The Ex-Amazon Exec Who Built a Netflix for Church Kids
Erick Goss left Amazon's e-book empire to build a streaming app that vets every cartoon against a 50-point checklist. Parents pay $10.99 a month so their four-year-olds can watch Bible stories instead of ads.
In 2018, a former Amazon executive named Erick Goss did something that sounds either very smart or very strange: he bought a struggling children's app called JellyTelly, kept the audience, threw out the name, and relaunched it as Minno - a subscription streaming service that does for Christian parents what Netflix does for everyone else. Eight years later, the company sits in Nashville with roughly 38 employees, more than 3,700 episodes, and a growth rate most consumer startups would envy.
The pitch is simple enough to fit on a fridge magnet: hand your four-year-old a tablet without wondering what they will stumble into next. No ads. No autoplay rabbit holes. No cartoon that nobody screened. Minno's library runs from licensed favorites like VeggieTales and Numberblocks to its own originals, and every title on it has been checked against a list of more than 50 criteria before a kid ever presses play.
Goss is blunt about who Minno is for and who it is not. It is not trying to be the next general-interest streamer. It is trying to be a partner to a specific kind of household - the Sunday-school family that wants Bible stories in the rotation and is tired of feeling guilty about screen time.
What Minno actually does
At its core, Minno is a direct-to-consumer streaming app for kids roughly ages four to ten. It runs on the platforms families already own - iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Prime Video, Chromecast, Samsung, LG, and the web - and supports offline downloads for the back seat and the airplane. A subscription costs $10.99 a month, or $69.99 a year for households that commit, after a seven-day free trial.
The name is not random. "Minno" is a play on the Greek word meno, meaning "to abide," a reference to John 15. That is a lot of theology to pack into five letters, but it signals the intent: the company frames screen time less as babysitting and more as a chance for kids to sit with stories their parents believe in.
The 50-point checklist is the product
Anyone can license VeggieTales. What Minno actually sells is trust, and the checklist is where that trust gets manufactured. Before a show goes live, it is screened against more than 50 criteria spanning three lenses: is it good for a child's development, is it theologically sound, and - the one plenty of faith-based media forgets - is it any good to watch?
Illustrative weighting of the three lenses in Minno's 50+ point review.
It is a deceptively expensive way to run a catalog. Most kids' platforms optimize for volume and watch time and let an algorithm sort the rest. Minno does the opposite - it caps what gets in so that the label on the door means something. For a parent, the whole value is not having to pre-watch everything themselves.
Who is behind it
Goss did not arrive from central casting for a children's ministry. Before Minno he spent years at Amazon, where he had a hand in launching the company's first e-book and print-on-demand businesses, plus the Super Saver Shipping program that trained a generation to expect free delivery. Before that, he was a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and a spokesperson to the Pentagon. He holds an MBA from Michigan and a master's in international relations.
The Amazon lesson shows up in the strategy: catalog wins. The more good titles you carry, the harder the service is to cancel. Minno pairs that catalog instinct with a founder's personal motive - Goss has been open that he wanted shows he could trust for his own kids. He co-founded the company with Dan Raines, and together they built it on the bones of JellyTelly, the app behind "Buck Denver Asks... What's in the Bible?"
A business, not just a mission
Faith-based media has a long history of good intentions and thin margins. Minno's numbers suggest a real business underneath the mission. Subscribers grew roughly 64% year over year from 2024 to 2025, driven in part by originals like Young David and the Laugh and Grow Bible for Kids, and by distribution deals with Amazon Prime Video and Roku. Total funding reached $14.7 million, and in July 2026 Capital IP Investment Partners - a firm that specializes in debt and hybrid capital for technology companies - announced a strategic investment to push content and subscriber growth further.
Indexed to 100 at 2024. Figures approximate, based on company-reported growth.
The company is structured as a benefit corporation, which bakes the mission into the legal charter, and it has been funded by a mix of subscriber revenue and outside investors. It was also, for what it is worth, named a recipient of TINYPulse's 2020 Happiest Company Award - a small signal that the culture is doing something right.
More than an app
Minno is not only the streaming service. Around it sits a small flywheel of faith-formation products: the Laugh & Grow Bible for Kids, a children's Bible that won a 2020 Christian Book Award and became one of the fastest-selling in its category; the Raising Boys & Girls Podcast, which has topped two million downloads; and MinnoLife, a set of free and low-cost parenting resources. The company also produced the first-ever American Sign Language Bible series for kids, extending its content to deaf and hard-of-hearing children - a small, telling move for a company optimizing for specific families rather than a mass audience.
- The name "Minno" comes from the Greek meno, "to abide."
- The company began as an acquisition of the JellyTelly app in October 2018.
- Its children's Bible was one of the fastest-selling in its category.
- It made the first-ever American Sign Language Bible series for kids.
- It is legally a benefit corporation, not a standard C-corp.
How it stands apart
Minno sits between two crowds. On one side are the free, secular giants - YouTube Kids, Netflix, Disney+ - where the content is broad, the ads or algorithms are present, and nothing is screened for a faith-forward household. On the other are faith-based peers like Angel Studios, RightNow Media, and Yippee TV. Minno's wedge is narrow and deliberate: ad-free, purpose-built for young kids, curated by hand, and wrapped in books and podcasts that keep families in the ecosystem beyond the screen.
The obvious question is why a family would pay $10.99 when YouTube Kids is free. The answer Minno is betting on is that "free" comes with costs a parent feels - ads, autoplay, and the low-grade anxiety of not knowing what loads next. For the household that shares Minno's worldview, removing that anxiety is the feature worth paying for. For a household that does not, it is not - and Minno seems comfortable with that trade.
Where it fits in the market, then, is less "the Christian Netflix" and more a category of one for a defined audience: a curated, ad-free kids' service that treats parents as the customer and screen time as something to be trusted rather than escaped.