EntreLeadership - #287: Find a Way, Not an Excuse with Bobby Gruenewald

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Even if you feel like the odds are stacked against your next big idea—no budget, no time, no scope—you may be in a much better position than you think. According to Bobby Gruenewald, Innovation Leader at Life.Church, the more limited your resources, the more creative and innovative you have to be. Tune in as Bobby shares his story of bringing the first-ever Bible app YouVersion to life as well as the lessons he learned along the way. entreleadership.com/podcast Learn more about our full-day leadership event you can watch anywhere: EntreLeadership 1-Day 50 Ways to WOW Your Customers from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode!   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Limited resources oftentimes, it's just really the crucible in which innovation happens because if you had more resources, you would just buy a solution. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thanks so much for joining the conversation. Really excited about introducing. many of you to a guy by the name of Bobby Gruenwald, who is our feature conversation this episode.

He's the founder of You version, which was the first Bible app in the app store. You'll hear that backstory in the conversation. Now reaching over 340 million people around the globe. And oh, by the way, it's free. An unbelievable story. Here's the big, giant takeaway that's going to help so many of you who feel right now, like you've got a brilliant idea, but you have zero resources. You don't even see how you can do it.

You just know it should be done. And Bobby dropped this bomb on us. Innovation happens within constraints. Woo! I'm going to let you chew on that for just a moment while I tell you about Bobby speaking with our team at the Entree Leadership One Day this fall. The Entry Leadership One Day is an unbelievable day where we take the playbook and give it away. It's November 9th. Here's the good news.

You can stream it live from anywhere. We've been doing this now for over a year where we take our signature basic event on how we give away the playbook and we give it to you via the internet. The theme is market disruption. You're going to learn how to create a mindset that sees opportunities rather than problems

while your comfort zone should be the most uncomfortable place to be. The importance of creating a culture that embraces change and isn't afraid to break things to make them better. Dave Ramsey, Chris Hogan, Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity Water, and Bobby Greenwald, who you're about to hear from, all on the stage. Now, this is an unbelievable deal. We're going to bring it to you in the convenience of your home, your church, your office, the cafeteria, Starbucks.

You can listen and watch wherever you wish for only $89. Now that's $20 off because you're a podcast listener. So the rest of the underprivileged world is going to pay $109 because you are a listener and you are a person of privilege. You get it for $89. Here's how you register for it, entreeleadership.com slash ken. Entreeleadership.com slash kin that gets you in at the special pricing. All right. Let's get right to it.

Bobby Grunwald, you talk about a humble, hungry, and smart leader who came up with one of the great innovations. I believe in the digital era. That's right. I believe it's that big of a deal. Here's my conversation with Bobby. Well, Bobby, it's good to talk with you again and full disclosure. We've known each other for a long time. And I'm really excited about this conversation because of your experience and one of my favorite topics to discuss, and that's vision.

I mean, if we think about what you've done and your team and what you have led and continue to do, it really is a, I believe, a case. and vision. So I want to start out in the early days before there was ever any code, before maybe there was even a whiteboard session. Take us back to how in the world this idea to take the Bible and digitalize it and give it away to everybody came about. First of all, Ken, it's great to be with you. I, you know, looking back on it, it's kind of one of those stories that clearly God's done. And you're right, it started with, start with an idea, start with a vision. I was in the O'Hare Airport in Chicago and a long TSA security line in October of 2006. And I have no idea why TSA security lines are a place that I

actually think of ideas. But in that particular, that particular line was really long that day. And I was sitting there thinking, I wonder if there's a way that we could leverage technology to help me engage with the Bible. I was on staff at a church. I mean, in my past career was as an entrepreneur, so I'd had some experience in the tech space as an entrepreneur. But for years at that point, I'd been on staff at a church, and I was not engaged in the Bible, sadly, as much as I really wanted to be, had lots of excuses as to why. But I just kept thinking, I want if there's a way that we could leverage technology to help me engage in scripture, because I know there's a lot of people like me that desire to, but aren't. And there in the

security line that day, this idea came for you version. And most people, know that idea today as an app that they have on their smartphone or tablet. But actually, the original idea was for a website and had some novel ideas. So it's kind of one of these examples of where we started off with an idea that actually turned into a failure when we launched it in 2007. The website nobody remembers because nobody went to it, basically. But it led us, though, to the ultimate idea that you know today as the Bible app. So the vision started with just this desire to figure out how to solve a problem, which was my problem, of how to engage in scripture and thinking that technology might be able to be a tool that can help us do that.

Okay, so that's fantastic. I want to jump in and out of vision and innovation and leadership. This is going to be this. I want to kind of walk through this thing almost chronologically. So you're in O'Hare, and you gave us a little bit of a summary, but I want you to walk us through because we've got a lot of entrepreneurs, small business, men and women, who think like you think. and I want to know what were some of those early steps to take vision and really hone it,

make sure it's the right vision, how did you polish it? What were those next steps early on before you ever got to launch? You know, when I come up with an idea, and this idea was no exception to it, I have kind of a group of people I trust that are willing to be honest with me and give me feedback. And that's super important for me. I'm an idea person, so I'm not usually short on new ideas. but what is a process for me is to kind of take those ideas, go with it. It's just a handful of people.

