Today we continue our series of developer stories to see how others make money. Here is my translation. It was too long and I cut it down.

Trevor McKendrick:

I didn’t start my tech career at first. I actually went to school and got my BACHELOR’s and master’s degrees in accounting. After school, I worked in Silicon Valley as an auditor for KPMG. My primary client is Adobe, so when you read their annual report, I’m one of the people behind the scenes.

Then I quit and started developing the Bible application. It’s used by Spanish-speaking users in the United States, and the entire app is translated into Spanish.

When I sold the company to Salem Media in 2015, our app revenue was around $8K per month, but it was growing every month at the time.

What made me start this application?

I quit my accounting job the week I got married at the end of 2011. My wife is still in school in Utah, so once we get married, I’ll move back to Salt Lake City. I had less than $10,000 saved in the bank, and thankfully only a little for school expenses.

When I arrived in Utah, I had some small job offers, but nothing substantial. I ended up taking a low-paying part-time job that paid $15 an hour but only gave me 10 hours of work a week. In retrospect, it sounds crazy, but AT the time I knew it was the only option. Accounting career is not what I want to do.

The bible app’s goal was just to pay our rent: $600 at the time. To be honest, the Bible app was just one of several ideas I was working on.

How did I come up with the Bible app?

I discovered this idea in a very simple way.

I scanned the top apps in each App Store category and specifically looked for apps that ranked well (i.e., they made money!). But they look terrible, or the reviews are bad, or whatever.

My Spanish has served me well since I lived in Mexico for two years when I was 20, but that’s just a lucky coincidence. I do think the language barrier helps me compete with other apps, and the lack of a decent Spanish-language Bible App is one of the reasons I wanted to do it, even though apps like this have been on the App Store for four years.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs are too focused on making new things, instead of looking around and noticing the industries that are already there and doing well. Bible markets have been around for hundreds of years, Christianity has been around for thousands of years…… I had to measure the demand for a book that had been around for thousands of years, and the demand was there.

The only real question was whether people would find me on the App Store, and I found there wasn’t much competition because the Spanish Language Bible program was niche enough that I knew it was an opportunity for me.

What do I need to make for my App?

I’m not a professional developer myself, so I had to hire a contractor to build the application. The first version took about a month and cost more than $500, which I paid for out of my own pocket. The first version was terrible, but it was enough to see where I was going with the market, and there were a few downloads of the app.

In the end, the outsourcing staff helped me finish 90%, but I still thought it was not perfect, so I learned program development by myself and finished the rest of the work. Finally, I spent an overnight to finish the application launch, which really excited me.

There’s a lesson here, the app could have been better, I could have spent more time, but that would have been a huge mistake. You can always spend more time. You can always add new functionality.

How did I attract users and increase downloads?

I didn’t tell anyone about the app except my wife. 99% of users come from natural search.

Some people say, “You upload it, and then someone downloads it?” It’s true. The lesson here is to do something where demand doesn’t match the market. This also applies to startups and small businesses: solving existing problems, identifying unsolved problems and solving them, is the best form of marketing.

Once we had an audience, I still had to figure out how to grow and monetize.

One of the most important changes I made was to monetize the application by selling content. This increased revenue overnight (not surprisingly) and helped us rank higher in search results.

I tried marketing with Christian Publishing, but it didn’t get a lot of users. They don’t have the same channels as the App Store.

How do you change your business model and increase revenue?

I started out charging 99 cents and made about $1,500 the first month.

I later created a second app that was the same, but also included audiobooks of the Bible. We charge $5 for the app. When it came along, our revenue jumped, and it was clear that audiobooks were popular.

After multiple revenue tests, I found that offering free apps and adding in-app purchases maximized revenue, and we ended up maintaining this revenue model for a long time.

After we identified the market, we didn’t just focus on the app. We also developed a website where we could record the entire Bible in voice, in other languages, and sell it on the website, which increased our revenue even further.

What is my greatest strength?

Obviously my Spanish is an advantage, although I think it can be done without speaking Spanish. But that makes the challenge all the harder.

Secondly, I think this app degree can successfully a big reason is that the market is very small, very segmentation, this also let me few competitors, I can do my best to get the experience of the application to users, the market although small but have a lot of income for me, I’m really excited when the first barrel of pension.

Both small and segmented are advantages!

What advice would you give to indie developers starting out?

Do it now, don’t wait, win half the people when you start.

Success is a to-do list. It’s simple, but it’s not easy

Don’t overplan, don’t get bogged down in details, and don’t think there will be too many problems. You may not have as many problems along the way as you first thought

Making this app was the best decision I ever made, but I didn’t know it at the time, because you can’t see that far away, so cherish the moment and start acting now

More exciting content to follow wechat public number: Jin Guangyue