Lots of people sell products they don’t believe in, but in Trevor McKendrick’s case, you just can’t ignore the irony. That’s because Trevor is an atheist who sells Bibles for a living – and something just doesn’t feel right about that, even to him!
Interestingly, Trevor did not consciously choose his profession – it sort of fell into his lap by accident. He happened to be out at a dinner with his family in February 2012, when he found out that a relative was making $8,000 to $10,000 a month just by selling iPhone apps.
Trevor found the prospects too good to ignore, so he decided to step into the app business himself. All he wanted to do was to make about $600 a month, which would have been enough to cover his rent. So he went on to the Apple store to find an app that was making a lot of money, but “sucked”.
Photo: Trevor McKendrick/Facebook
He soon found what he was looking for – a few Spanish Bible apps that were supposedly terrible. Trevor then hired a Romanian programmer to build a better app for him, and that version sold well. But it wasn’t the end of the road for Trevor. Soon he came up with an audio version, which turned out to be a big hit. He began to make serious money – almost $5,000 to $6,000 per month.
“That was the moment where it was: Oh this is not just a side project. This is a living,” he said. According to his blog, the app generated $73,034 in net revenue during its first year. The following year, the figure grew to $100,134. Trevor distinctly remembers the moment when he realized how much money his idea was making. He had turned to his wife and said: “Holy crap, honey, look at this money.”
Although it’s been over two years, Trevor still finds his success hard to believe. He said that it “doesn’t feel like real money because so little work is involved. Dude, I spend maybe an hour on this thing.” But he does admit that the money has changed his life, because he doesn’t have to worry about income anymore.
He might be happy with the money, but Trevor does have to deal with his conscience every day, because his business and his personal beliefs have nothing in common. Even though he was raised a Mormon with strong beliefs, he left church when he realized that he had always had doubts about his faith.
Photo: Trevor McKendrick/Facebook
“We don’t believe in Christianity,” he said, rather plainly. “We don’t believe in the Bible. I would describe myself as an atheist.” So he does feel some guilt about making truckloads of money selling a religious book that he does not believe in.
“What if you sold Harry Potter books or Lord of the Rings books, but you told people it was real?” he explained. “And you told people if they would just learn how to write spells themselves, they could heal their children? And if you sold that as a real thing? I would feel terrible about that. But that’s really the situation I am in selling the bible. I am selling this thing I truly believe is fiction.”
Photo: Trevor McKendrick/Facebook
Trevor said that he gets really uncomfortable when people mistake him for a preacher – some of his clients actually get in touch with him at times, asking him to pray for them or interpret the Bible. “If you’re emailing the maker of an app to get help for your son, you’re probably not a in a great spot. Trading that for profit weighs on me a little bit,” he said. But he has no plans to stop just yet, because he really does need the money. He’s using all his earnings to fund a new company called BackOffice, which makes a product he does believe in.