I like to bounce the idea off of them. I like them to kind of pick it apart. I actually challenge them to kind of challenge the idea. And the way the process works for me is like I actually want to try to defend it. And if I can't defend it well, it becomes pretty obvious that this idea may not have enough merit or it needs more thought or it needs more time, you know, to bake. And so I try not to get too married to these ideas or to hold on to them too tightly, but rather really trust the process of getting feedback on them.

So that's an early on thing. It's before we're just discovering some of the problems with it or we're certainly don't know all the challenges of what it would take to implement it. We're not getting down too deep into the weeds of what's involved in implementing it. But simply the feedback on, is this an idea that they think would work? Is this an idea that people might want to use or buy? if it's a product that we're selling, you know, just the basic kind of reactions that they get in the response to it. It's not a formal focus group.

I'm just not kind of wired that way. These are kind of informal conversations where I sort of test it, sort of pitch it almost. And each time I do that, I find that either I get better at pitching it, I refine it, you know, in subway, or the idea falls apart, or it's clear that it's just not the right time or not ready yet. So for me, that's the very first step for me is to just kind of get some feedback from people that I trust. All right. So you did this, right, in this process, and you had some people go, okay, I think there's something here. And one of the things I want to lead you into just kind of let you

take us along these next steps is you have a great statement that I want you to have some fun with, and that's innovation happens within constraints. So I love that. Let's first talk about the back half of that sentence. What were the constraints after you came out of that initial idea filter, if you will. What were the constraints? You had a good idea. People were giving you, okay, yep, this is doable. What were the constraints you were dealing with? So the constraints that we started with were, it seemed like everything was a constraint. So the first, we, even though I was on staff at the church, and there was a sense of permission on behalf of the rest of our leaders to say, we're willing to try this, that permission didn't come with the budget. So it really was sort of like, if you can figure out

how to build a prototype or build something, find some people that can do that, then that would be, let's do it, but we don't really have a budget, you know, for it. So that's, I mean, not like we have a budget of $50,000 and that's not enough, like, as in like we have no budget, like, zero budget, zero dollars. There's no contractor that can be hired. So then, you know, as an entrepreneur, I felt like my job is to take this vision and really try to sell it to people that had the capacity to contribute to it. I didn't have equity to offer. I didn't have ownership to offer. This is all part of what we're doing as a nonprofit. So all the kind of traditional means that a startup would have to say, come on board and you can own part of the company. That wasn't at my

disposal at the time. What I was basically just saying is if we could figure out how to build something that worked, it could really change how we engage in scripture. So for me, it was kind of a missional thing that I was trying to create a compelling vision for. And I found some people on our team that had the capacity. I'm not a developer. Most people don't realize it, but I've never written a line of code in U-version, not a single line. I don't know how to do that. I'm just a person that could bring vision ideas and find those people, you know, that know how to do that. So we found some people on our team that had some extra capacity outside of their normal jobs, something that they were willing to do in the evening, work on it. We would spend our own time kind of trying to

map out what we thought it should look like. And then I'm just making the case, you know, just trying to say, I need you to give your time, to volunteer your time, to build this. And of course, we're not setting these grand ideas of, you know, millions of people are going to use this one day. We had no idea what it was going to become. But it was just sort of a step-by-step kind of process of, I just need to get a design for a website. So let's find somebody that can help us build that design. We can help contribute to that, but somebody can actually draw it up on, you know, computer and make it look like it's supposed to look. And then just little by little, we begin to find those resources.

And so the first constraint was we had no actual financial resources. We had some time of our own time, but we had no financial resources to put behind it. And then the second probably most significant constraint is that we realized that we actually couldn't get the Bible for free that people actually owned the Bible. And we were so ignorant that we really had no idea that people translate the Bible. They have a license to it. You have to get a license to use it. So even if we could build this website that I was trying to get people to donate their time to do at the beginning,

the problem was to actually get the Bible text that people wanted to read. I had to go and figure out how to get a hold of publishers and people that own the rights to license us this. And my budget for licensing was $0 as well. And so that was kind of obviously another constraint that we faced. And I didn't have any of these relationships, by the way. was another constraint. I didn't know any of these people. I didn't know any of the CEOs. It wasn't like I had a Rolodex of people that I could just roll through and say, call this person, call this person. And so it basically, I mean, every turn I made, there was a constraint that we were facing,

but just the persistence of saying, okay, how do we overcome each of these problems sort of one at a time, not get overwhelmed by all of them, but just sort of take them one at a time was the way we approached it. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. What can you tell us about knowing the difference between a constraint, and a sign that we need to be observing. It's a great question. Sometimes there are those sort of roadblocks that are sort of ending points, you know, like where this is just simply not working. For me, I usually am always sort of stepping back from the problem

and making sure that we're making progress is one thing I'm looking at. Like, are we able to kind of move this forward? It is a bit of discernment that's involved in your question because there's things we try that fail. The fact that they failed is the answer that we should probably learn what we can learn from and move on and do something different, as opposed to just continue and to press forward. I don't know that I always have a simple answer because I think the variables are more complex than that. I don't know. I have like a simple recipe or a set of ingredients for it.

I think probably the key for me is I'm willing to let go of something, you know, when it becomes apparent that it's failed. So I'm not just hanging on to something that's obvious that it's failed or where everyone around me sees that it's failed or I can objectively measure it. It's more of a willingness to acknowledge that something's failed, I think, is sort of the key variable there. And if you have that willingness, I think you'll kind of know when that right time comes. But when it comes to trying to prove a concept, you know, if we can't get to the place where we can even just prove the concept or get to the demo phase, those were all obstacles that I felt like were overcomeable, like things that took some creativity to get through.

