Nir Eyal

The cold truth is that the best products don't always win. Many times it's - the products that have the ability to keep users coming back and using them without conscious thought and using them out of habit are the ones that keep us coming back.

The market for religious apps is fiercely competitive; searching for 'bible' in the Apple App Store returns 5,185 results. But among all the choices, YouVersion's Bible, funded by LifeChurch.tv of Edmond, Oklahoma, seems to be the chosen one, ranking at the top of the list and boasting more than 641,000 reviews.

Don Draper-style advertising is really only available to the biggest brands out there. It's only commodity goods that use those kind of messages because they have to differentiate goods that are really hard to differentiate between - Shell gasoline versus Exxon, Coke versus Pepsi, Sprint versus T-Mobile, it's all the same thing!

AdNectar was born out of a class project at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in January of 2008. The founders are all avid social network users and we wanted to see if we could discover the optimal way for advertisers to reach consumers in a way that felt authentic and organic, and yet was scalable to a mass audience.