Rick – So let’s talk a little bit about the YouVersion Bible app. Let’s talk about how the idea first came up and what the genesis of it was.

Bobby – I was in the O’Hare airport in Chicago in October of 2006 and I was in probably one of the longest TSA security lines that I have ever been in. It was one of those lines where it goes back and forth and back and forth and then you turn the corner and then there is a whole other set of lines. You thought you were at the end and then you find out that you are just beginning! And so it was there in that TSA security line, and I have no idea what prompted this, but I am standing there thinking, if we could just leverage the technology that we have today, perhaps we could be at one of those pivotal moments in history where it could change not just how this generation engages with the Bible, but generations to come. This would be not unlike how the printing press transformed the last several hundred years of our access to Scripture. I know that is a really big question to be asking in the security line—but that is what I was thinking.

So the initial idea for the YouVersion came there in the security line. Now most people know the YouVersion as an app that is on your smartphone or your tablet. Probably few people would know that YouVersion actually started as a website, but that is actually what the initial idea actually was. It had some novel concepts and features that I won’t take time to talk about, but the reason that none of you know that is because when we launched the website in 2007 none of you went to that website! Nobody else did either. It was pretty much a failure right out of the gate. The biggest reason that it was a failure is because I was honestly a below average Bible reader. I had the desire to engage in Scripture more but I just could never develop the right rhythm or habit or discipline, whatever you want to call it. So I was very much creating this concept for me, asking if there was a way we could leverage technology in order to make the site work well. This website didn’t change the way I engaged with Scripture. I would use the website but only because we created it and I was forced to but not because it was something that naturally helped me.

We are not afraid to try things and then shut them down. It is just part of the process of innovating and creating and so probably about three months in, after trying a few iterations and small changes to it, we recognized that this was not something that had natural momentum. It was not accomplishing what we hoped it would, so in early 2008 I made the decision that we were going to shut it down.

As part of that process I like to evaluate why something failed. I don’t want to just move on and move past it without understanding why. So we began to process some of the reasons that we thought it failed. One of the key reasons was that we were using our computers less, much less, and so it wasn’t natural for us to just connect to our computers. We were using our BlackBerrys all the time. Back in 2008, we realized that part of the challenge with why it was unnatural was that we were having to force ourselves and the time we wanted to use it we weren’t in front of our computer. So we thought that understanding that, why don’t we make a change. Let’s just redesign it so that it could very simply be displayed on the screen of a Blackberry. Back then Blackberrys were really simple in terms of their screen.

I was a bit skeptical as to whether that would really work because the Bible feels like such a big book with so many words and the Blackberry screen doesn’t seem like that. But we did that and very naturally without having to make a lot of effort to it. I began to more naturally engage with Scripture because it was just a part of this device that had been integrated into my life. Our traffic began to go up on the website from people using it on their Blackberry.

It was right at that time that Apple announced that they were going to make it possible for you to develop apps for the iPhone. Some people may not remember but when the iPhone launched, and for the first year, you just had the set of apps that came with it. You didn’t get to download apps. They didn’t have an app store. Then about a year later Apple announced that they were going to do an update to the software but they were also going to create this thing called an “app store” and make it possible for people to develop apps.

So based on what we saw happening with viewing it on the screen of this Blackberry I thought, well, let’s build an app for the iPhone. We had no idea how to build an app, nobody on our team had done that before, so I found a 19 year-old on our team who loved Apple. Those were about the only two requirements you had to have back then: be 19 years old and love Apple.

As a part time project we sat down and worked to build this Bible app. We thought what if the Bible could be one of the very first apps available in the app store? Perhaps people who weren’t even looking for a Bible would see it and be interested in it. We submitted it to Apple in June of 2008 and had no idea how many apps there were going to be. We had no concept of that. Sure enough Apple approved it and it was in the first 200 apps available in the app store the day it launched, July of 2008. And that was a Thursday evening and the very last day, I shouldn’t have been doing this, but I was reading an article on my phone as I was driving down the road—there are now laws against this, but at that time there weren’t—and the article was about some company that made it possible for you to get these analytics for these new iPhone apps. You just put their code in the app and it would help you get information back on it. I called the team and I was like, can we put this code in our app? It was the day before we were submitting our app to the app store. They said sure, let’s do it. Had we not done that we wouldn’t have known the impact because there was no data you got from Apple back then, it was just a black hole.

That was Thursday night and by Sunday morning, because of these analytics, we were able to see that 83,000 people had installed the app on their iPhone just in three days. It blew our minds! We had no idea, and not only did they install it, but they were using it. They were opening the app multiple times a day. The same thing we saw on a small scale with Blackberry all of the sudden we were able to see on a much bigger scale happening. I am an activator, so what was the part time project Friday for that 19 year-old became his full time job on Monday morning when he showed up to work because we had to accelerate it.

We have now been on this journey from 2008 until today and we raced to get it available on any mobile platform. It is on any smartphone or tablet platform in the world. You can download it and it has moved from just a handful of versions that we had available to I think over 1,200 versions of the Bible in over 880 languages.