But I was just trying to get to that proof of concept. If I've not even achieved the proof of concept, then I'm probably going to be. be fairly persistent at trying to get to that point at least, you know, to see if it works. Once I've reached that proof of concept, which in our case, we did in 2007, we did get this website launched. Then it became apparent a few months in, though, that no one was using it. I mean, we got audience to go to it, but even ourselves, we were only using it because we created it. That's when we realized we had kind of a fairly significant problem that we achieved what we were wanting to achieve, but it didn't actually work.

Okay. So let me jump in here because I love this timeline. And the reason I'm jumping in, Bobby, is because I thought you did a great job of really helping us get perspective. Each one of those constraints that you listed out a few minutes ago, there was a possible solution. It wasn't maybe evident right away, but they weren't clear stop signs. I can go meet people at publishers who have their version of the Bible. I could, essentially, I have a chance, at least it's possible to go get donors. You found guys who had some time, a little bit of time, not a lot of time, to help design it first face. And so you really did go, okay, these are constraints, but they're not complete and utter stop signs. There is some possibility

there. And when there's a possibility tied to that vision deep in your chest, that this could and should happen, then that's what creates true innovation, correct? That's when you start going, because that's what innovation is. That's kind of a fun buzzword these days. But the reality is it's not that sexy. It's like there are a bunch of constraints and I've got to figure my way around these constraints. Isn't that where innovation is birthed? Absolutely.

I mean, innovation, like I've said many times, innovation happens inside of constraints. Like, constraints are an actual ingredient for innovation. Yes. They're not something. I mean, so many people want to think outside the box as a figure of speech, but it's actually embracing the box, you know, recognizing the box that are in and figuring out. creatively how we move from inside the box to where we need to go and not this sort of sense of we need to remove all constraints we'll get better ideas if we eliminate any kind of barriers in our

mind actually I find that if you embrace those constraints you know you actually come up with better ways of doing things there and innovation at the core is solving a problem I mean it's solving a problem that there's a known problem and sometimes innovation solves a problem that that people didn't even know existed it's like a new opportunity where when you see the solution, you realize you had the problem and you never even knew you had the problem, you know, all at one setting. So it has different forms it takes. But at the core, it's still solving a problem.

And I think a lot of times people think, if I just had more money, if I just could put more behind R&D, if I could just do this, I would have more innovation. I've just found that that's simply not true. I mean, I think that limited resources oftentimes are, it's just really the crucible in which innovation happens. Because if you had more resources, you would just buy a solution. That's right. And you wouldn't actually innovate. You really don't need to innovate.

In fact, it's a plague that many organizations have. If they have too much resources, they usually don't have innovation, unless they place artificial constraints on things, unless they say, we have the money, but here's the budget. And the budget's this. And we have to solve this problem. This is all that we have to solve it with is this, or a constraint on time. You know, I do this with our creative team. all the time.

Everyone always feels like if I could just have more time to work on that project, I could get a better result. I was like, no, that's just a trade. You know, you're just trading time for whatever might be quality or something. That's just moving up a normal curve. That's not actually innovative. That's just sort of an exchange, you know, of one thing for another thing. And I say, no, real innovation comes if you can say, I get the same amount of time to work

with or, in fact, what if we could take less time and try to achieve the same result? and if that happens, then we're actually getting true improvement, you know, in it, and you have to get creative sometimes about how to achieve it, and it sort of forces innovation on it. So those are, like, might be artificial constraints. They may not be real. They're just artificial, but their constraints nonetheless. So definitely, even when I mentioned the publishers and the Bible texts that we were working with, I mean, we had to figure out an innovative way that we could bring value to them while remaining non-commercial, which we felt was really important. So we have a free product that they otherwise sell that we needed for free, but yet we needed to keep them sustained and provide value to them. So we had to come up with like an innovative way to achieve that. And we're able to do that. And we have great relationships with the publishers today. But it was that type of forcing that issue, not just trying to figure out, well, well, we just need more money and we could solve this problem. No, no, no, no. We had to figure out how to do it by embracing the constraints that we had. Okay. So I want to stay here because it's like you're

teaching out of the story and the story's so good. I'm going to stay where you're at, but I want to go back in just a moment, Bobby, to where you guys got the site up and got it launched, but then nobody was using it but you. I want to get back to that point. But because it's still in the timeline here, you got those publishers to agree to let you have their version of the Bible. And this morning, when I crack open my iPad, and that's why I love you version so much, it's just perfect on my device on my iPad. And I go and I've got my NIV version, all right?

No endorsement here. That's just what I read. but there's a publisher who had to say, all right, we're going to give away our version of the NIV and let you put it out for free, but that was only after you convinced them that we're going to send them back to you.

