I’m kind of an activator. So I just went and thought of the best name for this website I could think of there at the airport that day and registered the domain name YouVersion.com before I got on the airplane.
We launched the website in September of 2007. We were very fortunate because we had a large conference and a blog and [resources] that promoted this website, and we had an initial audience of 20,000 people that came to visit the website over the first three months.
So there was a lot of curiosity and a lot of interest initially. But the problem was [people] weren’t coming back. They would come and check it out, and it wasn’t really capturing engagement the way that we hoped and thought that it could.
So a few months in, we’re evaluating why it failed and acknowledging that the initial idea probably just didn’t work and failed. And in that process of evaluation, [we] really felt like one thing we should try is displaying it on a mobile device.
At that time, the most popular smartphone was the BlackBerry. We thought, what if we could make it display so that it can be read on a BlackBerry screen? And maybe that would actually make a difference. That was early 2008, probably January of 2008, when we made those changes.
And it was remarkable how much more we engaged with the Bible using our BlackBerries and then how much more other people engaged with it as well. We could see in our data that people were opening their BlackBerries and reading the Bible more times, more frequently, more consistently.
Shortly after that time, in the spring of 2008, Steve Jobs announced the possibility of creating apps for the iPhone that had just come out and creating something called an App Store, which was a new concept at the time.
So we thought, based on what we saw happening on the BlackBerry, we should try to see if we could build a Bible app. None of us knew how to build a Bible app, so we found a 19-year-old on our team that loved Apple, and then as a part-time nights and weekends project, we worked to build a Bible app.
Three-and-a-half months later, I think, we submitted it to Apple and didn’t know what to expect. We were not sure if they were going to approve a Bible in the App Store. We didn’t know how many apps there were going to be.
You know, we figured there’d be thousands and thousands of companies all trying to build apps for the App Store. To our surprise, though, when the App Store launched, the Bible app was among the very first apps that were in the store. There were only about 200 free apps that were available there on the first day.
And we were shocked that it made it in the store. We were shocked that there were only 200 free apps. And then that very first weekend, we saw 83,000 people install [the Bible app] on their iPhone. And for us, that number just kind of blew our minds. We had no idea that that result would happen that quickly.
We were trying something and just seeing if it would work and then were surprised by the results. So I have a pretty simple recipe, and that is, whenever you see God do something unexpected or there’s momentum that you’re not expecting, just take whatever resources you have and put it behind that. And so that’s basically what we did.
We made that the full-time job of that 19-year-old that was on our team when he came back to work on Monday. And we were just like, we’ve got to do whatever we can to try to keep up with this opportunity. And again, no idea that even at that point, even with that early success, that 17 years later on the day, I’d be talking to you and we’d be talking about the fact that we’re now approaching a billion downloads.
