurship, what would you do differently?

So many things. 

I’ve been doing this for 20 years. BibleChat is my eighth company. I’ve made tons of mistakes.

First, I wouldn’t build any local business. I’d look closely at global tech trends I could ride, or industries that are outdated and under-innovated, where I wouldn’t have many competitors. I wouldn’t go where all the Western founders go. But I wasted a lot of time on non-scalable businesses where the cost of goods sold was very high. There’s this metric in American accounting that I really resonate with, COGS, which essentially determines scalability. For online businesses, it’s very low. For online subscription businesses, it’s truly excellent. And you benefit from the greatest global distribution system humanity has ever created: the App Store. It gives you a scalable business from day one, with virtually no associated costs. I wouldn’t waste my time with local, brick-and-mortar businesses anymore.

For Romania, this kind of global, scalable, tech-driven mindset is exactly what we need, because it has the potential to contribute to the country’s economy by opening access to markets of hundreds of millions of people.

You mentioned it took a while to find this business model. What kept you going?

Until 2019, I was extremely money-driven. That motivation came from a tough childhood. I lived through the same harsh conditions we’ve all come from in Romania during the ’90s: scarce food, scarce conditions, a family of six living in a 30-square-meter apartment. It was hard.

But I was lucky to interact with people who had a better financial situation, and early on I decided I was going to become financially independent, for myself and my family. That belief kept me going time after time, and I’m not saying it in a defeatist way, I’m truly thankful for it.

Eventually though, I realized it’s not just about making money, it’s about contributing on a larger scale. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wealth. In fact, I believe God wants us all to live in abundance. But it’s only once you’re free from financial pressure that you can reflect on your deeper purpose.

To me, that purpose is reducing human suffering, even if only partially or temporarily. If BibleChat becomes a public company, we’ll be able to help more people than ever before, and we’ll share everything we’ve learned to help others do the same.

I was deeply inspired by what Daniel Dines did. I hope that I’ll get to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs in the same way.