I'm just real curious, the quick answer, because I think it's been great for people to listen to. How did you do that? What was the value proposition to that publisher? Yeah, well, it didn't all come together at once, first of all. Yeah, so we basically had to,

we were able to convince one. at that time it was Thomas Nelson and we were able to convince them to basically take a risk on us and our commitment to them and to all of the publishers that came on board was that we were committed to their long-term success we were not trying to

this wasn't an effort for us to shut down publishers or to fundamentally cause them harm in any way we needed them to be successful so my initial argument was that we have a generation of people that can't fathom paying 99,9,000, sense for a song that they love from a band that they love. And we were trying to get them to pay $20 for a book that they didn't understand. And so that, whether or not people agreed with the

morality, you know, of the way people perceived value of content or not, the reality of it was, is that many of these publishers, the Bible is one singular product of many products that they offer and that are Christian products. And if you can't get a generation engaged in scripture, the market for their product, all their other products, is going to erode. It's going to disappear over time. And so the premise was we said, why don't we let the Bible be something that is in essence a bit of a lost leader, you know, in terms of their investment. But do it in a way that we're not going to, we promise we want to kind of get people connected back to what the publishers are offering, find a way to build that relationship. We didn't know all the how, you know,

at the time. We weren't sure, but we were able to convince one to do it. And I honestly don't know if we convinced them or if they actually didn't fully know what we were saying. I'm not sure which, but nonetheless, you know, we weren't being deceptive. I promised you that. But it was just well those things where I'm not exactly sure how they agreed at the time other than God just, you know, opening that door. But we wanted to build on top of that momentum. So we took one and a bit of, you know, the others kind of saw what one did and that caused others to come on board. Now today, though, if you fast forward, because we remain committed to that, you know, to making them successful, the model ended up becoming a deal where the entire market changed in the middle of all this

and right at the beginning of this to where the key for content owners is to have a direct relationship with the consumer. It's what you see happening in retail, what you see happening, you know, that basically middlemen are getting moved out, you know, of the picture. And the publishers were the content owners. So I figured what we really needed to do is if we could be the group that figures out how to help them build this relationship with the consumer, that none of them had. They all worked through other people that had the real relationships,

and they were always one step removed. So we said, you know, because we're noncommercial, we don't have to own the relationship. We don't have to be the only people that have a relationship with the person that uses our app. Normally, if we were commercial, we'd be super concerned about controlling that and owning it and be the only ones. That's our value. That's what we own. That's our asset. Instead, we said, what if we're willing to share that with you? We go out and do all the work to find the customer. They're reading the Bible. And what we're going to do is that when they want to download the NIV version of the Bible, they're just simply going to be presented with an opportunity that they would be willing to share their email address with you, the publisher,

and nothing hidden from the consumer. Everything's upboard and the decision that our users are making to do this. And when they agree to do that, we're now sending you a very qualified lead for you to build a relationship with that customer. And so we've now done that to the tunes of tens of millions of people that we've built direct consumer relationships with these publishers. And for them, that's something that if they had to go do that on their own, that they would spend a ton of money trying to find that one user that is a valuable user that's interested in their products and their other products.

So that's what it looks like today. It started off with us just basically saying, trust us, let's work really hard. We're going to try to demonstrate through sharing. that relationship the best we can with you. But over time to make it fluid, to make it even easier, more empowering, we literally just made the direct connection between the customer and the publisher. And that's how we solve the problem. Yeah, I just made a note. This is for our audience. Tell me if I've got this right. I'm listening, taking notes. I think when we see a crazy idea and we believe in a crazy idea and we got to go pitch that crazy idea, if you can show crazy value,

then the crazy idea is no longer crazy. And I think that's essentially what happened here. Am I right? Yeah, no, that's true. And I think the other thing is we were focused on scale. And so, you know, whenever you see something that's got momentum, people, I think, are willing to come on board because they're afraid of missing out. Yeah, momentum. Tremendous momentum. Momentum was a big, a big factor in it. But it's really reshaped a lot of, I mean, we're not the only people, you know, that've contributed to this, but we certainly were a catalyst for it. The Bible publishing industry as a whole is really pretty progressive today. a whole, you know, and partly because of this and these moves that they made versus some of the other sides of the publishing industry. And so it's kind of a remarkable story of how it all came together. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's kind of that the craziness of it sort of works, you know, what you really does. All right.

Real quick, because there's so much more I want to cover with you from leadership and some other things. But I want to go back to that story. You took us to about, I think you said, 2007, and you got it up and going. And I'm sure you're dealing with other constraints. But there was a key point where you had to look at it and go, no one's using it. And we're going to have to figure out how to iterate, innovate, whatever it is, create, all those things together. I'm just curious what you learned about that, that you can pass on to our audience. Like I said, we're not afraid to try things and recognize that sometimes things fail.

They just don't work. The problem we had here was we built what we wanted to build. It may not have been perfect. There's always more things we could have added and wanted to do. but the truth was the core idea of what we were trying to achieve, we built that and launched it in September of 2007. So a few months in, you know, we were fortunate to have friends, you know, different organizations that were willing to promote it. You know, we had a little bit of reach ourselves as a church. So we promoted it.

