Episode 393 - How YouVersion Built the #1 Bible App | Bobby Gruenewald

Bobby Gruenewald (0:00)

So, we celebrated a milestone recently of 1 billion devices that have installed one of our family of apps. I really felt like we need to make it a moment for the Bible, not for us, use it as evidence of what God is doing globally, that became hard for people to deny. And it wasn't about us, it was literally about, this is one piece of evidence that God's word is alive.

SPEAKER_2 (0:26)

Bold visionaries, faithful disruptors, some call them crazy, but they are called to create. Under His power, for His glory, the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast.

In this episode, we have the founder of the most downloaded Bible app, YouVersion, Bobby Gruenewald. Bobby shares with us their key metrics, strategy, and how their focus on stewardship keeps them grounded as they grow, and help spread the gospel to the whole world.

Justin Forman (0:52)

Bobby, such a treat to be here.

Man, when you step into this new building, like this is a new day and a new age. I mean, the paint still smells new. Give us an idea of like, what has just happened here at the office?

Bobby Gruenewald (1:08)

Well, as far as the office itself, I mean, it's a building. But we wanted to create an environment that we're really proud of to be able to recruit the best talent around the world to come be a part of this mission.

Also wanted to provide just a way to kind of tell a story about what God's done and show the story of what God's done. I think sometimes words are, well, I know actually words are not really adequate oftentimes. And when we have people come that are interested in investing in the vision or the mission or people that are interested in joining the team, it's just really helpful to have kind of a place where we can sort of say, let me kind of walk you through the journey of what God's been doing, what he is doing. And it's just way more effective to do that than just use words, which is what we had been doing before. So, and practically speaking, we needed a place to grow our team. So we want people to kind of first sort of experience sort of where we sit in history and to really kind of understand what God's done with his word across history. So in a very short kind of video presentation, or even as you're walking in, you start to kind of see visuals, but then there's an immersive sort of video presentation that is designed to kind of sort of paint the picture of history and where we sort of sit, like in that timeline. And then you can kind of navigate in a nonlinear fashion, you know, multiple directions. But basically the vision that we have for YouVersion is God's word everyone, everywhere, every day. And there's basically three experiences that are part of this exhibit that we have that feature each of those parts of the vision statement. So everyone is telling the story of life change and how people have been impacted by God's word. So we have these kind of holographic boxes that are pretty cool that sort of give a unique experience to hear from individual people about that and their life.

And then we have an every one, excuse me, every day room, which is really focused on kind of the power of reading the Bible four more days a week. And just the fact that we really partner with partners on that. So we sort of feature several things in that room that really focus around what daily engagement looks like. And then everywhere is a really huge screen that is a live map of people opening the Bible up around the world. And you can kind of zoom in to different parts of the world and regions to see it. And again, each of these things are just, they're designed to be experiential, but they're really as a whole kind of trying to show the story of what God is doing and what God's done.

And so it's just, again, it's kind of, I'd say it's a fairly humble beginning. Like we've got kind of almost like a palette that we're gonna, you know, kind of a canvas we're gonna paint over time. But we want to kind of create the infrastructure and the framework to be able to do that. So it'll change over time, but that's what it looks like today.

Justin Forman (4:14)

Yeah. I know we've talked a little bit about the origin story and filmed some other things about that, and we'll push into that in a little bit. But give everybody a context.