This is the third in a series of blog posts based on an interview by Dr. Richard (Rick) J. Goossen with Bobby Gruenewald.  Since the YouVersion Bible App recently passed 500 million downloads we decided to highlight this previous interview with Bobby Gruenewald through a series of blog posts.

R – Where did the idea come from for the YouVersion Bible app?

B – 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.  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 it was pretty much a failure right out of the gate. 

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. 

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.  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. 

Because of our analytics, we were able to see that 83,000 people had installed the app on their iPhone just in the first 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. 

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. 

R – How do you make money or at least cover your expenses?  Who funds it and who owns it and the relationship with the church?

B – YouVersion is actually a part of Life Church; it is not a separate entity.  Most people don’t know that because we don’t ever use the app to promote our church.  The app is intended to get people engaged in Scripture.  It is not designed to grow our particular church in any way.  It is funded initially by our entire church.  It is part of our budget.  We allocated at the beginning a very small amount of funds to the app and then as it grew we allocated more funds.  Then some Christian business leaders that I knew came to me and asked if there was any way they could help accelerate the growth of the app. 

I said sure.  I have experience in business so I put together a plan of how we could accelerate growth if we had more resources.  I presented it to them.  They have funded a portion of our budget ever since then.  I don’t have anyone who does donor development or spends any time raising money.  We have the church today that gives a significant amount annually and then we have outside donors that fund the rest of it.  I have designed it so that if all of the outside funding went away one day, for whatever reason, we could more than sustain the operations of it.  So the rest of it is fuel on the fire—it is about growth and acceleration.

R – Do you see evolving it to a stand-alone entity?

B – No.  If we ever felt like that was a barrier to it being successful and engaging in Scripture then sure we would set it up as a stand-alone entity without question, but it hasn’t proven to be an issue.  There is so much I could go into about how it benefits from being a part of the church and how God has used it. 

NOTE: This interview was edited by Dr. Richard (Rick) J. Goossen and conducted with Bobby Gruenewald on November 18th, 2015 in Toronto, Canada.