So we didn't have a problem of getting audience to it. We got audience to it. The problem is that when audience came to it, they just kind of were like, yeah, that's interesting. And they just didn't come back. You know, it wasn't something that kept. their attention. And so as we really begin to dig into it, we realized that it's just fundamentally not, we weren't really engaging people in scripture in a new, meaningful way. The fundamental

idea was flawed. Like it just simply, the way we did it, the, it was either, you could argue it might be too early. There's lots of different arguments, but nonetheless, it just simply wasn't working. And we could tell even ourselves, like if you're trying to use your own product and you don't really see the value in it after you built it and started to use it, that's a problem, a fundamental problem with it. And if we thought that like a few tweaks, it was just all that was needed, you know, just tweak it here, tweak it there, we just didn't think that was, it didn't feel like that's where it was. You know, we felt like it was close enough to what we were aiming for that it just really meant our aim was off. You know, we needed to try again. So we're not afraid

to shut things down. In January of 2008, we'd kind of reached that conclusion. And we were going to shut the website down and just move on and focus on other things because we've got plenty of other stuff to focus on. And we always like to do like a bit of a failure assessment. I understand the why. Why did it not work? What went wrong? What could we learn?

Because there's anything we can learn from this. And one of the things that we were processing was that one of the dynamics was that having it on our computer, this website on our computer, we were using our computers less and less. and our computers were not too different than our physical Bibles and that they were kind of in particular places, like at our office, you know, or at a home office or something. And our BlackBerrys were a new device force back then. BlackBerrys were with us everywhere, and we were using our BlackBerrys more and more. But our website was not at all designed, I mean, to work on a simple Blackberry screen. And so we just thought, you know, part of the problem is for this to be something that really engages us, in a more regular basis.

We have to differentiate it further than like a print Bible that sits on our nightstand at home that's not with us everywhere. We have to figure out, which we kind of felt like we built another version of that, a digital version of our print Bible in some ways. So it wasn't the original idea, but we just said, what if we took that website we'd built? We already had the Bible text. We already went through the barriers to get access to it.

What if we just simply displayed it so that it would work on our BlackBerry? and when we did that, it was just very simple. I mean, like if you remember a Blackberry in 2008, it was like three or four lines of text. I mean, it was really, really basic screen. And as simple as it was, and it was just profoundly effective. Like, we used the Bible and read it, used it in places we had not anticipated more regularly, more consistently. The whole original idea, the novelty of what we were doing on the website, we kind of ignored all that, those features, and things that we cared a lot about.

We just simply made it so you could read the Bible on your phone. And when that happened, we saw the traffic go up to the website from people using their BlackBerry's. And we love data. We love to kind of look and understand how it's working. We could tell it was working for us. And so that became kind of the real shift. And we realized that we started to realize we're really on to something and it was working.

Okay. I want you to talk about first mover advantage because I love the phrasing of that. you've got a real thought behind what that is. And I think we've got enough of the backstory so far to really understand how U-Version is a great example of the first mover advantage. Yeah. So in early 2008, I think it was maybe spring of 2008. We're starting to notice this website on our BlackBerry is working.

And Apple announces that they're making it possible to develop apps for this new phone called the iPhone that had been out for a few months. And that even more importantly, they were going to build an app store. where you could download these apps, like one place where everybody was going to be focused that had an iPhone to download apps for their phone. So I looked at what we saw in our data that it was actually the mobile Bible was actually working and connecting on our BlackBerry's. I just thought we've got to try to build an app for the iPhone and see if it's possible for us to get it in this app store when it launches. Now, we had no idea how to build an app for an iPhone. We'd never done that.

There weren't books on it. Had no idea who could. we found a 19-year-old on our team that loved Apple, and that was about the only requirements you had back in 2008 to build an app is to find somebody that's 19 that loves Apple. Yeah, exactly. And then that was all you needed. And so, again, he had a full-time responsibility at the church, but we just kind of did a nights and weekends kind of project

where we just said, let's try to build this app. Now we know what we're going for. We're just going for a simple, initially a simple Bible reading app, let you pick different versions, but it would just work on an iPhone. So we built this app, submitted it to Apple. And to our surprise, in July of 2008, when the App Store launched, we were among the first 200 apps that were available the day that the App Store launched, which we didn't know at the time what that was going to mean,

but we were aiming for that because we just felt like it was super important for us to try to take advantage and be first in this opportunity. And that's what it was. We were the only Bible app, of course, that was among the, those first 200. But the key, though, was that we had all of these tens of thousands. I can't remember even how many iPhones were out at the time, but there were a lot of iPhones that had already been sold. They were all looking at this one place to download apps. And the Bible was among those group of apps. So we were able to see a quick result from people installing the app that very first

weekend. Yeah. So if you've got something, don't wait. The idea here is when you get out there first, it has, we're not talking about addition. We're talking about multiplication with exponents and I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, but it's big, right? I mean, that's the whole point. Yeah, no, absolutely. Because we never anticipated what the numbers would look like. We saw 83,000 people the very first week and install the app.

If you had asked me back then, you know, beforehand, like if you said, write a number down, I might have written down 50,000, 60,000 for the whole year, you know, might have been like just a big, huge goal. And we saw 83,000 in like three days that came. And so that blew our minds, what was possible. But what happened because of that first mover advantage, the fact that we were out there first, was that we were basically able to build off of that momentum very, very quickly.

And, you know, today, 83,000, you know, people turned into 340 plus million devices that have installed the app. But that momentum happened really fast. And it really came because we were really one of the, only one of the few apps that were available when it started. Yeah. I know you talk a lot about being nimble, and I think that story you just told of finding the 19-year-old who loved Apple,

again, a constraint, but you went, let's try it. You were nimble. He said, let's just get this thing super simple in the app store. And then boom. How have you and the team, I understand there's about 30 people on the team now, and as you said, 340 million people have downloaded the app. How do you stay nimble? It's the number one thing that I try to focus on as a leader today.

I mean, it is like, I think you have to fight for nimbleness because every organization, every company I've ever seen as it grows and as you have success, it is extremely natural to get slower. It's extremely natural to become more set in kind of how you do things and your ability to respond quickly, to be able to turn quickly, to be able to be dynamic and nimble. is compromised. And so I'm constantly looking for how to fight that tension between the systems that we need to survive, you know, and to support and the structure that we need to support what we do. And yet sort of forcing or fighting for nimbleness as an organization. So there's different ways you can do it.

What we've done in recent months is we really separated the sort of operational aspect of what we do with UVersion because we've got millions of people that we're supporting. And they need. sort of consistency, operational consistency. And I've kind of carved out a group of people that are helping us be nimble by, they have no operational responsibilities. They're not going to get sucked into the vortex of the operational needs, but rather are focused on pursuing new opportunities. They're looking at kind of what's happening today, what's happening tomorrow,

what we see on the horizon, and trying to make quick adjustments about new product ideas, new ways we can change. but it's not as simple as like assigning a responsibility for nimbleness. I think holistically we have to kind of continue to look for where can we fight for speed. And that's been a heavy emphasis. I mean, our story has been about moving fast, following momentum, staying nimble and really emphasizing speed over even accuracy for that matter. Like we don't have to be right about the future all the time. We don't have to be right in all of our predictions if we can just be really fast.

You can fix things that are broke fast. You can change direction when you realize that it's not working fast if you're quick. But if you're slow at all, you pretty much have to be a fortune teller and be out there saying this is exactly what's going to happen five years from now. And we saw it coming and we just hit it perfectly. And I just don't know who those people are. I'm not one of them. I feel like the best way for us to get there is just to focus very, very much on speed.

It doesn't come natural. Nothing gets faster on its own. everything gets slower by default has been my experience. And so as a leader, it's like it's always looking for where we can fight for speed. And I want you to speak to that. So to keep that nimbleness, you said, I fight for it. That was your phrase. Yeah.

How do you and your leaders create a culture in which let's go speed, let's go speed, let's not worry about mistakes? That's countercultural to us as human beings. I mean, certainly in the American work. for us, right? Oh, I'm worried about mistakes. I'm worried about screwing up. And we're not talking about character here. We're talking about functionality. So how do you create a culture where the team goes, oh, okay, I guess Bobby really means this. I don't need to worry about screwing up. I just want to try to quickly come up with the best solution. Then we'll sit back and reflect. Yeah, I think it's how you handle the screw ups as part of it, because you can send a message as a leader when someone makes a

mistake that the team, whether you told them to do this or not, is setting up a system, a policy, a process to ensure that never, ever happens again. And the cost of that policy or that procedure is speed or even the willingness to try. And so how you handle mistakes as a leader, how you emotionally, you know, handle it, how you handle it in your communication, I think is key. I try. I'm not perfect at this. I'm as human as anybody. I get frustrated when things don't go well when things don't work out. But I try to make sure that we are encouraging the team members that are involved, that we're trying to learn from what we can learn from it. I don't like repeat mistakes. That's not part of the process. We don't make the same mistake multiple times.

We're willing to make mistakes, but just making the same dumb mistake over and over again isn't acceptable, but that shows that we're not learning anything. So we focus on what we learn, but then we have to kind of, in some ways, just disconnect ourselves from the mistake and emotionally move forward, like just get past the emotion of it and just say we've got to press on now as when it comes to fighting for it that looks like in in conversation and in meeting you know there is a tension there's always going to be kind of operational systems that are required it cannot just be chaos and we and we don't have an organization that's full of chaos there's a difference because you could kind of tip one side of the pendulum and be completely chaotic and have no structure no system whatsoever that's not what it looks like

we hire people that are good at building structure and systems. I just view me as the other side of that tension. My job is to kind of constantly be pressing into our systems, you know, to value the fact that they're there, but to kind of always be asking the question, is it necessary? Is there a way we can do this faster? Is there a way we can eliminate an unnecessary layer? When it comes to team structure, you know, I'm always trying to keep it as lean as thin as possible because extra people seem like a great resource, you know, but it tips over to a point where it costs you on speed. It actually slows things down. You know, we were super efficient with what we were doing when we had like three or four people. As you add in team, you add, I'd have to leadership structure.

You just have to add in certain things that tend to create tension, tend to create friction. There's no way to avoid it. There's no way to avoid systems. There's no way to avoid these things that are necessary operationally. You just have to manage the tension. And as a leader, I feel like my responsibility is to always just make sure that there's an appropriate tension towards speed, because if it's not there, if it's not there in me, if it's not there in some of my leaders, then it will naturally sort of swing to complexity, it will swing to things that slow things down and you lose that nimbleness. You can still have a great organization. You can still have great support. It can still be a great place to work. It can still be all those things,

but what you'll stop doing is innovating. You'll stop leading. At some point, you know, you'll kind of lose your position because you haven't had that nimbleness to the ability to kind of move things forward. All right. We started all talking about vision. I want to circle back here before we wrap our time and talk about vision. You and I have a mutual friend named Andy who wrote a book called Visionering. It's a beautiful formula for casting vision. I'm not as much curious in how you cast vision, Bobby, but I'm curious, how does the vision change to the point of adjustment? Not so much a wholesale change, because we've heard the story so far today. And the original vision, you may not have seen the numbers, but the vision has come to fruition of what you really did envision.

Back in that TSA line where you were trying to actually maintain your religion in that long line. And so I'm just curious, now you've got mind-boggling numbers. 340 million people that have downloaded. We've mentioned that. Now we're talking about expanding the growth around the world. More languages. Sure. I mean, it's flabbergasting.

and I'm not trying to flatter you, but it truly is flabbergasting. How do you adjust the vision when you've had this much success? The best way for me to answer it is I've grown even recently to kind of appreciate that there's a difference between being in the lead and leading. And a bit of the great part of this story is sort of how quickly it grew and then how fast the numbers have grown since then. And so in essence, when it comes to Bible apps, from the day that the App Store launched, we've always been in the lead. We've always been the biggest.

We've always been number one. And not that I'm trying to have a competition against other Bible apps, but even among other apps in our category, you know, we've been number one against many other apps. And the problem with that is that you can, as a leader, you can kind of wake up and feel like you're leading just because you're in the lead. And the reality of it is, is that there is a difference between being. number one, being in the lead, and who's leading where this is going next? Who's leading us forward into the future? Who's the leader that I want to be following? And so oftentimes, if you're looking ahead of you and you see it like, hey, in our market, there's this other company, this other business, or this other group, they're way out there ahead. They're number one. They're

the leader in this space. Well, they might be number one, but that doesn't mean that you can't be the leader. You can't be the one that's sort of leading what's next for your industry, for your line of work for your type of product, whatever it might be. And I think that's encouraging on one hand because it just doesn't, it means that if you're behind on the leader board, doesn't mean that you can't actually be the one that sort of figures out how we can lead forward. The other, the flip side of it, though, is what we actually always having to address is that even though we're the leader, and maybe the leader by a long shot in terms of the number of devices or app installs, whatever it might be, that we cannot stop leading. We cannot stop figuring out what the

future needs to look like, what's our responsibility, you know, to kind of lead this forward. And so that's why we're putting time investment. It's where a lot of my energy goes personally. You know, I'm not as involved in the day-to-day operations of what we do as much as I am trying to shape kind of new ideas and things that I think would really kind of carry us forward or are risky, you know, things that might not work at all, kind of back to almost where we started in some degree. Like we're willing to kind of make, give a try at this, but have no idea whether it's going to work. And we might be more embarrassed by that failure than others would because there's an expectation now that we know what we're doing. And the truth is that puts a little more

skin in the game, you know, because we'll try something and it might be a really visible failure where we might have been able to hide our failures publicly a little bit more before. And so I think that distinction, though, of recognizing that there's a difference between being in the lead and leading is something I feel like drives me to feel like I have to continually push forward. And it may involve things that we felt like were fundamental to the vision of it that have to be different to lead us forward in the future. I'm willing to put that aside that's what it takes. I'm willing to say, look, you know, we're at to make some fundamental changes to what we thought was really important for the future because we can see a different future ahead or we can see a different path that we might need to take. So I don't know what it looks like for each person that's watching or listening, but I'm guessing that they're in one of those two scenarios and maybe a combination of both.

You know, whatever they're doing, they may not be the leader, but they still have an opportunity to lead, or they might be in the lead and still not be leading, you know, where it's going. And so just kind of figuring out, kind of answering that question. I don't know if it makes sense. That's the vocabulary that I came up with, but I'm not sure if it resonates. It makes great sense. It's what happened to Blockbuster, you know. Exactly.

I mean, I could come up with more examples. Toys are us. I mean, these are big brands that were, they were in the lead, and they stopped leading. And then we woke up one day and we went, Oh my gosh, I can't believe Toys R Us is out of business. How does the biggest toy store in the world go out of business? Absolutely. You're absolutely right.

Those are great examples. Really incredible. I think this is really important. And here's the other thing. For those who want to be in the lead, we all, you know, we're all competitors. Sure, we want to be number one. But, boy, you better be leading on the way up the ladder. Absolutely.

In fact, you have to be leading at some point to get in the lead. That's right. You know, if you're not, you know, already. Just don't stop. Yeah, the key is when you get there, though, exactly. Don't stop. You just got to keep on leading. It's not like now that we're number one, we've achieved everything.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Being number one, you might be number one on the list, but that doesn't mean that you have a pass now on leading. What got you there, you're going to have to continually do that, continually work to do that. And it's tough because you're driven sometimes to create new when you're not number one. You know, sometimes that's one of those motivators, you know. And when you get to the top sometimes, it's really easy.

I think to say, well, we're there. And you kind of almost sort of believe yourself a little bit more. You have a little bit more of that confidence that you haven't figured out. Pride, you know, would be a better way to say it. And you have to really fight against that. We've got this figured out. We know what we're talking about. You start to believe the things other people say about you.

And that, I think, is really something you have to really work hard to fight against and sort of maintaining that humility that says we don't get a pass on continuing. I mean, if we're not just the leader simple because we're number one, we have to keep working at it. We have to keep earning the right to be the leader. It's basically what it means. Let me ask a potentially silly question. We've known each other a long time, so you can tell me if it's silly and the audience will be fine with it. If we're following up what you just taught on, the idea of continuing to be leading, even if you're in the lead.

And what you just called out as a caution, it feels like even though we're in the lead, we as leaders need to put ourselves into some situations where there are some constraints so that we continue to have that mindset. It feels to me like when you get in the lead, the constraints seem to fade a bit, right? More resources, more people. We are living the good life, right? The top is down. We're on the Pacific Coast Highway.

It feels great. Went through the hair. And it's like we're no longer who we once were when we got this beautiful thing started. And that's a result of constraints seem to disappear. Is that a silly question? Like, how do you put yourself in a constraint when you're killing it? Well, it's exactly what you said. I mean, you actually said it in your question.

Oh, I did. See, I don't even know what I'm saying. How do you put yourself in a constraint? How do you create constraints? The answer is that oftentimes they have to be artificial constraints. You know, you have to kind of come up with ways because you're right. The problem with success is that if you're not careful, you know, the more success that you have, the thing that made you successful, the way that you were thinking that led to your success,

you stop thinking that way because you don't have to anymore. You don't have that same driver or that same motivator that's kind of pushing you to do it. So I think some of it is very much like its mindset is a huge part of it. What I just mentioned about leading and being in the lead is a mindset shift. It's like, okay, I recognize them in the lead, but that doesn't make me the leader. So some of the constraint is that sort of recognition that I have to go out and earn this, you know, every day, every month. So the constraint is that time.

Like, I just don't keep it by the fact that I have it. I lose it. Almost like points with your wife. You know what I mean? It's the, you might have earned some points today, but they all go away at midnight tonight. I got to earn them again tomorrow. You know, it's sort of like that. That'll preach.

I've learned the, I've gained the respect to be the leader, you know, but I'm no longer leading. I had a lead. I had a guy the other day that was very respectful. They were talking about some areas that we pioneering. And he used the term, he goes, now you guys were pioneers in this particular area. And when he said it, it wasn't in any disrespect. And he may not even meant it this way. But what I heard it in this particular, it wasn't about you version.

It was about a different thing that we worked on. I heard it. And I thought, he's basically telling me that we used to be the leaders. And now he's building upon what we did in the past to do it better. And if he went on and hold the whole story. And it was just an indicator to me that he doesn't see us as the leaders anymore. He saw us as a group that we were in the lead. So as a group that once led, he referred to us as appreciated our pioneering the space,

all those kind of language. And for me, that was just like a gut check for me as I was like, oh, you know, this is an example, you know, of where I really feel like we've got to do a better job, you know, of leading. So you're absolutely right that your success can become kind of your worst enemy, your resources that you gain from success can become your worst enemy when it comes to paving a path forward. But the best you can do is create artificial constraints. You can, and I think just really a self-awareness of that notion of the difference between being in the lead and leading is, I think, kind of one of the keys. Bobby, really good stuff.

As always, great to talk to you and see you, even though we're not in the same room. And I got to tell you, this is really fun to hear the story of something that is literally, revolutionized a whole space and has had untold impact around the world. The behind-the-scenes story is always encouraging. There's so much here for all of us to walk away with. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your story. Thank you, Ken, for the opportunity. I'm honored to do it. Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Bobby is a wonderful thinker. And I just want to point this out. If you think you've got to be the most outlandish personality, you think you've got to be the smartest guy in the room, well, you don't. And Bobby said in the conversation, he doesn't know how to

code anything. And yet he's the one that came up with the idea. He's the one that began to assemble people and talent. And now he still leads a group of people that he would willingly admit are much smarter than him in some ways. Now, he's also a lot smarter than they are. So this idea of limiting yourself around an idea that you may not be able to actually pull off, that should not hold you back. All right, if you'd love to learn more about what he's doing, uversion.com, that's the website you heard us talk a lot about. If you just go to the app store and you'll see the Bible app and Uversion and get the app, if that's something that interests you. And even if you've never cracked a Bible open a day in your life, go check it out because you'll see an unbelievably

innovative product and how it's changed from the early days where they just put up the Bible. If you would like to join us for our entree leadership one day, remember, We're going to bring that to you via the internet. You can check out the live stream, entreeleadership.com slash Ken. That's where you get your ticket for the event on November 9th. And you're going to get the $20 off discount. It's going to be a lot of fun. So we'd love to either see you live in Phoenix, Arizona, or join us on the live stream.

Again, entreeleadership.com slash Ken to get your ticket. And then all of the information that you need to tune in. InfusionSoft is constantly wowing entree leadership. They treat us so well, and we've seen how they wow their customers as well. So when they got us this resource for this episode, I was pretty excited about it. I love this kind of stuff, 50 ways to wow your customers. Now, this is a worksheet. So again, as with everything, Infusionsoft provides you, they're going to give you practical applications.

50 ways to wow your customers. This is going to help you with repeat customers. If you've got a customer who's going wow, you can promise yourself that they're coming back and they're probably going to bring somebody with them. 50 cost-effective ways to wow customers. That's what this worksheet is. So go check that out. And the InfusionSoft link is in the show notes at entreleadership.com. On behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thank you so very much for listening.

We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, folks, I want to make sure that you're aware that we have other great. podcast from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of the Chris Hogan Show. I am so excited to be able to talk to you all week in and week out. We're going to talk about your money, your life, your dreams, and your goals. You know why? Because I'm your coach. Whether we're talking about building wealth, paying off your home early, investing, paying for college, and guess what? How to become an everyday millionaire. We're going to focus on taking your calls because you matter to me. Together, we can do this.

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